Peculiar Muse

The most critical difference between H1B and J1 visas remains the issue of jobs and applying for green card. On a J1 visa, at the end of your residency / fellowship training, you must either, return to the country of last legal permanent residence for 2 years, or do a “waiver” job typically in a medically underserved area. You must do one of these things before you can apply for a green card, and that too via an H1B visa! (This aspect of J1 will be explored in a seperate post – coming soon).

On the H1B visa however, you are free to apply for green card at the end of your residency. You are also free to seek jobs at “regular” places.

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It is debatable whether getting a fellowship on H1B visa is any more difficult than on J1. While it is widely acknowledged that people on J1 visa experience little or no difficulty moving on to fellowship training after residency, some folks on H1 can find the going a bit tougher.

Most big, university programs have no issues when it comes to sponsoring visas. Programs at large universities are looking for excellent candidates and they don’t care about visa issues in general – they have the resources, both human and financial. If they find a great candidate on J1, they’d take him. Ditto for H1B.

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The H1B visa is issued to “temporary workers” and falls under the nonimmigrant visa category. A lot of information technology folks come to the US on H1B visa and so do a lot of foreign / international medical graduates. Let’s look at how an H1B visa applies to an IMG seeking residency in the United States.

According the Department of State:

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