McCormick fourth-year Sabian Atmadja has won what many Northwestern students strive for every year: a full-time offer with management consulting firm Bain & Company. 

Atmadja, who is originally from Indonesia, hopes to work in the U.S. after graduation — but that’s not up to him. To stay in the country long-term, Atmadja will have to obtain an H-1B visa.

“If I get it, then I can work at that company indefinitely, and if I don’t get it, I’m probably going to be sent back home,” Atmadja says. “So there’s a lot of uncertainty on that front.”

Most international students seeking work in the U.S. after graduation find themselves confronting the unpredictable H-1B visa process — filled with logistical hurdles, random chance and rules that could change any year. Ongoing debate within President Donald Trump’s political circles surrounding specialized immigrant workers has only compounded the uncertainty.

For some NU international students, that means entering the job search with concerns and priorities in mind, including why they want to stay and work in the United States. 

Atmadja is focusing on higher pay and work culture as he starts his career. He worries about work-life balance and rigid hierarchical dynamics back home in Asia. 

“It’s very much like the boss tells you what to do, and you have to follow what the boss does, no matter what you do,” Atmadja says.

A game of chance

The H-1B visa allows foreign workers in “specialty occupations” — those requiring “highly specialized knowledge” and the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — to live in the U.S. for up to three years after graduation. The visa can extend to six years. Obtaining an H-1B is a complicated process. Before applying for the visa, an applicant must find an employer willing to sponsor them. 

That requirement was a factor that made consulting companies an appealing choice for Atmadja. 

“They are quite generous with sponsorships,” Atmadja says.

Not all companies will extend that courtesy. McCormick and Bienen fourth-year Evan Chen says needing sponsorship can make companies less likely to hire international students — even if their websites don’t explicitly say so. 

“If I ticked that box, there are many times where, literally 30 seconds after I submitted the application, I would get the rejection letter, which made me pretty pissed off because they could’ve just told me and not wasted my time,” Chen says.

Increased discourse around H-1Bs has reduced that problem somewhat, he adds. 

The annual visa cap presents another hurdle for international students. According to USCIS, a student who found a willing sponsor joined 758,994 eligible entries for 65,000 available slots in 2024 — a spike in applications from previous years, when applicants had a roughly 25-40% chance of winning the lottery. Data from 2025 shows eligible registration numbers dropped  back down to about 470,000. 

This means that international students are acutely aware that, even after securing a post-graduation job offer, nothing is guaranteed. 

Weinberg third-year Tanat  Chavapokin, an international student from Thailand, plans on working in finance after graduation. According to him, employers in the finance industry will typically move people who don’t win an H-1B visa to a regional office outside of the U.S. temporarily before trying again. That is what Chavapokin expects to happen if he secures a full-time offer after graduation but doesn’t win the H-1B lottery.

If that doesn’t work, Chavapokin might pursue an MBA. Otherwise, he would return to Asia to seek other options there. However, he prefers to stay in the United States. 

“The opportunities here are the highest,” Chavapokin says. “It is the finance capital of the world.”

Ongoing policy debates

How the Trump administration may change the H-1B program is not clear. During his first term, Trump criticized the system for displacing American workers and issued an executive order targeting the program. H-1B rejection rates rose from 6% in 2016 to 15% in 2019, plummeting to 2% in 2024. 

At the start of his second term, Trump has expressed support for the H-1B program, backed by leaders in the tech industry who have become some of his close political allies — but others in his base are still calling for more restrictive policies.

Debates over bringing overseas workers to the United States aren’t new. The 20th century saw a gradual shift in U.S. immigration policy away from national origin quotas and toward visa limits that prioritized relatives of U.S. citizens, refugees and specialized foreign workers. 

The H-1B emerged toward the end of this shift. In 1990, the government created the visa for 65,000 annual workers. 

The policy tried attracting high-skilled labor with protections for American workers. To maintain domestic wage levels, Congress mandated that H-1B recipients could not be paid below the prevailing wage for similarly employed workers. Meanwhile, the growing tech industry lobbied to raise the cap, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a centrist immigration think tank. 

Debate over the balancing act has continued. Supporters of Trump’s second term in the tech industry — most notably Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of the social media platform X — have advocated for the persisted use of the H-1B program. Musk lamented the shortage of engineering talent on X in late 2024. 

“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H-1B,” Musk said in another X post. 

He, along with fellow Trump ally and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, have argued the United States does not produce enough talented engineers and should expand the H-1B program.

Some conservatives disagree. Elizabeth Jacobs, director of regulatory affairs and policy at the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, says the program needs significant changes.

“With the majority of H-1B employers or employers who seek to petition for H-1B workers, there’s actually no requirement to demonstrate to the 

Department of Labor that they attempted to hire an American worker,” Jacobs says.

Some employers dependent on H-1B workers or who have previously violated H-1B rules can be required to make those demonstrations, however. 

Jacobs, who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under the last Trump administration, would like to see the current government “revive” two regulations for H-1Bs from the end of the first Trump term that former President Joe Biden’s administration  didn’t implement. 

First, she says the government needs to increase wage rates — appropriate salary levels based on region and occupation —  for H-1B recipients. That way, employers can’t use low-cost international labor to replace American workers, Jacobs says.

