I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Hi Peter,

We have an employee that just won the H1B lotto. We don't actually pay employees any cash (all future payments). Will this be an issue?

Thanks!

Getting a visa and staying on it can be emotionally difficult situation, do you know if there are therapists who specialize in helping with this area?

This is incredibly helpful and generous of you. This is completely not specific to tech, but I have a friend who emigrated from Congo very young. As a young adult, he committed a felony. He served his time and was released last year. ICE did not pick him up from the prison, so he went home with his parents. He has a ruling date from an immigration judge this summer. He recently turned himself in to ICE after discovering they wanted to hold him until his hearing was resolved. He has an attorney, but his parents are very private.

What are his chances of not being deported? Does the current situation in Congo affect this? Is there anything I can do to help his case?

Thank you so much.

Preamble: As I understand it, it is permissible for a European who works for a US company to visit the US as a "business visitor" on an ESTA in order to visit the company, as long as the visit is not for "work". Various sources list activities that are deemed to be "business" and not "work", such as attending business meetings or attending a trade show, and entering on an ESTA for these purposes is thus acceptable.

Question: What I'm not clear on is whether the business-but-not-work restriction... 1. merely means that the purpose of your visit has to be business-but-not-work, or 2. requires that the visitor refrain from all "work" activities while in the US, even if they weren't the reason for visiting and would have happened anyway.

Concretely: suppose I am a programmer who works remotely from Europe for a US company. I visit the US to meet my colleagues face to face and attend a trade show with them (business, not work), but these activities don't take up 100% of my time. Rather than sit around idly during the downtime between "business" activities, I do some of my ordinary programming work, of the sort I would do back in Europe. Have I broken the law?

How transferable the open source experience from major projects (like being a core developer of the python language itself) in terms of O1 to provide the criteria of "reviewing other's work"?