Two weddings and a funeral show what H-1B chaos costs America
On Sept. 14, Emily Chen and David Yang boarded a 14-hour flight from Seattle to Shanghai. Software engineers in the United States on H-1B work visas, they’d spent months planning their wedding back home: interviewing emcees, choosing flowers, drawing up seating charts and preparing for family reunions long delayed by pandemic travel bans and visa paperwork. Now the big day drew near.
Yang hadn’t been back for a year. For Chen, it had been five. Chen’s grandparents had died during her time abroad. In addition to getting married, she planned to visit their graves — to burn incense and whisper belated goodbyes. The wedding would be in Jiangsu, Yang’s hometown, on Sept. 23, followed by a return banquet in Zhejiang, where Chen is from. (The visa holders in this column asked to be identified by the first names they adopted for use in the United States, a common practice among current and former Chinese students in America, and Chinese surnames, rather than the full Chinese names on their passports out of concern for retaliation from U.S. immigration authorities; their photos are cropped to withhold their identities for the same reason.)
In Ningxia that same week, Elena Li was returning home for her mother’s burial ceremony. Her mother died of breast cancer four days before Li’s law school graduation in May. She had already accepted an offer from a New York firm that sponsored her H-1B. Visa forms, exams, graduation, moving and job logistics delayed her trip. Relatives in China held a simple memorial service and postponed the burial till Li could come home.
On her graduation day, Li said, she “felt like an orphan” as she watched classmates wave to cheering parents. “I have lost my mom forever,” she said. She was finally back in China.
In Yunnan, Jesse Li, an H-1B holder working at a small education consulting firm in New York, arrived after a 25-hour trip on Sept. 18 for his cousin’s wedding. He and his cousin, just four months his junior, were raised together by their grandparents. All through primary school, they had been in the same class, and he had long awaited the day he could come home for her wedding.
Then, one day later, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa petitions — and touched off a desperate race back to the United States.
The vague language of Trump’s order threw thousands of legal immigrants into a panic. Major employers such as Microsoft, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs sent urgent emails urging H-1B workers not to travel abroad. Posts flooded social media expressing alarm and speculating frantically about what was to come.
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At 8 a.m. the next day in China, Chen’s phone began buzzing with messages from company lawyers, colleagues and friends. She and Yang started packing after carefully reviewing the post from the White House. They had just bought a home in the U.S., and they couldn’t risk getting locked out of the country. Flight prices soared by the hour. Abandoning their wedding plans, they booked two one-way tickets through Vancouver for a total of $3,350 and raced to the airport.
In Ningxia, Elena Li was sitting in a funeral car with the urn holding her mother’s ashes when her phone lit up with similar alerts. She stared at the screen, torn between rushing to the airport or staying by her mother’s grave.
Jesse Li, on the way to picking up the bride, began buying tickets as prices spiked. He was just 10 minutes away from seeing his cousin in her wedding dress, but he had to leave. The route he settled on involved trains, subways and three flights, traveling through Hong Kong.
Chen and Yang landed in Vancouver the next day. Before they got off the plane, they saw new guidance: The $100,000 fee didn’t apply to existing visas. Their runaway bride-and-groom journey had been for nothing. Meanwhile, guests gathered back in Jiangsu to watch a video apology from the young couple instead of vows. But Chen’s deepest regret was that she wasn’t able to visit her grandparents’ graves or to see her parents and friends she hadn’t seen in years.
Elena Li chose to stay in China. As the traditional suona horns wailed, she knelt before a large brazier burning paper offerings. Ash from the leaping flames left a small mark on her vest. That evening, she read a similar update from her firm: The policy applied only to new visa applications.
“I knew an order like that would be vulnerable to legal challenges,” Li said, “but the fear was real.”
Flanked by other H-1B travelers, Jesse Li finally collapsed into his seat on the flight back to the United States. In just three days, he crossed the Pacific twice. He received photos of his cousin’s wedding, full of laughter and joy. When he passed through customs in Los Angeles, the officers barely looked up.
Thankfully, in the end, this story isn’t about productive, law-abiding, legal residents of the United States having their lives upended by arbitrary government decree. It’s merely about four people, and thousands of others, who were confronted by a threat and forced to make an instant calculation about what the current U.S. government was capable of.
Engineers, educators, researchers and other professionals hurried through airports or abandoned travel plans fearing that a single executive order could undo all that they had built in the United States. A $100,000 H-1B fee will not just hurt universities, hospitals, tech companies and artificial intelligence start-ups, which lean heavily on international talents, but also send a message that America is no longer a reliable place to build a career. Each abrupt rule change strengthens competitors eager to welcome the minds the U.S. is driving away.
Rule of law still matters in the United States. This month, a coalition of labor unions, hospitals, universities and visa holders brought a federal lawsuit challenging the H-1B policy that sent so many scrambling. They argue the president does not have the authority to unilaterally rewrite an immigration system created by Congress.
The White House has dismissed the suit as frivolous. But for people like Emily, David, Elena and Jesse, it represents an effort — a plea, really — to restore faith in a system that once promised fairness and equality. Those who play by the rules — those who work, pay taxes and help build the nation’s future — shouldn’t have to fear that their own futures could collapse overnight.
“Choosing America is like living under the sword of Damocles,” Elena Li wrote in a post online. “Your neck always bare, waiting for the blade to drop.”
When policy descends into chaos, everyone loses. In the global competition for talent, this isn’t a version of America that can attract the best and brightest.
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The conversation explores the impact of sudden immigration policy changes on individuals and families living and working in the United States on visas, particularly focusing on the H-1B visa program. Many participants express concerns that these changes, such as the proposed... Show more
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