The Comprehensive Report of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (2)

The Types of Visas in the United States

Many people are confused about the concept of a visa and your identity (status). The concept of visa and status are related, but their definitions are different. For example, you must first face 2 thresholds:

The Embassy of United States in your countries offers you the U.S. visa

The place can successfully enter U.S. customs after landing in the United States

After passing these 2 thresholds, you are allowed to enter the United States legally because the U.S. Visa gives you the right to cross the United States border. After you are in the United States, your U.S. visa is not important anymore, you must provide your legal residence status in the United States. It is the legal status that customs officials will give us permissions and determine how long we can stay in the United States and what we can and cannot do. The identity is given to us by the customs officers. There are non-immigrant visas and immigrant visas provided by customs officers.

7 types of non-immigrant visas

It will be discussed in the next series of article.

5 types of immigrant visas

B1/B2, F-1, H-1B, J-1, L-1, E-2, and O-1 are the seven most commonly used non-immigrant visas to enter the United States, meeting the needs of most people in the world for business, tourism, work, and study.

Note: EB4 is not mentioned here, because it is a special immigrant visa for those religious people and members of the U.S. military, etc.

In summary, there are 2 general methods to immigrate to the United States, either working or investing in the United States. Only an immigrant visa leads directly to the green card, and the non-immigrant visa status itself must rely on the category in the immigrant visa to get the green card. For non-immigrant visa holders, it is useful for you to immigrate to the United States earlier without a green card.

Take note:

The visa holder’s activities in the United State must not exceed the scope of the visa issued and its corresponding status

You hold a B2 tourist visa, but want to switch to an F1 visa when you want to study at a U.S. university.

You hold an F1 student visa, you are not allowed to work for a U.S. company unless you get the work permit visa.

You hold a B1/B2 tourist visa, but you want to work in the United States, you must switch to an H1b visa.

Since the U.S. government cannot judge our purpose, the U.S. government draws a timeline that stipulates that if the application for change of status is made 90 days after landing in the United States, it will not be regarded as visa fraud.

2. You must pay attention to the question of whether various types of visas are allowed to have immigrant tendencies.

The term for the immigrant tendency is called dual intent. We are accustomed to default visas that do not allow immigrant tendencies because the visas we have the most contact with, such as tourist visas and student visas, do not allow immigrant tendencies. However, L-1, H-1b, and other work visas allow you immigrant tendencies.

The jobs are software engineer, software developer, programming, UX/UX designer, Web developer, mobile developer, feature engineer, data analyst, data engineer, machine learning engineer, etc. If you have 2 years related experience and would like to apply for H-1b, you are encouraged to apply for a job related to computer systems design & related services. It is a much higher possibility to get a chance to get a work visa.