A visa nightmare sparked this founder’s immigration-focused startup

Aizada Marat paid immigration lawyers thousands of dollars to help her navigate the US visa system.

Instead, a basic mistake left the Harvard Law graduate unable to work, travel, and stuck in legal limbo while living in the US and supporting her family back home in Kyrgyzstan. She called it an “immigration nightmare” that lasted more than a year.

Then she built Alma to fix it.

Founder Brew spoke to Marat in April about her experiences navigating the US immigration system and her reasons for forming a company to help others in similar situations.

This is an excerpt of our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve described your experience as an “immigration nightmare.” What was the moment you realized something was seriously wrong?

When I talked to an immigration [attorney]—because I’m an attorney—I listened and did my own research, and what I found was different from what they told me. So I went back to them and said, “Hey, according to my research, you’re wrong. This is how it’s supposed to be done.” And they said, “You’re not an immigration attorney. We’re immigration attorneys, and this is how it’s done.”

The major problem was that I was just stuck inside the US. I couldn’t work legally. I couldn’t travel because it would mean I am abandoning my green card process…I’m still the one who supports my family back home, and I was like, “What do I do?” I really struggled.

How does your personal experience with the immigration system show up in the way Alma is designed and operates today?

We focus on three pillars: speed, excellence, and care, and all of those things really matter for immigrants. If you think of speed, immigration is always deadline driven. Just like with me, it really mattered for me to get work authorization fast.

You really need high-quality legal advice that gives you the right guidance, not the wrong advice—that’s the excellence piece. The third part is care…If you care for immigrants, you make sure they get the best experience.

We’re automating certain things in an attorney’s workload. We’re able to get petitions filed faster…A lot of my attorneys are first or second-generation immigrants because they’ve seen their parents go through the problems, or they’ve gone through them themselves, so they can really resonate with immigration issues. That’s how it all translates into the product.

Zooming out a bit, how are you seeing recent immigration policy changes affect your clients today?

This year, the H-1B lottery had [fewer] lottery entries as a result of this $100k implementation…Around 20%–30% of all H-1B lottery entries were actually people who are coming directly from outside [the US], and those were affected. Last year, we hired an amazing engineer from abroad, and we were able to bring him in because there was no $100k. This year, we were not able to get in one person from outside because, as a startup, we simply wouldn’t be able to pay a $100k fee. We had to limit H-1B lottery applications to people already inside the US—maybe on F-1 STEM OPT, or maybe some other visas, and they can change status from one visa to another.

At what point do visa costs and uncertainty around timelines become too risky for companies to hire international talent?

For a $100,000 fee, this is when they really assess whether they should do it or not, and it’s usually for bigger companies, case by case, depending on how critical this function is.

For certain types of visas, there is premium processing, so businesses can pay and still get the business outcomes fast, within 15 business days, which is a guaranteed government timeline. But if someone is on a grace period, and then their visa is running out very soon, then [companies] don’t like to risk it, because then the government might just raise additional questions…Immigration right now under this administration is very complex. A lot of companies need to have strong immigration vendors to understand the risks, and it’s always case by case.

At what point in the immigration process do companies or candidates tend to run into the biggest problems?

With the current administration, I’m seeing that there are unprecedented rates of Requests for Evidence—when USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] issues requests for additional information for a filed petition.

Almost half of the petitions that are being submitted now are being issued [RFEs], and [RFE] is just additional legal work, additional fees, additional complexity, additional unpredictable timelines. That’s what we’re seeing first.

We’re also seeing that across “extraordinary ability” visas—like O-1s, EB-1s, and EB-2s—the market rates have gone significantly down. For example, for the O-1 visa, the latest data, last July to December, was an 85% approval rate. For the EB-1, it was [an ~40%] approval rate, which is very, very low…It’s not good news for anyone who is in this business, and it’s not good news for immigrants. It’s heightened scrutiny.