Visas & immigration: the United States
The U.S. has no simple points-based system and, as of 2026, no digital nomad visa — nearly every path runs through an employer, a family member, a lottery, or a multi-year queue.
H-1B: the default, and its 2025–2026 turmoil
The H-1B “specialty occupation” visa remains the main door for skilled employment migration: an annual cap of 65,000 regular slots plus 20,000 reserved for holders of a U.S. master’s degree or higher (85,000 total), allocated by electronic lottery each spring for an October start. Employers register candidates for about $215 per registration, and only registrants selected in the lottery may file the full petition. In September 2025 a presidential proclamation attempted to impose a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions for beneficiaries outside the U.S. — a dramatic jump from the previous few-thousand-dollar cost. That fee has had a turbulent life: a federal court in Massachusetts vacated it in June 2026 as an unauthorized tax, the government appealed, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reinstate it in July 2026, leaving it blocked as of September 2026 — but the underlying appeal is still pending and could change this again. Confirm the live status directly with an immigration attorney or uscis.gov before budgeting for a petition.
Other major employment categories
L-1 lets multinational companies transfer managers, executives or specialized-knowledge staff (L-1A/L-1B) from an overseas office to a U.S. one, with no annual cap and no lottery — you just need at least one year of qualifying employment abroad first. O-1 covers people with “extraordinary ability” in their field (sciences, arts, business, athletics) and is also uncapped, though the evidentiary bar is high. On the permanent side, employment-based green cards run through five preference categories: EB-1 (extraordinary ability, outstanding researchers, multinational executives), EB-2 (advanced degrees / exceptional ability, often via PERM labor certification), EB-3 (skilled workers and professionals), EB-4 (special categories like religious workers), and EB-5 (investors, roughly $800,000–$1,050,000 depending on the project’s location).
Family-based immigration and the country caps
Spouses, parents and minor children of U.S. citizens are “immediate relatives” with no annual numerical cap and the fastest timelines (roughly a year). Everyone else — adult children, siblings of citizens, and most relatives of green-card holders — falls into capped family preference categories (F1–F4) that are further limited so no single country can take more than about 7% of the visas issued in a category each year. That per-country cap is what produces the U.S. system’s most notorious backlogs: Filipino and Mexican siblings of U.S. citizens (F4) can wait 20+ years, and Indian-born applicants in the employment-based EB-2/EB-3 categories commonly face waits well over a decade because so many qualified applicants are competing for the same capped share.
Skilled employee, sponsored
H-1B lottery each spring (or L-1/O-1 if you qualify) → employer-sponsored PERM/EB-2 or EB-3 green card. Realistic for most nationalities in a few years; can stretch past a decade for those born in India or China.
Family of a U.S. citizen or resident
Spouse/minor child of a citizen moves fastest (~12–18 months). Siblings, adult children and family of green-card holders face the F1–F4 preference queues, which can run 5–25 years depending on category and country.
Student route
F-1 student visa → up to 12 months of Optional Practical Training (OPT) after graduation, extendable to 3 years total for STEM degrees — a common bridge into an H-1B lottery entry.
No local sponsor
The annual Diversity Visa (DV) lottery issues about 55,000 green cards to applicants from countries with historically low U.S. immigration — free to enter, but odds are long and it excludes people born in high-immigration countries like India, China, Mexico and the Philippines.
As of 2026 the U.S. still has no digital nomad or remote-work visa — unlike dozens of other countries, there is no legal path to simply live in the U.S. while working remotely for a foreign employer without a qualifying visa category (tourist status (B-1/B-2 or ESTA/Visa Waiver) does not authorize any work, remote or otherwise, and overstaying or working on it risks future bans). If you don’t have an employer, family petitioner, investment, or extraordinary-ability case, the U.S. is genuinely one of the harder OECD countries to move to on your own terms.
Most working professionals arrive via H-1B (lottery-capped, employer-sponsored), L-1 (intracompany transfer) or O-1 (extraordinary ability); family-based and employment-based green cards both run through per-country caps that create decade-long backlogs for people born in India, China, Mexico and the Philippines; and there is still no visa built for remote workers who just want to live in the U.S. without a local employer or petitioner.
Sources & how current this is
U.S. immigration policy has moved unusually fast through 2025–2026 — the H-1B $100,000 fee alone has been imposed, vacated, appealed and stayed within a single year. Treat every fee, cap and court-status figure here as a snapshot and re-check uscis.gov and travel.state.gov before filing anything or relying on a number for a decision.