Every job has a power imbalance. Your employer pays you, and they can decide to stop. That's normal, and most people accept it as the deal.
A work visa adds a second imbalance on top of the first one, and it's much bigger. Your employer isn't only deciding whether you keep your job. In a very real sense, they're deciding whether you get to keep living in the country you've built your life in. And unlike the first imbalance, almost nobody on the employer's side ever thinks about it, because they've never had to.
I'm not a lawyer or a policy expert. I'm someone who spent years on the visa side of that table, and I've written about what it did to me personally. This post is the other half: the structure underneath it, and what I think would make it fairer.
How the dependence actually works
On an H1B, the most common US work visa for people in tech, your legal right to work is tied to the employer that sponsored you. If you want to change jobs, a new employer has to file a new petition for you. You can't just quit and start somewhere else the way a citizen can.
If you lose your job, you get a grace period of up to sixty days to find a new sponsor, switch to another status, or leave the country. Sixty days, in any job market, to find not just a job but an employer willing to take on visa paperwork. In a bad market, that's a coin flip with your whole life on it.
Then there's the green card. An H1B can only be held for six years. To stay longer, the employer generally has to start the green card process well before that limit, and whether and when they start it is entirely their decision. Nobody is legally required to sponsor you, no matter what was said in an interview. For people born in countries with long green card backlogs, India included, the wait after that can stretch for many years, and for much of it, changing jobs is risky and complicated.
Put together, it means a single organization has a hand on your job, your income, your right to stay, and your future here, all at once.
What that does to ordinary decisions
That concentration of power changes how every normal workplace moment feels.
Negotiating your salary is riskier when the person across the table also controls your visa. So is pushing back on unreasonable work, saying no to extra hours, raising a concern about a manager, or reporting something that's wrong. None of these require anyone to make a threat. The threat is built into the structure. Everyone on the visa side of the table knows it, even when nobody on the other side does.
Over time, that pressure turns a lot of people into what I can only describe as "yes sir" employees. Not because they lack opinions or backbone, but because they've learned that staying on a visa means keeping one relationship intact at almost any cost. You agree in the meeting. You take on the extra project. You don't push back on the deadline, or the reorg, or the manager who makes it harder than it needs to be. Every disagreement gets weighed against a question nobody else in the room is asking: is this worth my status?
Not everyone ends up there, and it hasn't always been this way for so many people. But it is now. When the rules get less predictable, the safest strategy for anyone on a visa is to be as agreeable as possible, and employers lose the honest pushback of exactly the people they worked hardest to hire.
It also means the cost of an ordinary mistake falls entirely on one person. A missed filing deadline is an inconvenience for an HR team. For the person it belongs to, it can mean leaving the country. I wrote about the colleagues I watched lose their place in the country because their employer chose, late in the clock, not to file their green cards. Nothing about that was illegal. It was just a decision made by people who would never have to live with it.
That's what I mean by a power dynamic. Not that employers are villains. Most of the people involved are decent, and many are trying their best inside a system that doesn't ask much of them. But the system lets one side make life-changing decisions casually, and leaves the other side absorbing all the consequences.
What I'd like to see employers do
Most of this doesn't need a new law. It needs organizations that sponsor visas to treat that responsibility as seriously as the person relying on them has to.
Write the green card policy down, and share it before someone accepts the offer. Whether you sponsor, under what conditions, and on what timeline. If the answer is no, say so up front, so people can choose with their eyes open instead of finding out with ten months left.
Commit to a timeline that leaves room for error. If the process is going to happen, start it years before the six-year limit, not months. The deadline is fixed and the paperwork is slow, and the only way to make that safe is to leave a buffer.
Tell people early when the answer changes. A "no" with years of notice is a setback. A "no" with ten months of notice can uproot a life.
And when layoffs happen, remember that the same notice means something very different to a visa holder. Earlier notice, and real help connecting people with employers who can transfer their visa, can be the difference between a hard month and having to leave the country.
What I'd like to see change more broadly
Some of it does need policy. Sixty days is not enough time to find a new sponsored job, especially in a downturn, and a longer grace period would take an enormous amount of fear out of every layoff. Making it easier to move between employers, especially while a green card is pending, would mean people could leave a bad situation without putting their status at risk. Both of those would shift a little of the power back toward the people who currently have almost none.
Why I'm writing this now
I'm on the other side of this now. I have my green card, and when I was laid off recently, it didn't come with a countdown. That's exactly why I want to write this. The people still on visas can't easily say any of it out loud, because saying it out loud is one of the risky things.
If you sponsor visas, or you manage someone who's on one, I'm not asking for charity. I'm asking you to notice the weight that's on the other side of the table, and to use the power you have the way you'd want someone to use it if your whole life here depended on it.