- President James Madison
Anonymous - Washington DC
How many hoops do we have to jump through?You don't know in how many ways you can fail to stay legal in the US nowadays until you take a look at how many hoops I have jumped through and still failed to keep a legal status in the end.
1. I took both the TOEFL test, for proof of English proficiency, and the GRE test, for graduate school admission.
2. I got admission to a graduate school at the State University of New York in Binghamton.
3. At first, I paid my tuition. Then I got a teaching assistantship.
4. After studying hard and worked hard on a thesis, I got a Master's degree in Computer Science.
5. Then I got a job as a consultant at IBM Internet Division. A few months later, IBM decided to shut down the project. By this time, my employer had transferred me from practical training status to a work visa using the excuse that they did that so IBM could convert me into their full time employee. Holding a work visa meant that I had to find a job in two weeks or leave the country.
6. I did find a job at Prodigy in two weeks. However, Prodigy went through a big layoff shortly after I was hired. The only thing is, this time, Prodigy gave me one month to find another job before I was officially laid off.
7. I found three jobs, one with McGraw-Hill's Standard and Poor's ComStock, which mailed me a huge benefit book, another with a large software company, and one with an Internet start-up that offered stock options. I took that last one. One year later, when the company was going to go public, the company started to fire some of the early employees. I was one of them. This time, it was close to Christmas. I could not get a new job in two weeks. So I applied for a visa to work in the Internet start-up of a classmate from my graduate school.
8. Later that year, I was told by my former employer that I had lost the stock options that I had earned during the year that I worked for them. I immediately contacted a few lawyers and found one who filed a lawsuit on my behalf not long afterward.
9. The lawsuit dragged on for two years. Before I got a settlement for my case two years later, I had had to quit my last job and had gone out of status for more than one year. According to an immigration bill passed in 1996, I would not be allowed to come back to the US in ten years if I had overstayed my visa for more than one year. But because I came to the US before 1996, the year when the bill was signed into law, I was allowed to apply for adjustment of status without leaving the US under provision 245(i), under the condition that I filed for a labor certificate, the first step toward adjustment of status, before a deadline. So I filed for a labor certificate before the deadline.
10. When I got a settlement for my case, my application for a labor certificate had been filed. So I stayed on to wait for the decision from the Labor Department. I have not heard from them all these years. I only know that my case is still at a backlog processing center in Philadelphia.
So after all these years jumping through so many hoops, I am still having no status.
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