How to Secure Your H-1B Visa

The H-1B visa is the gateway for the world’s best and brightest to live and work in the United States as IT professionals, engineers, scientists, professors, doctors, nurses, and researchers. How to Secure Your H‑1B Visa guides employees and employers alike through the maze of H-1B laws, policies, and procedures. This road map lays out the whole H-1B process from petition to visa to status maintenance to visa extension and, ultimately, to permanent residence in the US for you and your family. It shows you step by step exactly how the H-1B process divides up between the employer and employee. It identifies the points where the two tracks converge and the H-1B employer and employee need to pull in tandem.

Navigation icons tell you at a glance whether a topic concerns employees and employers equally or primarily one or the other. Sidebars highlight pitfalls, liabilities, and disasters to avoid; tips and exceptions to leverage for success; administrative and enforcement trends and late-breaking changes; and special  conditions that apply to nationals of particular countries, such as India and China. Ancillary chapters cover complementary visas for family members and H-1B substitute visas for professionals with particular skill sets or from particular countries, such as Australia and Canada.

The authors are Silicon Valley immigration lawyers with 60 years combined experience handling professional work visas. Whether you are an international professional desiring to work in the US for the first time, an international student in the US wishing to remain after graduation, or a hiring manager or HR specialist for a sponsoring entity, this short book will show you how to secure, maintain, and leverage your H-1B visa and answer all your questions about:

• quotas and exemptions
• RFEs and consular interviews
• dual representation by the employer’s lawyer
• LCA compliance, auditing, and penalties
• serial H-1B employers
• termination and benching regulations
• reconciling filing deadlines with expiration dates
• transitioning from academic to affiliated to private H-1B employment 

What you’ll learn

As a result of reading How to Secure Your H-1B Visa, foreign professionals will learn:

• How to optimize the outcome of your non-immigrant skilled worker visa petition
• How to ace your interview at a US embassy or consulate and answer an RFE
• How to maintain or change your and your family’s status in the USManagers of US companies with skilled worker needs will learn:
• How to include international professionals in the development of your HR strategies
• How to coach your foreign hires to cooperate in the petition process and avoid pitfalls
• How to avoid fines, penalties, and other hazards

Who this book is for

This is a practical, accessible, and affordable short book for both individual foreign professionals (especially IT workers) who want or already have an H1-B non-immigrant specialty occupation work visa (or a treaty-substitute or alternative visa to the H1-B) and also for their US corporate sponsors (especially small-to-medium enterprises and startups in the IT sector), showing foreign employees and US employers how to work in perfect sync to nail that H1-B visa, hang on to it, and leverage it.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Overview of the H-1B Petition Procedure
3. The H-1B Annual Quota
4. Eligibility for H-1B Status
5. Complementary Roles of the H-1B Employee, Sponsor, and Attorney
6. Employer Inputs to the H-1B Process
7. Employee Inputs to the H-1B Process
8. Labor Condition Application Compliance
9. H-1B Investigations and Penalties
10. Maintaining H-1B Status
11. Termination of H-1B Employment
12. H-1B Alternative Visas
13. Summary
14. Appendix 4
15. Appendix 5
16. Appendix 6
17. Appendix 8
18. Appendix 9
19. Appendix 10