Hardeepubhi101

Hello guys and girls,

First time post here. My wife and I visited California around a month ago and we both fell in love.

I currently work in retail management and my wife for a transport company.
We have savings of around £40K. After our trip we were considering taking a career break and living 6 months in California, finding jobs and see if the life suites us.
Looking around online I have mainly found that I may need a hb2 visa but have to have a job secured before hand.

Would there be any other way around this or would this be the only way?

We understand that we are not going to land the jobs of our life while there but it would give us an idea of the 'Californian' life.

Any advice from anyone who has done this before would be great.

Thanks in advance for any responses

H

Pulaski

Take a look at the two Pulaski wikis in the US section of the wikis tab above.

Generally speaking I see nothing in your post that would qualify either you or your wife for a work related visa. Work related, for most people means "transferred by my employer", H-1 visas are mostly for computer specialists and other science, technically, and engineering occupations. H-2b visas are primarily for seasonal agricultural workers and hotel "domestic staff", and are both notoriously low-paid occupations, not to say over-worked too.

You can't "live" in the US without a visa that allows you to do so, and in any case even a six month visitor visa is notoriously hard to obtain if you are VWP-eligible (unless you are retired), exactly because the US doesn't want people "living" in the US on a visitor visa.

Hypothetically, if you came to to the US and started looking for work, what you would get is offers from employers that who say "here's the offer, let us know when you have got yourself a visa", when there is no way for you to obtain a visa, or even for the employer to obtain a visa for you (because there is no relevant visa category for which you are eligible). We typically see one of two such questions here on BE each year, along the lines of "I have a job offer, how do I get a visa?" ..... Er, you can't!

Owen778

To be fair, the OP is asking about H2-B visas, not H1-B. The H2-B is a seasonal work visa, so it would work for the OP's idea of "trying out California" even if it wouldn't work for most.

There are several problems, though:
1. Finding an employer willing to apply for an H2-B for them, especially considering wages are likely to be much lower than they're used to.
2. Working in an H2-B visa job will probably be a shock when what they seem to want is an extended holiday. Especially since living in the nice bits of California is expensive.
3. An H2-B is very unlikely to lead to a long-term job that would allow them to remain in the US for longer than the seasonal work period. Even if they wanted to stay, they wouldn't be able to.

To the OP: I recommend you take a shorter break and use the visa waiver program to take about 85 days of holiday (it must be under 90 days, but it's recommended you take slightly less so that you're still under 90 days if there are flight cancellations). Bear in mind you cannot work during that time.