\n\n“Vong spoke with his interim manager and new team director in December about his upcoming trip. They indicated that it wouldn’t be a problem for him to work from Australia remotely, so he left the U.S. in January, first visiting Singapore and then Malaysia. There, Vong got the news that he’d been laid off after all. His interim manager had been moved to another team and his director had been fired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The layoff would’ve been bad enough on its own, but because of the rules of Vong’s visa, it landed him in a bureaucratic mess that now prevents him from returning to the United States. “February was hard,” Vong tells Reason<\/em>. “Coming to terms emotionally with staying in Australia a lot longer\u2026how to move things out of my apartment in L.A., sell my car, and I’ve been trying to facilitate all of that remotely.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vong was in the U.S. on an E-3 visa<\/a>, which is reserved for highly skilled workers from Australia. Similar to the H-1B visa, another temporary visa for specialty workers, E-3 holders only have 60 days to find a new job if they’re laid off. Otherwise, they have to leave the country. With mass layoffs taking place recently across the tech industry\u2014which relies heavily on the H-1B program\u2014thousands<\/a> of foreign workers have been forced to scramble<\/a> to find new work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Vong’s case had an added layer of complexity since he was out of the country when he was laid off. “I was thinking, well, I have 60 days’ grace, I’m still technically employed, maybe I can just like fly back to the U.S. right now, cancel the plans to hang with my family in January,” he says. He consulted his immigration lawyer\u2014who is also his friend\u2014and learned that it might not be that simple. “There were all of these potential risks that plausibly could happen because of the uncertain, undefined circumstances around my unemployment, or technical unemployment,” explains Vong. “None of that language matches the visa language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Immigration officials could interpret his employment status in very different ways. On one hand, he was still technically employed, having been given “two months of a nonworking period” where he was still getting paid. On the other, he’d lost access to his company email. They could welcome him back without issue. “Or it could go the other way where it’s like, ‘It doesn’t look like you’re actively employed right now, and this visa requires you to be actively employed, so we’re going to have to deny you entry,'” Vong says. An immigration officer might also feel that Vong was intentionally misrepresenting himself, which could lead to more severe penalties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, his lawyer warned him not to risk it. “I didn’t have a reliable way to get back in,” he says. Immigration lawyers interviewed by Fast Company<\/em>, which covered Vong’s story, indicated<\/a> that he was “right to stay overseas for now.””<\/p>\n\n\n\n