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Comment by haspok | Hacker News Reader

I read a story on my LinkedIn feed about a lady who had it worse: she relocated to the US with her family a couple months ago on an L1 visa, before being fired from Meta. Because of this, she now has a few months to pack her belongings, because obviously the L1 is non-transferable, and even if she applies and wins on the H1-B lottery and finds a sponsor the earliest she could start working again is fall of next year. There is nothing she can do about it. Life is really unfair sometimes.

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I think that treating the adversarial and anti-business (and, dare I say, inhumane) US immigration policies as simple facts of life is a mistake. These are not stone tablets carved by a god; these are policies that people presently living dreamed up and implemented. They were made and they can be unmade.

Life isn’t unfair nearly as often as US immigration policies are unfair.

I think it’s more that this one lady cannot fight against the entire US judicial system. Especially with the SC as it is.

If there is no provision on L1 for early termination, then the rules of this particular type of visa are entirely broken and needs fixing. I understand the reason L1 exists, I actually lived in the US under L1 myself, but there is no excuse for a country to accept a worker they deemed necessary and acceptable to migrate, and then impose such a harsh rule for edge cases. If the person needs to be let go because somehow their own fault, it is fine. But layoffs are an example where the company is at fault and the employee is the victim - in this case the minimum the government should do is to offer a fair amount of time for the person to find another job.

... but who gambles their whole family on these horrible visas? (Okay, obviously people who don't have better options. Still, very disturbing cautionary tales :/)

>>Okay, obviously people who don't have better options.

As some body who has been through this whole process. Let me tell you people come to the US to work on Visas happen to be the most privileged of the pool.

Simply put, it is a high stakes game of luck, which you are more or less guaranteed to lose eventually. It just makes it very painful when you lose it sooner than you expect.

Immigration itself is a game of luck. People who end up winning really go through multiple level of family, career, health and visa luck situations. Most people get filtered out one phase or the other.

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