How a BA graduate became an engineer on an H1B visa in the United States

The visa rejection made him hungry. Before the door banged shut on him, he hadn’t looked at the world outside. But now his mind, body and soul ached for ‘Dream America’. His wait ended soon because that world knocked again. The Y2K bug had heightened the demand for IT professionals in the US. Body shops, promising visas to desperate techies, conducted interviews in Hyderabad’s hotels.

Sreenivas wore a white shirt, blue trousers, a patterned tie, and headed for interviews, holding resumes, certificates and a passport. He sat in a lobby or a conference hall and waited for his turn. The recruiters flipped the pages of his passport, noticed the AFU (Anti-Fraud Unit) entry and rejected him for being rejected—or for being a BA graduate.

But he had a cheat code: caste (and its privilege of professional networks). Sreenivas accompanied his father—an ex-Andhra Pradesh government employee—to submit his resume to the Human Resource Development Institute (HRDI), a training centre for civil servants, for an IT contractor role. The employment screening took almost a year. He joined in late 1999.

Sreenivas finished his training in Lotus Notes R5. A friend’s friend told him about its huge demand in Singapore. He contacted a travel agent, applied for leave and landed in the country. The set-up looked like Hyderabad: countless consultancies spread across different floors of a building. He carried a pile of resumes (‘like a newspaper boy’) and met company owners, all of them Indians, most of them Tamil and Telugu. He got only one client interview—that, too, resulted in rejection.

A few years later, a new manager at the Institute transferred Sreenivas from the IT department to make him his executive secretary. The very stereotype of a corrupt IAS officer, he came to the office in the afternoon and carried confidential files home. He cancelled existing agreements and hired professionals through a different contractor. It cost Sreenivas his job. His ex-colleague, Gopal, had already filed a lawsuit. Sreenivas joined him. The battle was so uphill that even their attorney dissuaded them.

‘I want to see how judiciary works in India,’ Sreenivas told him. ‘I want justice.’...

Wanting to sharpen his IT skills, he reached Ameerpet. It was a blizzard of billboards: a centre promising SAP coaching here, one offering Java classes there. You name a software skill, especially one coveted in the US, and the training hub tossed classes for it.

Students poured in from different parts of the country, including villages, carrying modest expectations: an entry-level job. Since many (private and government) engineering colleges lacked qualified faculties, it also functioned as an educational jugaad.

Most institutes followed a formulaic script: a receptionist dangling a ‘free demo class’ and a ‘24x7 lab’. The first session was great, ‘like a movie trailer’, the rest not so much. The coaching centres looked like two-bedrooms apartments: the living room became a reception and the bedrooms classrooms. Their instructors—often IT workers themselves—underscored rote learning, treating the students like twelve-year-olds. Sreenivas enrolled in a SAP course; the patronising attitude annoyed him. The smell of America, though, wafted through the region. What did the USA stand for, ran the joke among students, ‘United States of Ameerpet’.

Besides training institutes, it contained offices of desi consultancies promising H-1B visas for a few lakh rupees. But not just in Ameerpet. A caste Hindu in Hyderabad knew someone in America. Or knew someone who knew someone. Or knew someone who knew someone who knew someone. Sreenivas had met all three types, countless times, over the last decade. Those men had all the answers, especially to his most desperate question: ‘How can I go to America?’ Simple: pay a few thousand dollars. The amounts changed with the years, from $4,000 to $5,000 to $6,000. It baffled him: why should he pay for a job?

So he continued to rot in India. Years passed, nothing changed. In 2007, working as a system administrator for an IT company, he went to Bangalore to write the GMAT and TOEFL. Scored low, made it to an obscure school and travelled to Chennai for the visa interview. The visa officer asked him how he’d fund his education. He said his father, a farmer, would cover his tuition.

Rejected.

Not qualified under section 214(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The officer considered him a potential immigrant.

He wrote the GMAT again. An awful score once more. Carrying a new I-20 (a Department of Homeland Security document signed by an approved American school), and keeping everything else unchanged, he re-entered the Chennai consulate.

‘What’s the difference between the last time and this time?’ the visa officer asked.

‘The I-20 is different.’

Rejected. 214(b), once more.

His phone rang one morning. A man named Vishnu Nidamarthi from an IT firm in New Jersey, 4M TechGroup, had received Sreenivas’s resume. Did he have time for an interview? It lasted for around forty-five minutes. At the end of the call, Vishnu told him to attend another interview at the head office in Mumbai. The company was the IT division of a famous Indian bank; Sreenivas agreed. A few days after the second interview, he got an email. He had got the job. Edison, New Jersey, $55,000. He converted it in a blink: Rs2 lakh per month, eight times his current salary.

When he reappeared at the American consulate for the interview, the first question stumped him: why are you coming again and again? He had done this so many times that he refused to spin an answer.

He said, ‘I need visa.’

The officer asked him about his failed attempts.

‘I needed visa.’

‘Who is the client?’

No client, he said, his company had an in-house network engineering job.

‘Your visa is approved.’

Sreenivas collected the documents, rushed to the water cooler and swigged two glasses of water to calm himself down.

Finally, after twelve long years, America.

After a Recession-induced delay, 4M sent him the air ticket. Sreenivas travelled to Mumbai for his New Jersey flight. His goal was simple: earn in dollars, save in rupees and return to India after two years. He cleared the immigration check, boarded the plane and buckled his seat. As it glided on the tarmac, his heartbeat hopped and raced. Several feelings swirled inside: sorrow, of leaving his motherland, wife and child; excitement, of first-time international travel, a 10,000-mile journey and America; relief, of a new job, a new life, a new future.

His long turmoil—the sweat, the rejection, the corruption—was history. This BA graduate had fought, and won, against a predestined story. He had become an engineer—and not a regular engineer, but one working on an H-1B visa, the ‘best and the brightest’. Sreenivas had, finally, been chosen.

Two years: the promise he had made to his father, the promise he had made to himself. Just two years: then a flat in Jubilee Hills, enough cash to invest and the freedom to script his own life. For someone who had dreamt with his eyes open for the last twelve years, two more years were a blink.

Excerpted with permission from Westland.