Specialty H-1B Visa

The Specialty H-1B Visa allows United States employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in a job that requires specialized knowledge or experience — known as specialty occupations — to work in the US. Examples of specialty fields are biotechnology, chemistry, computing, architecture, engineering, statistics, physical sciences, and journalism. In health, it can include medicine, dentistry, nursing, physiotherapy, economics, education, research, law, accounting, business specialties, technical writing, theology, and the arts, among others.

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The hacker girl who wanted to do no evil and got her Specialty H-1B Visa to USA

Holly Liu was the Queen of Hackers, everyone in Hong Kong knew that. There was hardly any encryption standard she couldn’t find her way around. She had once amazed fellow nerds at a party by hacking into a certain country’s department of defence computers.

Fortunately for the world, Holly was not a cyber-criminal. She had no interest in scamming ordinary people or drip-stealing money out of banks. She strongly felt that the awesome power of the internet ought to be used to increase the security and personal freedoms of people everywhere, and help make life easier.

With rumors from the mainland that Hong Kong’s independent days were numbered, she was looking for an exit.

An interview with her in WIRED magazine about how hackers could help bring down cyber crime and increase privacy caught the attention of many prominent computer professionals in the US, notably Google, Apple, Amazon, IBM and the Department of Defense. Soon she was getting job offers.

She quickly settled on Google, not only because she admired them as a company but also thought she could fix them from within. She felt strongly that they had strayed far from their early inspiring slogan: “Do no evil.”

The recruitment team at Google was sure that she would qualify for a Specialty H-1B Visa. And they were bang on.

The legendary Specialty H-1B Visa allows US employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in a job that requires specialized knowledge or experience — known as ‘specialty occupations. Specialty fields include biotechnology, chemistry, computing, architecture, engineering, statistics and the physical sciences, among others. With her hacking superpowers, Holly easily qualified as a specialist.

All that remained was for her to actually get the Specialty H-1B Visa.

Only 65,000 Specialty H-1B Visa are issued every fiscal year, in addition to 20,000 more issued to specialists with master’s degrees, like Holly. She knew her visa would come — or not — out of the famous annual H1-B visa lottery.

Applications with master’s degrees get thrown into the lottery pool first and 20,000, the total quota, are randomly selected. The excess applications over the quota get re-included into the pool of regular applications for the next lottery round, out of which 65,000 are randomly selected. Since Holly held a master’s degree, her application would get considered twice during the lottery.

Holly won her lottery Specialty H-1B Visa in the very first round. Incidentally, she also made it out of Hong Kong in the nick of time. Within weeks of her departure, the Chinese Government crackdown on Hong Kong began.

You can get more information on the Specialty H-1B Visa from the detailed, user-friendly visa guides you get when you buy one of our Visa Plans.

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