This is part II of the brain dump I started in a previous post to help me make peace with the immigration journey that lies ahead. Because broader life is a melting pot of a variety of unforeseeable events and personal experiences, this analysis that’s intended to be prescriptive is but speculative. With that said, it’s helpful to resume with some facts and likely possibilities. For the next two years, it’s highly unlikely that I will be back in the US. The only way that can happen is if I get picked in the H1B lottery. If I change employers in Canada before March next year, they will mostly not even apply for the H1B unless we strike some explicit agreement or if it’s, say, a US-based startup that views Canadian employment as temporary to begin with. In any case, the whole H1B situation has taken a major toll on my peace of mind, so I’ve decided to let it go. It’s for the best. With that out of the way, the next question is do I get anything by being in Canada in the next two years? Yes: PR - the green card for Canada. It provides essential peace of mind - the liberty to opt in or out of working, to pursue a personal project or a business idea, as well as access to a broader job market in Canada. The alternative to staying put in Canada until I get PR would be the L1B VISA - with my current employer I can be back in New York by August next year, and nostalgia makes that prospect very lucrative. But I’m not very eager, at least for now, to return on L1B and be tied to my current employer for several years. If this route is possible with my next role, I might strongly consider it. But finding that role in Canada is quite challenging. The number of openings in US companies at Canada office locations in general is a very small fraction of the number in the US, and the fraction of US companies hiring in Canada itself is small. Now on top of that, there are additional filters on what is worth pursuing when I consider the long term trajectory of my career. Before we get to that, I think useful to step back a bit and revisit the point of it all, at least from where I stand.

But why?

Like many people in my demographic, I fancy having the wealth to not have to rent out my time to sustain my and my closed ones’ lives. That will birth the sweet freedom to work on exciting ideas or empower those of others through leverage. I am quite convinced that today US is the place with opportunities to build that life. I understand this could very well change ten years down the line, but while it doesn’t, having a permanent resident status in the US is the only way to pursue those aspirations in the long term. Now the big dilemma I want to get to the bottom of and dissolve, by writing down my cluttered thoughts around it as part of this post, is whether or not there is an intersection point in the future where the long term path to be pursued (if indeed) to get the US green card meets the path that emerges by pursuing the most rewarding/fulfilling near-term endeavors in my career. And that could in turn help me decide what’s the cost I’m willing to pay to hang on to the possibility of building a life in the US. Above all, my priority is to make sure whatever I’m doing is not a mere means to an end. The journey has to be organic and fulfilling in its own right. Because if not, the opportunity cost is a man’s thirties. So yes, it’s an absolute requirement that the ride be fun, because there’s just one.

Alright, there are a couple of routes relevant to someone in my position, which can lead to the US green card. If any of these work out ideally, I could get it in as soon five-seven years from now, and believe me, that’s short for an Indian/Chinese immigrant. But I have to be all-in on whichever I choose to pursue. If I’m simultaneously making progress on multiple paths at once, that’s amazing. But I know that getting to the finish line will most likely take longer than I think and it will test my perseverance way harder than I can imagine. The paths are as follows:

a) Get into a managerial position

and spend at least a year out of the US in this role. Assuming my then employer supports my move to an US office, I am eligible to come back on an L1A VISA, and apply for the EB1C green card. Becoming a manager could take at least two to three years from now, and it would be another year to move to the US. From my limited understanding about the entities involved in a green card application - the PERM process, priority dates, I140, I1485 - it’ll take about three-five more years once I’m in the US on L1A to get the EB1C green card processed with India as my country of birth. I not sure if I can change employers during that time. I should find out the answers to these questions. I should also check with my current employer if any of the processes involved can be started today by any chance. Anyway, this is the more doable of all the possible paths I can lay out for myself, although maybe not the most appealing.

b) O1-A/EB1-A:

Establish myself, in the eyes of the USCIS, as an individual of extraordinary ability and bag the O1-A VISA. O1 VISA doesn’t require sponsorship from an employer, which is a great feature. It also does not guarantee a green card, not in and of itself. But from what I’ve heard, it serves as a great stepping stone to the highly coveted EB1-A green card, aka the Einstein VISA. The criteria to qualify for both is similar, with EB1-A having stricter standards. I know that to qualify for O1-A one needs to satisfy three out of eight criteria, and that doing well at my day job can get me two of three. One I believe has to do with having a public record of expertise in a specific field through authorship in online publications, and instances like judging competitions, etc. To actually build that profile, I will need a lot of guidance from people with experience, and more importantly, a role more conducive to putting out industry leading work through publications or talks in conferences. It’s clear that a research team in a Big Tech company would best match that description, but without a PhD getting in from the outside is close to impossible. I imagine I will first need to join, in my current capacity of an ML Engineer, any business or product focused team in one of these companies - where non-PhD engineers and scientists are known to have co-authored published papers. Off the bat I can think of some of the research groups at FAANG companies - Facebook AI Research (FAIR), Google Research, Amazon Science, and Microsoft Research, etc. The real challenge would be to then get into the research group at that company. I have no inkling if there is a paved path there, and how long does that take. I believe a stronger bet for me is to land a role in my current domain, i.e. information retrieval, search ranking, and recommendation systems, with better than present prospects of publishing work. My homework here would be a) dig into the archives of the top conferences in this field, such as KDD, RecSys, SIGIR, etc and locate the publications’ authors, and through that b) compile a list of my target companies. Consumer tech companies like Airbnb, Uber, Spotify immediately come to my mind as the top places. But at this point at least, I don’t see them hiring in Canada at all. But this surfaces another conundrum - what to do about the ML opportunities that knock at my door, but are outside of this specific domain. That’s a consideration because for O1-A and EB1-A, one needs to demonstrate leading expertise in one specific area. Although I haven’t published anything in the Search and Recommendations ML domain, but I may have just found my groove there. So I’m somewhat biased to continue in this area. It’s worthwhile to get some advice on how to navigate this. In any case, actively pushing for publication opportunities in my current role is the most rational approach in the present.

