I've been hearing about the Startup Visa initiative from various startup folks (Eric Ries, Dave McClure) over the last few months. I recently came across a post from Brad Feld on his blog that they are now looking for immigrants to tell their story. I just submitted my story (you can submit yours here) and I thought I'd share it here as the first post on my new blog. So here goes...

I moved to the US from India in 1997 to go to school as an undergrad here in the US. I received a BS in Computer Science in 2000. Like all foreign students graduating with a degree from a US educational institution, I was given 1 year of OPT which essentially allowed me to work for a company in the US – In that year, I had to get a company to hire me and then sponsor a work visa (category H1-B) to avoid being sent back home to India.

Luckily, the dot bomb had not fully hit yet. Since I’d been involved in a lot of undergraduate research in college and had a couple of internships under my belt, I had 6 job offers from well known technology companies. I picked HP out in the Bay Area.  Within a year, I was among 6000 people that HP laid off in August 2001. That’s when things got hairy – I needed to find another job ASAP so I would not overstay my visa. But, it was nuclear winter in the tech job market. Thankfully, I was able to contact one of the companies that had tried to hire me out of school and I managed to find a job at Texas Instruments in Dallas.

Great, so I dodged that bullet. Now, I had to start thinking about how I was going stay in the country after my H1-B expired (it usually lasts 4 years with a typical extension to 8). Thankfully TI is a great employer and they sponsored me for a Green Card (US Permanent Resident) application.

The problem is that the Green Card process is long and convoluted. To paraphrase an immigration lawyer talking to a bunch of us Engineers at TI – “We know you engineers are used to applying logic to everything, just remember to check that at the door when you come to these immigration discussions. Logic has nothing to do with the immigration process. The government has set rules and we have no choice but to follow them.”

Here are some of the problems I dealt with during the Green Card process:

1.     It takes anywhere from 3 to 6 years to get one – there is no real visibility into the process other than, average processing times for your local office to get from stage to stage.

2.     In 2003, when President Bush gave amnesty to illegal aliens living in the US, those applications were given precedence over others. i.e. they jumped the line. So, my application was delayed by a further couple of years thanks to a few hundred thousand people being added in front of me.

3.     You are not allowed to change jobs or even job titles during the entire process. An employment-based green card is for a specific job where the company has to prove that no existing US based talent is available for that specific job. So, the lawyers have to get creative when you get a promotion at work.

4.     Along the way, TI paid for me to get my MBA and I wanted to switch to a Marketing role. This was going to require me to reapply and go to the back of the line again!

My only saving grace was that I met a wonderful woman right after moving to Dallas and after dating for a few years we got married in 2004. She was a US citizen. TI was able to reapply for my Green Card using a family based application – which aside from requiring a lot of proof to show that we were happily and legitimately married – took only about a year.

The sad fact of the matter is that I think the immigration process slowed my career down significantly. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones who was able to rely on my marriage to get a green card faster than many of my colleagues. I would not have been able to start the technology company I run today if I did not have my Green Card.

Today, the US is faced with fast growing challenges in the technology and business environment from multiple countries. As the economies of India and China grow by leaps and bounds, more and more American educated talent is going back to their home countries because of the quagmire that is the immigration process. We need to keep this talent here! It will not only make us more competitive globally, but also continue the great tradition of immigration that helped make America such a great country to begin with.