Skip to main content

Long Wait

One of my co-workers recently posted about his H1-B visa troubles on LinkedIn. G is a couple of decades younger than me and is experiencing what I did back then except I never shared things quite as publicly. This is a private hell new immigrants have to live in for a long time as the world around them goes on. Over time you start to fit in better, understand the culture and have a social life with people who simply won't understand your visa situation. I remember how anything I shared was met with complete astonishment by folks who had no idea what this was all about. 

On their best day, they knew of some family who had immigrated twenty years ago but no knowledge of what it took to get to a point of stability. G's troubles are unfolding in real-time and every day is consequential. He is one of those who chose not to put their entire life on hold waiting for permanency. My young friend S is the same way - she is making great strides in her career notwithstanding her H1-B status. 

They both are making the moves they need to make to build a good career, make as much money as they can while they remain in visa limbo. This entails changing employers along the way and losing their place in the queue. It's a prudent choice when the queue won't clear for decades anyway and the person is single. S does not want to add marriage to the list of things on her plate right now and understandably so. G's post saw a lot of helpful responses but the reality of a long, uncertain and stressful wait to freedom remains.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...