When Allison Yang moved to the US from China two years ago, she noticed that immigrants often talked about their visa status like they were playing cards. The former Chinese journalist and founder of the game studio Reality Reload was at an event in New York when she heard fellow Chinese immigrants talking in confusing terminologies, like playing a Queen, Knight, or Ace. Everyone introduced themselves by words like H-1B, OPT, L-1, O-1, NIW—names of legal immigration categories in the US. With their cards on the table, they could start talking in greater depth about each person’s immigration journey.
This kind of jargon, in my experience, gets passed around a
→ Continue reading at WIRED
