The layoffs came suddenly. One day, Jose Abalos was hired to work at Disney Infinity 4. The next day, he was not. “It was something that overturned everything, everything, all kinds of security,” he says The Verge. “Everything swelled in one day.”
In May 2016, Disney Interactive closed its in-house studio, Avalanche Software, laying off nearly 300 unemployed employees. For Abalos, there was an additional complication. He worked in the states on an H-1B1 visa, a limited program for workers in Singapore and Chile, which requires renewal every year. Abalos had only one month until his visa expired. Not only will he not receive unemployment benefits for anything later than that date, as will his colleagues, but his visa will soon be canceled, forcing him to leave the country. His life has gone from “Hey, we’re working on Infinity 4, and this is wonderful, “to” Oh, shit. I have to find a job, like now, ”he says.
Every year, developers immigrate to the United States to pursue careers in game development. For some people, such as Abalos who grew up in Chile, the US offers more opportunities than their home countries, where development communities may be small. According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2020 economic impact report, the US industry alone directly supports 143,000 jobs. It hosts major developers such as Electronic Arts, Valve and Activision Blizzard in large and small cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Raleigh.
However, regardless of location, maintaining a successful career in game development is always a challenge. Every year, the studios suffer major layoffs, uprooting the lives of their employees. For immigrant workers, the problem is more complex. I’m not just losing my job. They may be forced to give up their lives completely and leave the country. This fear drains into various aspects of their careers, limiting where developers can afford to take jobs and how much leverage they need to demand better wages or working conditions once they enter.
“It was every day, just desperately looking for jobs,” says Abalos. “Whoever wants to take me, I’ll do it.”
For visa developers here, time is of the essence. In October 2020, Jennifer Scheurle suddenly lost her job after the project she was working on was canceled. Under the O-1 visa, which is granted to people with “extraordinary skills or achievements”, she had only 60 days to transfer her visa to another company or to leave the country. He started his job hunt that day. “In the gaming industry, more precisely, hiring within two to three months is not just one thing, or even rare and difficult to achieve,” she says. The Verge.
Her health insurance will be exhausted in about two weeks. “I lost the ability to go see my therapist because I didn’t have coverage anymore, which is hard when you’re trying to figure out how to get your life in order,” she says. The project in which he had poured his heart for years had suddenly disappeared. Her life has been thrown into a pressurized chronology of just 60 days, which she says is not enough. “You don’t have zero time to process what happened to you. You have zero time to understand just what that means for your life. ”
The process can – and usually does – take months. Recruiters usually expect to attract a wide range of candidates, who then go through an intense screening and interview process. Developers can ask a candidate to meet large areas of their teams, which means hours of interviews. (Pre-COVID, this usually meant personal presence where a potential commitment could come to the company’s campus for an eight-hour day. As the industry operates from home, more of this process is now relegated. to video calls.) Production time for video games, which requires years of construction, means that companies must carefully consider who they want to bring on board.
Scheurle describes a loss of agency in his own life. “I felt it was not in my own condition,” she says. “I was forced to accept the terms and decisions dictated by this chronology and by [US visa process], instead of having a minute to think about what I want next. ”
The contributions of immigrant developers are crucial to maintaining a diverse and therefore strong workforce. Employers want to throw a wide network, says a recruiter in the gaming industry The Verge; it is in a company’s interest to explore talents, technical and artistic, that are very different from what they might find only in the US. It is impossible to follow directly how this loss of talent has an impact on projects, both those completed now and those to come. But this loss exists.
The problems apply not only to full-time developers, but also to young developers hoping to find a job outside of college. Raj * came to the United States as a student and was, in every way, on a successful path. His play was nominated for student awards and received press coverage and awards. With a strong portfolio and plans to publish his game, he hopes to start a visa process to help him stay in the country. However, his team’s dreams of publishing through Nintendo, but even later a crowdfunding effort, fell through.
It was the end of April, and his visa was due to expire in May. She got engaged recently. At the request of his lawyers, he was told not to leave the country, but rather to begin the green card process and try conditional release that would allow him to remain in the country after his visa expired. “I gave up everything to do this in two weeks,” says Raj. Instead of spending the year planning their wedding, he and his fiancé held a short ceremony in his in-laws’ yard. His parents were unable to attend, but instead joined Sky. “We had to bring everyone to the same page so fast, but we somehow succeeded and we received the request sent in time. Now I just had to wait. “
And he did, for almost seven months. The initial estimate of three months had stretched, as complications arose from the Trump administration’s policies. In the meantime, he could not take on any job. He was told “to stay inside as long as possible to stay away from ICE agencies. My lawyer had a very real concern that I might be wrong to end up in a border camp. ”
This moment was a challenge for Raj, a self-proclaimed nervous wreck who was “practically under house arrest” for fear of being deported. “We’ve been in the US for months with an expired visa and we were horrified to hear a knock on the door and it would be an ICE agent,” he says. “I had no idea how long this would continue or when we would run out of money. I knew that I was not doing well mentally at the moment, but we could not afford the therapy and we did not have access to any form of insurance and we could not apply for any ”.
The recruiter says the problem is compounded by the need for many developers coming to the US to have visas to already have experience or high-level positions. The Verge. Their paper qualifications and even their country of origin have a significant impact on the type of visa they may be able to apply for. Even with a job offer, some developers had to give up these positions because the company could not solve the visa problems. Contract work is often inaccessible to developers who cannot work in the US. “It’s an impossible process in which we lose talent on such a massive scale,” says Scheurle. Less experienced developers are not allowed to work in positions that could give them the skills they need to rise to senior talent.
It also prevents developers from looking for smaller companies that could offer them better or more creative opportunities in favor of a larger developer with a larger bank. To get a visa, any visa costs thousands of dollars and the help of a good immigration lawyer; some visas, such as H-1B, meet strict deadlines and approval limits. There is little margin for error.
“At the end of the day, the company also has to apply for a visa, and smaller companies just don’t know how to deal with it,” says Abalos. “While a large company, such as, say, Activision or Ubisoft, have entire departments that do just that. That is their only goal. “
It’s a tiring pressure. “There were points, for example, why do I keep trying?” Says Abalos. “I mean, I should start concentrating instead of packing everything and leaving.” Scheurle says the experience made her doubt she would ever want to return to the states. “I love the United States and the people as a place,” she says. “I just don’t want to go through this. I want to be somewhere where people appreciate humanity and what it means to move countries. ”
Abalos managed to find a job and stay in the country, while Scheurle took a job in Vancouver. Raj still works in games today, but says the trauma of his visa struggles continues to affect him. “I still have episodes from time to time, and I can’t handle high-pressure environments like I’ve been before,” he says.
Many of the developers The Verge they spoke in order to continue to be considered privileged cases, either because of race, education or financial status. They are called examples of the best scenarios: people who either managed to stay in the country or found profitable jobs elsewhere.
Reflecting on his own experience, Raj also sees what he considers privileges. “I would have been deported a hundred times without all the benefits I had,” he says, pointing to things like his industry awards, financial support from his family and access to an immigration lawyer. He calls his ordeal an infernal experience, but still one with positive results that include a happy marriage. “I know from my friends that the stories we don’t hear are even scarier, even more tragic.” The US, in particular, has become a harder place for any immigrant to work under Trump.
“I hope that by sharing my story,” says Raj, “a story in which things ‘worked,’ helps people have more understanding and empathy for those who didn’t.”
* The name has been changed to protect the individual’s identity.