Many years ago, Dr. Stephen Hauser and his research team discovered how B cells were crucial to the damage caused by MS. They developed new treatments, including one medicine that is literally saving the life of someone I love dearly. (If you need hope here, read his amazing book.) I met Dr. Hauser a few days ago at a charity dinner in San Francisco, where he spoke about the breakthrough. I got to thank him for this miracle of science, while trying not to cry.
The H-1B lottery system isn't merit-based. Each year, there's one lottery where applicants are put into a pool, and around 85,000 people are picked randomly. Twenty thousand spots are also reserved for people with a master's degree, but even though I had a master's, the odds were still low. It felt like I was playing the slots at Las Vegas. You win a few times, but you lose most of the time, and you don't have any control over it.
President Donald Trump on Friday changed the rules of the H-1B visa program, which provides skilled foreign professionals permission to work in the United States. His executive order, which raised the visa application fee for new applicants from under $10,000 to $100,000, scrambled stakeholders around the world. Tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft issued travel advisories to their visa-holding staff, warning them to stay in the US or return to the country within 24 hours.