Watching the H1B lottery from the sidelines is exhausting

The constant anxiety of visa status

I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Gangnam, trying to finish a project while refreshing my email every ten minutes. It wasn’t even about a job offer. It was about the looming deadline for H1B visa petitions. I have a friend who was in the middle of this process, and watching them go through the motions of waiting for a lottery draw felt like watching someone gamble with their entire future. They were making a decent salary, probably around 90,000 dollars, but even that didn’t feel like a safety net anymore. The talk of moving away from a random lottery toward a wage-based selection process made everything feel so unstable. It’s hard to focus on your actual job when the ground under your feet keeps shifting because of federal court rulings or sudden policy shifts from the administration.

The reality of cost and burden

There was this news floating around about a 100,000 dollar fee for certain visa filings, and honestly, reading that felt like a punch in the gut. Even if the courts eventually stepped in to call it unlawful, the psychological damage was already done. Who has that kind of money? It’s basically a tax on being a foreign worker. I heard from a friend who works at a university in Georgia that they had to scramble just to cover the standard fees for a faculty member. When you factor in the lawyer fees—which can easily run anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 dollars depending on how complicated the petition is—the cost of staying employed just keeps climbing. It makes you wonder if it’s even worth the effort to stay in the U.S. when every year is a new headache.

Moving from OPT to H1B feels like a bottleneck

Many of my acquaintances who graduated from schools in the States tried the typical path: finishing a degree, securing an OPT, and then praying for an H1B. I knew a veterinarian who went through the PAVE program, and they were constantly stressed about the timeline. The 1-year OPT window is just too short. Everyone knows that getting a permanent residency sorted out within that one year is basically impossible, so you end up in this weird limbo. You’re working full-time, paying taxes, and contributing to the economy, but you’re essentially one administrative error away from having to pack your bags. I saw a case where the embassy sat on a petition for over a year, and the person just had to keep existing in a state of suspended animation, unable to travel or make any long-term plans.

Why the process feels so impersonal

The most annoying thing isn’t even the rejection—it’s the silence. The U.S. embassy in Seoul handles such a massive volume of cases that things just seem to fall through the cracks. You become a case number, not a person. I remember hearing someone complain that they had to keep sending follow-up emails for months just to make sure their file didn’t disappear into a void. It’s not like you can call someone and talk to a human who understands your specific situation. You just wait. And while you wait, you look at other options like E2 or J1 visas, but those come with their own sets of limitations that make your career goals feel stunted. It’s a very strange way to live, always having your life governed by a stamp in your passport.

Still uncertain about the future

Honestly, even after seeing people successfully make it through, I still don’t feel like there is a ‘right’ way to do this. You try to follow the rules, you try to build a life, but the rules are always changing. Whether you aim for the O1 visa because you have some ‘extraordinary ability’ or just hope for the luck of the H1B draw, you are always at the mercy of factors you cannot control. I don’t know if I would recommend this path to someone just starting out today. Maybe I would just tell them to look elsewhere, or at least keep their options open. But then again, people still apply, and they still wait. Maybe it’s just the hope that the next cycle will be the one where things finally stabilize, even though deep down we all know the instability is part of the system now.