Amazon techie says American dream is not staying in America, but living life freely without obsessing over visa.
The story of Wen-Hsing Huang, a 25-year-old engineer working at Amazon, can bring closure to many struggling with the present H-1B chaos. As told to Business Insider, Huang’s experience of working in the US, living a life depending on a visa, is of self-realization that the so-called American Dream is not staying in the US but to build something in the freedom of one’s home country and yet reach an international customer base. For Huang, it’s Taiwan, from where he studied to get a spot at the University of Illinois.”I arrived on an F-1 student visa in 2022, when there were mass tech layoffs at Meta, Twitter, and many other companies. Finding a summer internship was really difficult. Usually, that’s the path to a full-time job, but I had no offers,” Huang said. He was lucky to have landed a job with Amazon in 2024, as he was obsessed with staying in the US and then getting a green card eventually. “The turning point came in April 2025, when there was a lot of news about F-1 students being deported. I didn’t get selected in the H-1B lottery for the second time and felt very uncertain and insecure,” he said. “For three years, every major decision had to be filtered through ‘Will this affect my visa status?’ rather than ‘Is this what I actually want to do?’ I couldn’t test business ideas, take entrepreneurial risks, or even travel freely without worrying about reentry,” he said. “Now, my plan is different. I’ll keep working at Amazon a while longer, save money, and return to Taiwan to start my own business. With the internet, borders matter less. I can register a company in the US, serve a global customer base, and earn US-level income while enjoying Taiwan’s lower cost of living and better healthcare,” he said adding that he’s grateful to America for his degree, bif tech experience, broadening his perspective and lessons in resilience. “But leaving means I can finally make decisions based on what I want to build rather than what my visa allows. I don’t give advice to others; everyone has their own priorities. But for me, leaving the US isn’t a failure. It’s freedom,” he said.
