This is the main reason I've given up. It's not an effective use of anyone's time to wade through the US immigration mess. My J-1 visa expired last October. I was in SF for my PhD research on a J-1 and had to suddenly return to Europe last April due to unforeseen family circumstances. I was in the process of filing for a waiver when I was in SF and had a long call with someone at Google about a position I'd applied for. I discovered that I had just missed the H1B deadline, so there was pretty much no way for me to get a job in 2013.
Now that I'm back in Europe, I've been looking into applying for a J-1 waiver and it's just form after form after form. Additionally, you have to pay something in the region of $2000 according to an immigration lawyer I sought out and with that I'd only be throwing my name in the ring, with the possibility that the State Department would reject my waiver application apparently.
I absolutely fell in love with SF whilst I was living there and would love to make it back now that I'm wrapping up my PhD, but I think it's neigh on impossible given the current bureaucracy involved.
Guess I'm just gonna wait it out and hope for immigration reform to kick in.
I applied for J-1 waiver last summer. It's a painful bureaucratic process but it's not too hard to follow. You have to fill up DS-3035 [1] and get a no objection certificate from your embassy or government. Most embassies in US have some standard procedure for sending no objection certificate directly. After that, they'll take about a couple of months to approve your waiver.
You can do it all by yourself and in total you won't have to pay more than $500 ($215 for DS-3035 + fee for no objection letter.) Go for it!
J1 waiver isn't too bad. Yes, it involves some paper-work, but nothing that would need an immigration lawyer. You can do everything yourself, and costs about $200 last I checked.
Also look into the O1 visa that doesn't require a waiver, and has no quotas.
Ok, that's good to know. That's an order-of-magnitude less than I was told. I guess I should look into it in more detail. In the meantime I have accepted a postdoc position in Europe, so I'm in no immediate rush to get the visa situation sorted out. Would just be nice to be able to sort things out so that once my postdoc is done I've got a better chance of returning to the Bay Area.
With regards to the O1 visa, I've heard that you have to really stand out in your field of research, as the original article states, and unfortunately, during my PhD I haven't really achieved that level of success.
Start the waiver process now. It is multi-staged, and takes several months if everything goes smoothly. You'll need a no-objection letter from the embassy of your home country. This is usually the most tricky part. Once the US Department of State gets this, you can track your status online. Start now so you are done with it by the time you finish your postdoc.
Re the O1, read up on the requirements, and work on publishing more during your postdoc.
I thought of exploring that, but TBH, my understanding is that you have to be a "publishing machine" to even stand the chance of being considered and unfortunately I haven't been as productive as I had wished during my PhD in terms of number of papers. Maybe I should investigate this further, but the original article also seems to indicate that an O1 is a long shot.
Now that I'm back in Europe, I've been looking into applying for a J-1 waiver and it's just form after form after form. Additionally, you have to pay something in the region of $2000 according to an immigration lawyer I sought out and with that I'd only be throwing my name in the ring, with the possibility that the State Department would reject my waiver application apparently.
I absolutely fell in love with SF whilst I was living there and would love to make it back now that I'm wrapping up my PhD, but I think it's neigh on impossible given the current bureaucracy involved.
Guess I'm just gonna wait it out and hope for immigration reform to kick in.