One Visa Decides the Fate of More Than 300,000 Chinese Students in America. Here Are Two Stories

Luck doesn't favor someone just because she started trying earlier.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, Zhang Yiling went to work as an actuary at a company in San Francisco. She had come to the United States straight out of high school and had lived there for six years, and she hoped to stay for good.

But that was about to fall through.

Xiao Hang, who arrived six years after she did, had bought his first house in San Francisco the year before.

Zhang Yiling and Xiao Hang were classmates in the same high school in Dalian, class of 2009. The one thing that pulled their lives apart was the H-1B visa.

The H-1B is a visa for foreign professionals who hold a college degree and specialized skills. It is open to applicants worldwide, but it is generally treated as the road international students must take if they want to stay in the United States after graduating from an American university.

An estimated 650,000 to 900,000 people are working in the US today on H-1B visas. Once you have the visa, you can get a green card — permanent residency — within three to four years.

So the H-1B is seen as a ticket to the American dream.

Each year the US government issues 85,000 H-1B work visas to foreigners, 20,000 of them reserved for people holding a master's degree or higher from an American university. Universities, hospitals, and other nonprofits can apply for extra visas on top of that quota.

In recent years that ticket has been hard to come by. Demand shot up, so since 2013 the government has awarded the H-1B by lottery. Counting this year, it has now gone five years running in which more than 85,000 applications — more than the quota — arrived within five days.

In 2014, nearly half of all applications were turned away because the quota was full. In 2015, the government received 233,000 applications in seven days, and two-thirds were rejected for the same reason. In 2016, applications ran to almost three times the number of visas available.

This year the government took in 199,000 applications in the first five days, then stopped accepting any more.

Recent data show that of the 85,000 visas, 69% went to Indians and 12% to Chinese (about 19,963 people), with the rest going to citizens of Germany, Japan, Spain, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

As it happened, the year Zhang Yiling graduated from UC Berkeley was the first year of the lottery. She entered three times — 2013, 2014, 2015 — and never became one of that 12%.

Zhang Yiling was one of the few in her high school class who went to the US for her undergraduate degree; most of her classmates, Xiao Hang included, stayed in China. Xiao Hang graduated the same year from the computer science department at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and he and his girlfriend both got offer letters from Google in the US.

In 2014 their paths crossed with hers: all three went into the H-1B lottery together. Xiao Hang and his girlfriend were both picked. Zhang Yiling lost again.

Zhang Yiling liked to keep everything in order. She began preparing for American college entrance exams and application letters in her junior year of high school. In college, to buy herself one more shot at the lottery, she finished her coursework early and graduated in the fall of 2012, so she could make the April 2013 draw. (Students normally graduate in June, which means missing that year's April lottery.)

All that planning counted for nothing against the H-1B lottery. The only difference between her and Xiao Hang was luck.

By mid-April the mood at the office had turned heavy; each day that passed took a little more of Zhang Yiling's hope. This was her last chance. Her manager couldn't sit still, called her into the office, and got an immigration lawyer on the phone. The manager asked him: "Is there any way at all to keep her here? A green card, anything?"

When the lawyer heard that Zhang Yiling was Chinese, he said there was nothing he could do. Too many Chinese were already in the green-card queue, and while she waited she would have no legal standing to remain in the US.

When Zhang Yiling showed her white manager the official rejection letter, "she shut the door and cried. She couldn't make sense of it — she had never been an immigrant herself," Zhang Yiling said.

From the day she filed her application, April 1, the question of what to do next kept turning in her head. She went from waiting calmly, to disappointment, to anger — "Why me?"

Her feelings about the lottery changed just as sharply. The first time she wasn't picked, she shrugged it off; going home to China didn't sound so bad. The second year she started to get nervous. The third year, she did not sleep well once from the day she filed.

