Just wanted to share my story too (throwaway account).
I first came to the US when I was 16 on a high-school "exchange" program, which was actually a one-way "exchange" (nobody went to my country from the US), sponsored by the US government in order by promote democracy, American way of life and thinking, etc., across the world, and especially in the former Soviet Union, where I was from. The American plan was to immerse 15-17 year-olds from the former Communist bloc into American mentality, then send them back to their home countries and let them loose into their societies.
At the time, my former USSR republic was in chaos, the Union just collapsed a few years earlier, economy was in turmoil with ridiculous hyperinflation, food supply failures, crime rate skyrocketting, etc. Needless to say, everybody wanted to get out, and the competition to get into this US-sponsored program was crazy. To get in, you had to pass 3 rounds of testing: prove your English language skills, submit an essay in English, and finally, pass an interview. In my high school of about 1500 students, I was one of the two people who made it that year.
I then spent my last year of high-school as a senior in an American high-school out in the Middle of Nowhere, USA and lived with an American host family, who were proud "rednecks". I didn't fully understand the full meaning of that word at that time, but in those parts of the country, it wasn't anything to be ashamed of. Needless to say, I learned quite a bit about "American way of thinking" during that year.
Meanwhile, the message from my parents back home was simple and consistent: find a way to stay there FOR GOOD. Get into an American university. Oh, and by the way, we have no money for that, so figure out how to do it for free. Which I did, by the end of my American senior year.
I lucked out because I got into a graduating senior class, even though I was supposed to stay with my age group and be a junior. As a senior, I got to take SATs and ACTs, and studied hard for them, having figured out that those were an important ticket to American education. Surprisingly, my results were higher than national average, even though my English was nowhere near native. It would be enough to get into most colleges in the universities in the country.
Unfortunately, just being accepted was not an option in my circumstances, since I had no money whatsoever to pay for college. I needed a full-ride scholarship, nothing less. Fortunately, my (pretty high) GPA and test results turned out to be enough to get one at only one college out of over 200-300 applications that I sent out.
In the meantime, I was back home, back from my first year in America, wanting to go back, this time on my own, without the hand-holding by the State Department and the chaperones. To do that, I needed to learn more about a whole another side of the State Department -- the consular office, the visas, etc. With my letter of acceptance, and an offer of full scholarship in hand, I braced the throngs of my countrymen lining up at the American embassy. I did end up getting one, a student visa this time, although with a frown from the consular officer about the fact that I just came back from the US on an exchange visa. At the time, that was a minor detail I should have paid more attention to.
Fast forward several years.
I have a Bachelors and Masters degrees from US schools (both paid for by the schools themselves), have interned at cool companies, met my wife (also an immigrant, but not from my country) and married her, and switched from studying on a student visa to working on an H-1B visa. At this point I've lived in the US for over 13 years, and investigated the possibility of finally getting a green card.
It turned out that it was nearly impossible for me to get a green card without having to first go back to my country for two years and fulfilling the State Department's original goal for me -- sharing what I learned in the US as a 16 year-old kid with my countrymen. This, despite the fact that Internet erupted and connected the entire world in ways unthinkable since that time. Despite the fact that I have shared quite a bit with many of my countrymen via various online forums and discussion boards during those 13 years. Despite the fact that I have started a family with roots in the US and my wife does not speak the language. Despite the fact that my skills are better suited in the US, which is proven by high-paying jobs I held, along with similarly high taxes I paid along with that.
And so, after 13 years in America, after having received Bachelor's and Master's degrees, with respected schools completely subsidizing my tuition, and after having worked at some of the more respected companies in American tech community, I had nothing left to do but pack up and immigrate to Canada, who was gracious enough to take me, and glad enough to use my skills and take my tax dollars. For me, American Dream remained a dream. Canadian Dream is not as hyped-up as its bigger sister down south, but it has its fair share stories. This is one of them. :)
Thanks for sharing. Yeah the program was called Freedom Support Act. And you probably had a J-1 visa. That was a great program and I wish there were more of those kind of programs that would bring in kids from other regions of the world.
