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Comment by gokulk | Hacker News Reader

same here.. my OPT gets over in a few months.. this may screw me over completely and force me to go back to native country. Dreams in Silicon Valley burnt due to extremely limited cap.

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I'm in the same boat as you. My OPT ends on September 30th, ironically enough (H1B starts Oct 1st).

A backup plan I've been thinking about would be to move to the Canadian west coast if I don't get a visa (EU citizens, your country may or may not have visa agreements with Canada that allow you to work there- France has nice things in that regard) to be not too far from my team.

Look into STEM OPT extension. It's good for 17 months. Your student advisor should know about it and your employer must be enrolled in E-Verify. You'll need the employers E-Verify # when applying and you'll get a new I-20 from your school. Nothing with USCIS is ever that simple but the employers I work with have lots of F-1 students that qualify and quite easily get their STEM OPT extension. You have to apply well before your OPT expires though (90-120 days).

Yeah, we thought about the OPT extension. The problem is that we're not enrolled in e-verify, and the company that we outsource HR etc. too doesn't do it at the moment either.

We might go down that path anyways if H1B fails; we'll see what happens.

Enrolling in E-Verify is very easy and if the company you outsource HR to can't process E-Verify for your I-9 Forms I'd be extremely worried.

Doesn't your company has to have an office there already or open one if you work for them from Canada?

If you have a MS degree then you qualify for the special category where they issue 20,000 visas thus if you strike out once, you get 2nd shot for the lottery.

"USCIS has also received more than 20,000 H-1B petitions filed on behalf of persons exempt from the cap under the advanced degree exemption." So, advanced degree 20k cap is filled. The other way it via lottery.

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