The second regulation would replace the current lottery with a system that prioritizes wage rates. Jacobs says this policy would be an improvement, as wage rates are a reasonable proxy for the “value” that a worker contributes to the company and the overall economy. “We view [these] regulations as being pro-worker,” Jacobs says. “And that means pro-worker in terms of beneficial to American workers and to foreign workers.” 

Jacobs also raises concerns with the misuse of the H-1B program by companies that use outsourcing business models,   

bringing workers to the U.S., training them and moving them back overseas. This could reduce job opportunities for workers, including non-citizens who are authorized to work in the country, she says. 

In late 2024, Trump appears to have sided with Musk and Ramaswamy, expressing support for H-1B to The New York Post. Nevertheless, the future of the program under his administration is far from clear, adding uncertainty to the plans of the hundreds of thousands of international students hoping to work in the United States. 

For Chavapokin, the political uncertainty is confusing.

“I heard they want to reduce the number of people they take for H-1B each year,” Chavapokin says. “But I also heard a lot of talk about the current people in the Trump administration also supporting H-1B so there’s some kind of divide in there.”

With so much uncertainty surrounding their futures, many international students look for strategies to maximize their chance of successfully passing through the H-1B pipeline. 

After graduation, students on an F-1 student visa are eligible for work directly related to their major on a 12-month Optional Practical Training (OPT) period, which can serve as a stepping stone to an H-1B visa. Students with STEM degrees can receive an extra 24-month STEM OPT extension — meaning more chances to win the lottery without having to leave the country.

This is why having a government-designated STEM degree is so important for international students. The U.S. government updates the list of eligible degree fields, most recently adding Environmental/Natural Resource Economics to the list in July 2024.

Chavapokin is currently pursuing a double major in economics and statistics. 

“I got scared [that] my econ major might be removed from STEM OPT,” he says. “That’s why I added stats as well.”

Other students like Chen have to balance chasing their passions with more feasible H-1B routes. 

As a student studying both violin and computer science, Chen has considered pursuing both interests; he has a full-time software engineering role lined up after graduation and is also auditioning for a seat in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. 

Chen says he’s unsure if he’d be allowed to be sponsored by two places at once. 

“Not only has that affected the career that I chose, anything else that I pick other than that is also kind of affected by that choice,” he says. 

The H-1B also makes it difficult to switch employers. If a worker decides to accept a job offer from a different company, their new employer must file again for a new H-1B. Although this transfer does not require reentering the H-1B lottery, it still deters workers from changing jobs, tying people to the sponsoring company for visa stability.

Depending on a student’s nationality, the H-1B may not be the only option to stay in the United States. Chen holds a Canadian passport, meaning he’s eligible for the TN visa, a different working visa open to Canadian and Mexican nationals that does not involve a lottery. 

But employers are often unfamiliar with alternatives to the H-1B. Chen says the company he plans to work for after college grouped him in the H-1B category, and he had to convince staff he was in a different situation. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s that different from the H-1B, except that you’re not on the track to get a green card, which I don’t mind because I don’t intend on staying in the U.S. forever,” Chen says. 

Beyond the H-1B

Getting an H-1B is far from the end for international students and workers. 

Applications for green cards, which allow people to live and work in the U.S. without a time limit, also face a decade-long backlog.

While the national origins quotas of the early 20th century are gone, green cards are still broadly capped, with no more than 7% of visas going to people from any one country. This presents issues for people from applicant-heavy countries like India, China, Mexico and the Philippines seeking to move from a temporary H-1B to a more permanent option.

Anam Khan, who went to college in Bangalore, India, graduated from NU in 2020 with a master’s in computer science. Encyclopedia Britannica offered her a full-time job, and she transitioned from OPT to an official work visa after winning the H-1B lottery in 2021. 

“It is not a fun position to be in,” Khan says. “If I had the forethought when I was younger to actually foresee and think that I was going to stay somewhere long term, I would probably pick something that was less stressful than this.” 

Now, Khan is in the fourth year of her H-1B visa, and her current extension will expire in 2027. If her employer doesn’t file for a green card petition to extend her status beyond six years, Khan will have to move out of the country. Even once it is filed, she knows she will probably be waiting years for a green card. With an H-1B visa, nothing is certain. 

Several students say they were unaware of just how difficult it is to stay in the U.S. after graduation as an international student. Khan says she didn’t initially plan to stay and work after graduation. But after finishing her internship at Britannica and receiving a full-time return offer, she began to see a future here.

Even though she has an H-1B visa, she is still unable to call the U.S. her permanent home.

“Security and stability is just what I want right now,” Khan says. “It’s so dicey and it’s so scary, and even switching careers with the visa, with the sponsorship, right? Because if I lose my job, then I have three months to find employment. If not, then you need to leave the country, which is so daunting and so scary, and yeah, that does make you second-guess every decision.”

Her current contingency plan is to move to another country, perhaps the U.K. or somewhere else in Europe, where the culture would be more similar to what she has become accustomed to in the U.S. as opposed to India. Khan hopes that her computer science degree and work experience will make things easier. 

For Atmadja, the uncertainty is something he has come to terms with.

“As I’ve learned from being in the U.S. for three and a half years now, you just have to take it one day at a time and just hope for the best,” Atmadja says.