It is unfortunate about the 2 year requirement for your particular case. Since it was a US govt. sponsored program they paid for your stay, travel and allowance while here. It was not just a program to benefit you personally and to eventually help you integrate into the American society, but rather it was to create future leaders in your country that would support and follow "Western" ideals, and to have you spread your knowledge about the American culture in your own country. As they see it, you have failed that task since you came right back for college.
Overall I agree, it was a positive program, although with its own quirks and downsides. That said, my "issues" with it are:
- That "task" was never clearly spelled out to mostly immature, 16 year old minors. The attached strings were slowly revealed much later into the deal. I don't want to call it a "bait-and-switch", but it does have many attributes of it.
- There's no way to repay the State Dept for the expenses if you don't want to "do the 2 years".
- As I already mentioned earlier, communications mechanisms were revolutionized since then with the advance of Internet. Most communication and spread of informal knowledge now occurs online, even in my home country. Most ideological "debates" over Western ideals, etc., happen online.
- I wonder what the failure rate was for the program. Most people I know either came back to the US immediately, or eventually. I believe the program is shut down now. Unfortunately, a failed program to a government official is just that -- oh well, time to move on. To a participant, it's a life-altering experience, for better or worse.
Very good points. Yeah at no point in the process did they make that explicit, and that is unfortunate.
And completely agree, someone should have the option to basically repay all the expenses associated with the 2 years and get a waiver in return. Heck, you have probably already repaid it many times over just by paying taxes and producing value in this country.
Looking back at my experience I did actually do some of the sharing. I was only 15 at the time and so I had 2 more years of high-school before heading back to US for the University (also a full ride scholarship). There were a number of times when teachers from my high-school back home invited me in for a round table discussion so I could share some of the teaching practices from American high-school. For example I told them about how frequent quizzes and tests are used to make grading more objective and it keeps tracks of students' progress. Or how group and research projects are used. At least in that one high-school some teachers chose to implement that. I encouraged my extended family members to study English (2 of my younger cousins followed in my footsteps). Also remember tutoring some classmates in English and telling them about American culture informally. I would like to think I made some contribution at least.
Yeah you made a good point about how Internet sort of made this obsolete. I agree 90%, the other 10% are reserved for the case when actually meeting someone who have been abroad and has acquired some of the culture and ideas is still different than reading it from a magazine or seeing it online.
Ha, I should have realized you were an insider. :) Your timing was much luckier, since you had those 2 years built-in, although I'm not sure whether you got to skip a grade when you came back, or had to "downgrade" and sit those two years with lowerclassmen, while your classmates remained a grade ahead. That would have sucked.
Anyway, the fact that you also went back to the US after graduating validates my last point -- yet another "future leader" failed the "task". ;)
> or had to "downgrade" and sit those two years with lowerclassmen
Good guess! Yap had to to that. But it was a fun time. I already knew all the material and didn't really have to work. Had more time to hack on my computer which is what I really wanted to do.
> yet another "future leader" failed the "task". ;)
True. Not much of a future leader more of a introverted nerd who likes to code. It worked out great for me though.
Nice meeting you here. I also came to the US as a Freedom Support Act exchange student in high school. I never went back to my home country, got accepted to a University, graduated and was out of status for a while. I married a US citizen and now I am dealing with a 2-year requirement. I applied for a waiver based on "no objection" from the home government. I received a favorable recommendation, but the exchange program wrote a letter to the Waiver Review Division stating that I violated the program and therefore go home. I can reapply basing my case on hardship or political asylum.. but my chances of winning are very slim. You mentioned in one of your posts about repaying the sponsor the amount that was spent? Could you please elaborate? I am in dire need of advice. Please e-mail me at madina_a@hotmail.com
Did you just create this account to make that post?