So that would be the O1-A, EB1-A road. I recall some encouraging words that Soundarya Balasubramani, who runs the Unshackled community, said to me about pursuing this route, “Getting the O1 VISA is not a matter of if, but when”. This can be the fastest route to a green card for Asian immigrants like me if everything works out favorably - maybe two years to build a strong profile for the O1, and another two to get it up to the EB1-A mark and have the green card processed. The journey to accumulating that credibility can be quite fulfilling if one is genuinely immersed in their niche.

c) Build a startup and obtain funding:

This is a second way to obtain the O1-A VISA - having founded a funded, or at least a validated startup. Like I mentioned previously, working on my own thing is indeed what I desire to do in the long term. As a contingency plan for the green card though, with not even a business idea in my head today, and with little to no confidence in my abilities to lead a founding team anytime soon, this path is not really a realistic option to rely on. Purely from an immigration perspective, whenever I set out on this path, the true outcomes will be not be realized until at least 3-5 years down the road, if ever at all. Qualifying for the O1 VISA as a founder with enough evidence is no less unpredictable. Instead, I believe the credibility and experience I’ll gain from pursuing a) or b) will prove to be a more robust foundation for building something from scratch. But what’s more important is that in the meantime I keep expanding my network and stay on the lookout for any opportunities to join a promising founding team. I can’t imagine a better training ground to become a co-founder.

Back to today

Let me paint an overly approving picture of pursuing green card as a goal, which can otherwise make life very susceptible to getting plagued with constant immigration anxiety if not consciously guarded against it. If that goal is attached snugly to the pursuit of long term aspirations, it will reinforce conscientiousness, add an external accountability force on my nascent dreams of become a leading expert in my field, and/or make a dent in the world by venturing into startups. From that angle it’s simple: march on your path to greatness, leaving a verbose, comprehensive paper trail for the USCIS’s review.

Now, if tyranny of place was not a thing and I could freely optimize for personal fulfillment, here’s an overly simplified linear roadmap I would hand to myself:

hone my niche through rapid hands-on experimentation
 ||
 \/
in the process, build a public record of "leading expertise" to build leverage for networking - publish impactful, industry-leading work frequently, present it to other practitioners through talks in conferences
 ||
 \/
become a tech lead manager, or maybe a product manager if natural inclination guides there
 ||   / OR
 \/  /
join a company as a founding engineer or co-found/found one myself 
 ||
 \/
become an investor to bring others' visionary ideas to life

It’s true of course that US has an order of magnitude higher volume of opportunities to accelerate progress on that roadmap, in addition to faster accumulation of wealth. But it is what it is. Canada is my base now. At this point, I’ve articulated quite a bit about how I see the immigration journey ahead. Since it’s challenging to plan precisely several years ahead, I’ll focus on goals for the time until I get PR - the time I’m guaranteed to be spending in Canada. And the short-term metric to optimize for, in my opinion, is what gets you energized, and what has you wholly immersed in the process. Then among all options available at any decision point that can get me to the end goal, I should go with what:
a) is exciting to me,
b) is rewarding in its own right, adds to personal fulfillment and impact - expertise in my field, leadership experience towards a founding role, networking with other passionate people
c) is immediately actionable (i.e. for which I can think of some next steps), and
d) also boosts EB1 prospects

This criteria applies to the following general guidance that is based off of the roadmap above, in order of expected ROI:

  • On the job
    1. aggressively seek out and grab projects where the work would lend itself well to sharing with the industry, and/or is novel and significant enough for a publication
    2. [throughout] build and demonstrate leadership skills towards a managerial path - helpful for both EB1C and a founding role
  • Off the job
    1. seek out and pursue interviewing opportunities, preferably within my immediate domain but not limited to it. The goal is to move to highly coveted places offering either higher pay or research roles. These locations, being magnets for great talent, are also fortuitous for entrepreneurship opportunities.
    2. build a network to grow alongside and consistently put out work as an individual ML specialist
    3. be on the lookout for highly rewarding founding team opportunities and keep building my network and reach in the entrepreneurship community

All of that sounds great. But without diligent goal-setting, it could very well just stay a blob of words on a screen. Additionally, this general guidance will need to be revised as I hit one milestone after another (🤞). I also have to be stoic with random yet lucrative opportunities that show up frequently, but are not well aligned with the long-term roadmap. It’ll enforce focus and save a lot of my time and energy. But at the same time, I must use discretion to not stay bound to linear progression, and not miss out on early but disguised opportunities that lead to an asymmetric life.