The two-plus years spanning her three tries changed a great deal. In that time Zhang Yiling got her first job, as a consultant at an actuarial firm; passed her actuarial exams; won a quick promotion; and stood out as the strongest performer among the actuaries who joined with her.

Without the H-1B hanging over her, all of that would have been good news. Instead it became a "stumbling block" to her decision — "The more they recognize you, the harder it is to leave. If I were miserable at work, I'd just go."

In 2015 her OPT — the post-graduation work period attached to a student visa — was about to expire, and she had no more chances at the lottery.

Losing the lottery didn't mean leaving at once. There were still roundabout ways to stay and work in the US.

Many people enrolled in a master's program at some obscure university and used CPT — Curricular Practical Training — as cover to keep working at their current company and drawing their usual salary.

These universities seemed to exist for international students. They offered full-time CPT, letting "students" work 40 hours a week with classes packed into weekends. Plenty of people used the trick to buy one or two more shots at the lottery while nominally studying for a diploma-mill master's.

Zhang Yiling had even scouted out a school in the Bay Area. Then a friend asked her: "If you hang on for two more years on CPT and still don't get picked, can you take that?"

She froze.

International students at multinationals had a second route: the company could post them to a Canadian or Chinese office for a year and enter them in the lottery again the next year. Zhang Yiling's company offered her that.

She turned it down. "Every option means waiting another year, and I still wouldn't know next year's result — I'd have to enter again. I'm not accepting that."

The waiting wore away her hope and her will the way warm water boils a frog. Sometimes she couldn't settle the most practical, simplest questions in life — whether to buy a concert ticket, say, when she might not be in the US six months later.

The damage went further than that. At work, facing long-term projects, she found she could no longer concentrate the way she used to. She stopped caring. "If I draw up a plan and won't be here to see it carried out, I don't have much motivation."

Her love life had the same problem: as at work, she found it hard to give herself fully. That was especially true with Americans who had never been international students. "Do I tell him about the H-1B? I can choose not to, but then we don't see the situation the same way. If he knows, can he still take this seriously? And if he knows but doesn't offer another way forward, do we keep going?"

Everyone around her thought the odds of losing three years in a row were tiny. To Zhang Yiling, each year was an independent event. "Every year it's a one-in-three chance. There is nothing you can do about it. I felt powerless."

Every year she faced the same questions: "If I go to Canada, how do I make friends? Leave again after a year? What if after a year I can't come back? How much time do I give myself? Where's the cutoff? When can I return to the US?"

While she wrestled with her own unease, every year she also saw friends off. "After all that, I couldn't see when it would ever end."

By her third lottery she was nearly 25, and something in her had shifted. She had had enough of waiting. "I've given all this uncertainty three tries. That's it. Time to end it."

She chose to go back to China. "Going home is at least a long-term plan."

The moment she decided, she felt lighter than she had in years — "Now my life can move forward."

While Zhang Yiling was making that hard decision, 40 new graduates just like Xiao Hang were packing their bags, excited to set foot on American soil. Nearly all came from Shanghai Jiao Tong, Peking University, and Tsinghua, and all were going from China to Google's US headquarters on H-1B visas.

Straight out of college they were earning salaries that Americans envied. The year before, they had bought a new house not far from Google's headquarters. "It's easy to buy a house when you're two coders," said Xiao Hang, who is 25.

They had arrived six years after Zhang Yiling, and they were about to get their green cards.

The way Xiao Hang saw it, "The American dream is a house and a car. We have both."

Li Xuan was another of these latecomers who got ahead. He did his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Tsinghua, worked at Microsoft China for two years, and moved to Microsoft's Seattle headquarters on an internal transfer in 2011.

By Li Xuan's estimate, about 200 people a year make the same move from Microsoft China to Seattle. It is a common path: of the dozen-odd colleagues on his own small team, 80% are now in the US. Around 2011, engineers still saw America as the better option.