Also did you read the whole thread? Nobody mentioned that you can _actually_ pay back for the 2 years and actually get a waiver for it. It was a hypothetical ("what if" type scenario) that the original poster suggested in response to my claim that US govt. spent the money on these "future leaders" not to help these kids easily become American Citizens, but to share and spread American culture, ideas and ideals in their home country. So hypothetically since you didn't fulfill that goal (the 2 year stay is a proxy for it) _in theory_ you can think of them letting you pay back all the expenses they incurred having you in this country.
You can try another country like the original poster did. Canada is a great country and probably better than your home country at the moment.
> ... applied for a waiver based on "no objection" from the home government.
Yeah not sure I see how that would work. I can imagine any post Soviet block country having a "student exchange program
monitoring and tracking system". So who wrote that "favorable recommendation"? Be honest. Was it someone in your family and then you paid someone to sign. I am saying it because that is how things run in my home country and that is why other (let's say "Western" governments) don't really trust letters, transcripts or recommendations from any such places.
I'm frankly surprised you were able to transition away from the H1-B from the F-1.
(My partner is in a similar boat, but still on the F-1. I'm currently in his country, and we're hoping that despite him being on the F-1, the accumulated time that he spent in his country totalling two years will be enough to count for the requirement, despite it not being contiguous. The problem is it seems to be all up to the discretion of the officer handling the issue, because the rules don't seem to be anywhere.
Yes, J-1. :) It's such an obscure corner of the US immigration law chaos, that barely anybody knows about it, except for those that have to live with it. The transition to H-1B from F-1 under J-1 cloud is even more obscure -- it's actually a legal loophole in the law that I think only a few know about. Basically, it's illegal to apply for H-1B visa without first satisfying the requirement, but it's OK to apply for H-1B status while remaining in the country.
Nah people know about it, I know at least a hand full of companies (personally, there are certainly others) that use said law to get workers into the U.S. and working for them.
It's not just the J-1, but those who come into the states under a visiting scholar program through the US government as opposed to an au pair private program, for example.
Fascinating story that rings true to my heart, but how did you manage to send out 200-300 applications and find the full ride? I remember applications costing money($30-50) in the early 1990s.
My biggest regret in life is not having had a good advisor in choosing which colleges to apply to. Upon applying to college, I was being given reasonable advice as an American high-schooler in California when in fact I was in a very similar situation to yours(ex Soviet, exchange student, and so on).
In the early 90s when I applied it cost money for college applications. I applied to Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley,UCLA and UCSB, because everyone else I knew was applying (I did not have access to Usenet just yet and there really were no other sources of information).
I got accepted at UCs and got confronted with the fact that college would cost a small fortune for an out of state student that UCs considered me(and I was already working part time as a programmer for UCSB).
There were some smaller colleges which were sending me spammy letters, which I ignored, but actually they were quite decent colleges in retrospect (Harvey Mudd for one).
To this day I wonder what would have happened if I had managed to get a reasonable scholarship to one of the lesser known colleges.
Thanks! This was 96-97, applications were all free, except for the postage. There may have been some higher-end schools that required money, I probably didn't even consider those. My algorithm was to go through Kaplan's (or one of those) catalog of all US colleges and universities, request an info package from each college where it seemed I can get a full-ride, receive it a few weeks later, fill out the enclosed application, send it out.
I did some prior research into scholarships and didn't even consider top schools (Harvard, Stanford, etc.), as I knew there was no chance to get a full-ride with my credentials. I mostly focused on smaller regional colleges.
Actually, I take that back. You're right, there were fees for the applications. And I didn't send out 200-300 applications. I just received >200 info packages (not even sure anymore of the estimate, but it was a lot). Out of those info packages, I applied to several schools (probably five or so), which clearly stated their criteria for qualifying for a full-ride scholarship (usually GPA + test score combination).
Sorry for the unintentional lie, I wish I could edit the original post. I guess so many years do weird things with memory.
