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A skilled would-be immigrant says Trump doomed his American dream - Business Insider


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Leo Wang, 32, arrives at the airport for his flight home to China on February 18, 2019, after his H-1B visa petition was denied.

 

Even as a little boy growing up in China's Jiangxi province, Leo Wang knew he wanted the American dream. 

He loved the idea that working hard and following the rules could guarantee success, and he remembers watching from afar as a booming tech sector drew some of the world's top talent to Silicon Valley. 

Wang even owned a hard drive from Seagate — a company he and his parents admired, and one that would eventually pour months of effort into hiring him. 

But he admits now that he was naive about some aspects of America before he arrived as a graduate student in 2015. 

Wang, now 32, knew of President Donald Trump, whom he used to watch on "The Apprentice." But he never imagined that the tough-talking presidential candidate who railed endlessly against illegal immigration would one day become an insurmountable hurdle to his own efforts to immigrate to the US. 

"I didn't think his policies were going to affect H-1B visas — people who work hard and are educated and who follow all the rules," Wang told INSIDER. "I didn't think that was going to affect us. That part that I didn't know that much about. In some ways it maybe disappointed me about America." 

Wang was one of 85,000 skilled foreign workers selected annually by lottery as part of the highly competitive H-1B visa program, which grants three-year visas to workers who have already secured jobs and sponsorship from employers in the US. 

He is also part of a growing number of H-1B petitioners whose application was ultimately rejected amid the increasingly cumbersome series of bureaucratic hurdles the Trump administration has implemented — which experts and industry leaders decry as a crackdown on talented workers that companies are keen to recruit. 

Wang's American dream began when he attended to the University of Southern California in 2015, first for an MBA before switching to a master's degree. From university, Seagate quickly snapped him up, hiring him on a temporary post-graduate visa to work as a senior program/project manager.

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