Getting a US Green Card sounds like a big win, but for many people, the road to it is anything but simple. There are visa lotteries, long queues, and rules that keep changing. For one Indian-origin engineer working at Microsoft, the journey turned into years of waiting, doubt, and quiet resilience. Her story is now going viral.
7 H-1B rejections: ‘I didn’t get selected. Not once’
In a post on LinkedIn, Aishani B, a senior software engineer, described how she kept trying her luck with the H-1B visa lottery year after year. From 2019 to 2025, she entered the system seven times. “I didn’t get selected. Not once,” she wrote.
“The first rejection stings. The second, you rationalise. By the third, fourth, fifth, you stop telling people. Not because you’re ashamed. But because there’s nothing new to say,” she added. What made it harder was not just the “no,” but how it slowly chipped away at her confidence.
“What nobody tells you about losing repeatedly: It’s not one moment of disappointment. It’s a slow, quiet erosion of certainty. Am I good enough to be here? Would someone else have figured this out by now? How long do I keep trying?”
Moving countries, but not giving up
Instead of putting her career on hold, she kept going. In 2022, she moved to Canada so she could continue working while her company kept applying for her H-1B. A year later, in 2023, she returned to the US on an L-1 visa.
For many professionals, the H-1B is a temporary work visa, usually valid for a few years. A Green Card, on the other hand, allows someone to live and work in the US without time limits. Her breakthrough finally came in 2025. But not through the route she had been chasing all those years.
She got her Green Card through the EB-1 category, often called the “Einstein Visa,” meant for people with extraordinary ability. In 2025, after years of waiting, she finally got her Green Card.
“I sat with that for a long time,” she shared. “Because the version of me losing lottery after lottery didn’t feel extraordinary. She felt exhausted.”
There were many moments where it would have been easy to stop trying. But something kept her going. “A quiet belief that there was a reason for this. And a stubbornness that refused to find out what quitting felt like.”
Looking back, her journey shows that things don’t always work out the way you plan, but that doesn’t mean they won’t work out at all. “7 losses didn’t mean no. They meant: not this way. If you’re counting your own rejections right now, the number isn’t the story. What you build in between is.”
Aishani’s post soon went viral, with many people sharing their own experiences. Some spoke about going through the same cycle of hope and disappointment. Others said they were still trying. One user wrote, “When you will look back after many years, these 7 will be the best No. you ever got; in hindsight, dots always connect.”
H-1B rules are getting stricter
Over the past few years, especially since 2025, the H-1B visa system in the United States has become much tougher than before. The idea behind these changes is to protect jobs for American workers and to reduce misuse of the system.
Earlier, getting selected in the H-1B system mostly came down to luck. It was a random lottery. That has now changed. From February 2026, the system is moving to a weighted selection process. This means candidates who are offered higher salaries or are seen as more skilled will have a better chance of getting picked.
In September 2025, a new Presidential Proclamation added another big change. It introduced a $100,000 extra fee for new H-1B applications if the person is outside the United States. This has made hiring from abroad much more expensive for companies. For many employers, especially those hiring fresh talent or moving employees from other countries, this cost is now a serious factor.