I'm assuming people have suggested this to you, but in case they haven't, I've heard of people getting a lot of traction by contacting (and having their citizen friends contact) their senator/congressperson.
I first came to the US when I was 16 on a high-school "exchange" program, which was actually a one-way "exchange" (nobody went to my country from the US), sponsored by the US government in order by promote democracy, American way of life and thinking, etc., across the world, and especially in the former Soviet Union, where I was from. The American plan was to immerse 15-17 year-olds from the former Communist bloc into American mentality, then send them back to their home countries and let them loose into their societies.
At the time, my former USSR republic was in chaos, the Union just collapsed a few years earlier, economy was in turmoil with ridiculous hyperinflation, food supply failures, crime rate skyrocketting, etc. Needless to say, everybody wanted to get out, and the competition to get into this US-sponsored program was crazy. To get in, you had to pass 3 rounds of testing: prove your English language skills, submit an essay in English, and finally, pass an interview. In my high school of about 1500 students, I was one of the two people who made it that year.
I then spent my last year of high-school as a senior in an American high-school out in the Middle of Nowhere, USA and lived with an American host family, who were proud "rednecks". I didn't fully understand the full meaning of that word at that time, but in those parts of the country, it wasn't anything to be ashamed of. Needless to say, I learned quite a bit about "American way of thinking" during that year.
Meanwhile, the message from my parents back home was simple and consistent: find a way to stay there FOR GOOD. Get into an American university. Oh, and by the way, we have no money for that, so figure out how to do it for free. Which I did, by the end of my American senior year.
I lucked out because I got into a graduating senior class, even though I was supposed to stay with my age group and be a junior. As a senior, I got to take SATs and ACTs, and studied hard for them, having figured out that those were an important ticket to American education. Surprisingly, my results were higher than national average, even though my English was nowhere near native. It would be enough to get into most colleges in the universities in the country.
Unfortunately, just being accepted was not an option in my circumstances, since I had no money whatsoever to pay for college. I needed a full-ride scholarship, nothing less. Fortunately, my (pretty high) GPA and test results turned out to be enough to get one at only one college out of over 200-300 applications that I sent out.
In the meantime, I was back home, back from my first year in America, wanting to go back, this time on my own, without the hand-holding by the State Department and the chaperones. To do that, I needed to learn more about a whole another side of the State Department -- the consular office, the visas, etc. With my letter of acceptance, and an offer of full scholarship in hand, I braced the throngs of my countrymen lining up at the American embassy. I did end up getting one, a student visa this time, although with a frown from the consular officer about the fact that I just came back from the US on an exchange visa. At the time, that was a minor detail I should have paid more attention to.
Fast forward several years.
I have a Bachelors and Masters degrees from US schools (both paid for by the schools themselves), have interned at cool companies, met my wife (also an immigrant, but not from my country) and married her, and switched from studying on a student visa to working on an H-1B visa. At this point I've lived in the US for over 13 years, and investigated the possibility of finally getting a green card.
It turned out that it was nearly impossible for me to get a green card without having to first go back to my country for two years and fulfilling the State Department's original goal for me -- sharing what I learned in the US as a 16 year-old kid with my countrymen. This, despite the fact that Internet erupted and connected the entire world in ways unthinkable since that time. Despite the fact that I have shared quite a bit with many of my countrymen via various online forums and discussion boards during those 13 years. Despite the fact that I have started a family with roots in the US and my wife does not speak the language. Despite the fact that my skills are better suited in the US, which is proven by high-paying jobs I held, along with similarly high taxes I paid along with that.
And so, after 13 years in America, after having received Bachelor's and Master's degrees, with respected schools completely subsidizing my tuition, and after having worked at some of the more respected companies in American tech community, I had nothing left to do but pack up and immigrate to Canada, who was gracious enough to take me, and glad enough to use my skills and take my tax dollars. For me, American Dream remained a dream. Canadian Dream is not as hyped-up as its bigger sister down south, but it has its fair share stories. This is one of them. :)