How to Secure Your H-1B Visa

03/22/2013 · No Responses

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 US

Managers 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
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Overview of the H-1B Petition Procedure
Chapter 3. The H-1B Annual Quota
Chapter 4. Eligibility for H-1B Status
Chapter 5. Complementary Roles of the H-1B Employee, Sponsor, and Attorney
Chapter 6. Employer Inputs to the H-1B Process
Chapter 7. Employee Inputs to the H-1B Process
Chapter 8. Labor Condition Application (LCA) Compliance
Chapter 9. H-1B Investigations and Penalties
Chapter 10. Maintaining H-1B Status
Chapter 11. Termination of H-1B Employment
Chapter 12. H-1B Alternatives