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Eternal Tunnel

I have lived through the H1-B ordeal that upended my personal and professional live profoundly. My story is over two decades old counting from when it started. I had and continue to look at it as the price to pay for making my own choices and pursuing my personal idea of freedom. I was not forced into any situation against my will and I am very cognizant of that. While that is likely true for people enduring the same pain today, it does not diminish the level of needless suffering and how it makes a person feel like they are on unstable ground every minute of "their life" as "normal life" goes on all around them. The ones who try to insulate the kids from the chaos, try to plant roots - buy home, form community and more, incur even more stress because they have added the weight of baggage to the unrelenting uncertainty of their lives. Nothing seems to have changed in the two decades that have gone by since my time. There are wave upon wave of people who go through the same crush of anxiety walking through a tunnel where there is no light at the end. 

The 60-day grace period that foreign workers have to remain in the U.S. and try to secure new jobs doesn’t apply to those who are laid off while abroad, says Hiba Mona Anver, a partner at Erickson Immigration Group, a law firm based in Arlington, Va. If a worker on a temporary work visa has their role terminated while they are traveling out of the country, she says, that visa is no longer valid for re-entry unless the worker manages to secure another job while abroad. 

I made some hard, inflexible choices in the day - no buying a home, no travel out of the country including India, no  vacation beyond a day or two added to a long weekend once a year. Not everyone should have to make choices like that and extend their suffering on to their family - but sometimes that is the only way to survive with some sense of control over your destiny. I would not wish the way I lived through that time upon anyone else but the truth is people did and continue to have it even worse than I did. 

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