Here are some tips that I got from people before I arrived in US.
- Immigration officers are not the kind of people you are used to in your classroom or work environment. - They are mostly moderately educated, stuck in a clerical job without any purpose and do not know much about the outside world. - They might be jealous of people who might be younger and far more successful/high achievers then them. - Their job is to enforce rules within their powers. They dont give a damn about you and how good your intention is.
Getting past them involves optimizing on the following variables.
- That you have got impeccable paperwork. This needs to be conveyed using important keywords that they are looking for instead of other rubbish. For example for H1B workers if the officer asks, why you were in US on B1 via a year back you should say "For last 4 years I was a student in India doing my 4 year graduation in CS, I had arrived in US on B1 visa to publish my paper at Standford University" compared to "I was in US to publish my paper on Cost Effective Real Time Systems for Greenhouses". The officer might think that you were publishing newspaper or something.
- Other important keywords for H1B immigrants are "specialized engineering", "4 year graduate program", "part of engineering team responsible for highly scalable/ specialized system in Java, Databases systems". "working out of XYZ company".
- One should totally avoid words like "Hacker", "Startup", "small company", "disruptive change", "Venture Capital", "seed funding", "angel investors", "entrepreneurs". I remember when one H1B guy told the officer that he works for a Venture Capital he asked if it is the same company that has Capital One credit cards.
- One should also use influential words that the officer is familiar with. For example "Director of our Company is Mr. X, who was a Vice President of Google Inc.", "Microsoft has invested X in us". "Our Company has turnover of 100M dollars" and so on. Keep the evidence handy.
I think the lady here got into trouble because of she mentioned of Hackathon, Social Entrepreneurship, evolution as an individual etc. etc. If she had said that she works on a program recognized by UN and given the evidence to officer she would have probably got away with this.