Like Li Xuan, foreigners transferred from a home-country branch to a US headquarters usually arrive on what is called an L-1 visa, which lets workers formally employed by a company overseas work in the United States. The L-1A goes to foreign employees at management level, the L-1B to technical staff like Li Xuan.

There is no cap on how many of these visas can be issued, but because they cover an internal transfer, a foreigner on an L-1 can't change jobs while in the US. To immigration lawyer Qiu Huiyue, "the L-1B is modern-day slavery," he said. "L-1B technical staff have no fast lane to a green card. They're worse off than H-1B holders. The H-1B has a wage floor and lets you switch jobs; the L-1B has no wage floor and no job switching at all."

So many foreigners on L-1 status apply for an H-1B at the same time, as a hedge. And before 2012 the H-1B was there for the taking — no lottery needed. The US had not yet recovered from the financial crisis, the economy was depressed, companies were barely hiring, and far fewer foreigners found jobs than the government's 85,000 quota allowed.

In 2011 Li Xuan used that window to get an H-1B. As soon as he had it, he left Microsoft for the photo-sharing community Pinterest. The move didn't affect his place in the green-card queue, and last year he got the card.

Next to Zhang Yiling, Xiao Hang and Li Xuan had it too easy — the H-1B came to them without effort, which she found hard to swallow. "They never meant to stay long-term. They just wanted the experience. It's like the way we went abroad to study in the first place: go see what America is like, come back in a couple of years," she said.

After a year and a half at Google, Xiao Hang gave up his green card and went home to start a VR software company. The Google halo was already his. "One year gives you the same halo as two or three."

He spent a little over three months getting the company ready and quit the day after he closed $1.3 million in investment. The only thing he agonized over was how to build the VR software; that quitting might mean leaving the US did not bother him at all.

He had no real attachment to Google or to the country. Over his last two years, Google's food had gotten worse and worse as the company trimmed budgets. America had not made much of an impression on him either. His life in Mountain View, where Google is based, was mostly spent among other Chinese — Google's Jiao Tong alumni alone could fill a sizable alumni association. "There really are countless people from Jiao Tong, seniors everywhere," Xiao Hang said.

So when he heard what Zhang Yiling went through after losing the lottery three times and having to leave, he thought it was a shame, but "I can't fully understand it. Honestly, I don't care that much myself."

If you really want an answer to Zhang Yiling's "Why me?", plenty of people will point at the Indians.

Federal records show that of the 20 companies that received the most H-1B visas in 2014, 13 were global outsourcing firms, led by Indian giants such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and Wipro.

Those top 20 took 32,000 visas, 40% of the total, leaving the other 10,000-plus employers a sliver each.

TCS alone filed 14,000 applications, and 5,650 of its people got H-1B visas — nearly half of everything all Chinese applicants received.

Over the years, Indian firms have also learned to work the gray areas of the H-1B. The rules say each foreign worker may file only one application, but there is no limit on how many visas a company can apply for. So after underbidding for contracts with American companies, an Indian firm will have several affiliated companies apply for the same position at once. One of them is bound to be picked.

Every year, as soon as filing opens on April 1, these companies submit tens of thousands of applications. Applications are handled first come, first served, so a small employer that starts a week later is out before it begins.

In recent years, once the five-day count passes the quota, the government stops accepting applications altogether.

President Trump, during the campaign and after taking office, has repeatedly cited fraud and abuse in the H-1B system. In April he signed an executive order directing the relevant agencies to propose changes to H-1B policy: American companies should hire Americans first, and the visa should go to the most skilled and best-paid immigrant workers.

He did not say which group the order was aimed at, but a lot of Indian companies got nervous. "Indian companies have pulled back for now. Many had applications ready and never filed them, afraid that too high a win rate would make them the nail that sticks out," said Qiu Huiyue, an immigration lawyer in New York.

For Chinese students this is good news and bad news.

