Planner and Architect want to move to US!

[MPrimar]

Hi all,

I am a Chartered urban planner, have BA in Urban Planning and Prof Diploma in Urban Design with 5 years experience. My Boyfriend is a qualified architect 2 BA degrees and Professional Diploma (RIBA / ARB registered) also with 5 years experience. We are both UK citizens.

It is our aim to move to New York within the next 2 years to gain experience of work overseas in within our respective professions.

Can anyone give advice on whether this is achievable and whether it would be fairly easy to get an employer to sponsor our visas?

Any information anyone could give would be most most appreciated, as we are at the beginning or our search!

Thanks and look forward to hearing from you.

[Rachel_Heath]

Not being in the urban planning business I'm unsure as to what your chances of working out here are; however the one thing to keep in mind is that you and your boyfriend will have to go through totally independent approval processes and one of you might succeed where the other fails.

There is a 65,000 annual cap of new H-1B Visas which always runs out fast (Last year it ran out after just 2 days) and so the earliest you'd even think of being able to start now would be October 1st 2009 (the start of FY 2010 for the USCIS).

Given your position I'd possibly start by looking for large employers out here who'd have pockets open enough to pay for the Visa process. The Visa process is painfully slow and onerous for all parties concerned and as a result many business do not want to go through the process...

An alternative is to locate a domestic employer that also has locations in the US. After at least a year of working domestically you'd potentially be able to pursue an L1/2 transfer which has no such caps.

[synthia]

The only urban planners I've met who work overseas work in developing countries. Unless you are a 'name' my impression is that architecture is an overcrowded and underpaid field. If you have environmental expertise, that might make a difference.

My impression is that architecture is an overcrowded and underpaid field. I met someone quite a few years ago who went into his father's firm and got laid off.

The US is in a recession, and there are plenty of people around looking for work.

I think the advice about trying to contact major employers is good. Do not expect to be hired by government agencies, as they only hire Americans or people with green cards.

Just for fun, I went on monster.com, and searched for urban planning in New York City. The search brought back only 85 jobs, most of which just happened to have those two words in the job description, I guess. Only a few sounded only remotely possible, and they were for environmental specialists or landscape architects. That's not a lot of positions on a major job board for a city of 8 million people.

Unless you are working for a company with offices in the US, or have skills for which we have a drastic shortage in the US, the chances of your getting sponsored for a work permit are practically nil. Even during the big IT push in the late 90's, the people I me who were coming over just took a job, wherever is was. If they were from the Philippines and they had to go freeze in Minneapolis, that's what they did.

Do you have any contacts or know anybody who has managed this?

The only option I can think of is to do a post-graduate degree, see if you can get a job using the one-year visa you get as a sort of internship, then see if you can use that to stay.