The good news is that there are fewer applications. The bad news is that some small and mid-sized American companies now refuse to hire international students who need an H-1B. "Trump's posture has spooked them. They don't know what he might do to American companies that hire foreigners," Qiu Huiyue said. "Chinese students have run into a lot of shut doors in this year's job market. Plenty of small and mid-sized companies say you must already have a green card, or have held an H-1B before — otherwise there's nothing to discuss."

That shapes where Chinese students can work. But even before Trump took office, the existence of the H-1B had already drawn the boundaries of their careers.

Go to any American university's career fair and you'll see the same scene: a few booths mobbed by international students. They usually belong to tech companies like Amazon and Google, or to financial firms — the big banks, the Big Four accounting firms.

These large employers need huge numbers of new graduates, and all of them sponsor H-1B visas. They are willing and able to pay the $2,460 filing fee plus more than $2,000 in legal fees for every applicant.

Take Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four. In 2015 it filed 850 H-1B applications across the US; this year it filed twice as many, 1,500, of which 500 were picked.

The odds of being picked are low, but the numbers are not small, which is why companies like this are the popular choice for Chinese students looking for work.

Smaller companies hire fewer people and may not sponsor an H-1B at all. The real problem is that, stuck on campus, most international students find it hard to tell which companies sponsor and which don't. So instead of casting a wide net, they aim at the safest, highest-odds targets at campus recruiting: the big technology and finance firms.

Even after picking the safest route into a job, these students still couldn't dodge luck's tricks once they were inside. Zhang Yiling and her four closest friends all stayed in San Francisco to work after graduation, and half-jokingly decided to play the probability game against the US government.

The published odds were one in three. They wanted to use themselves as a sample and see: "What are the odds that all five of us get to stay in America?"

The result: through this year, exactly one of the five women was picked each year. "We wanted to beat the odds, but there was really no way around it — it came out exactly the same," Zhang Yiling said.

As an experienced credentialed actuary, Zhang Yiling spends her days using numbers to price uncertain, unknown events and weigh risk.

Her probabilities are usually accurate. This time, she lost.

America became a beacon for the world's innovators precisely because it took in immigrants from everywhere. Companies founded by immigrants have given the country a steady supply of jobs and more than $10 billion in economic value.

And the H-1B is the single most important link that lets immigrants put down roots here.

Mike Krieger, the Brazilian-born co-founder of Instagram, stayed in the US to work on an H-1B. Instagram sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012, and he once said: "It took longer to get my visa than to build Instagram."

First Lady Melania Trump was born in the Republic of Slovenia. She used an H-1B while working as a model in New York and became a US citizen in 2006.

Many Silicon Valley tech companies lean heavily on the H-1B: at Facebook and at Qualcomm, at least 15% of US employees hold one.

Startups use it too, to pull in immigrant talent from around the world. The think tank National Foundation for American Policy studied 87 American startups and found that more than half were founded by people born outside the US, and that immigrants held management posts at 71% of them — Uber and Tesla among them.

But immigrants to America may not stay this lucky.

Under Trump's approach, many members of Congress have proposed handing H-1Bs to higher-paid immigrant workers, to keep American workers' wages from being dragged down. That might suit Silicon Valley's big technology companies; for startups it is terrible news. Startups usually pay new hires less and make it up in equity.

If the plan goes through, Chinese students will have even less chance of joining a startup after graduation, and will be tethered instead to traditional big companies.

In 2015 Obama allowed the spouses of H-1B holders to work in the US. The Trump administration recently said it is reviewing that policy.

From every angle, H-1B policy keeps tightening. The country billed as the world's most innovative is closing its door to immigrants — which also means America is close to losing its standing as the beacon for the world's innovators.

Zhang Yiling has now been back in China for more than a year. Her salary is half what it was, but in that year she got a boyfriend and secured a Shanghai hukou. She has a long-term plan.

At the interviewees' request, Xiao Hang and Zhang Yiling are pseudonyms.

Cover image: nestgcs, trbimg, sandratrappen