A One-Way Ticket Instead of a Green Card (Part 1)

The Late Starter · September 4, 2026

A Chapter in My Late Start Retirement Journey

When my whole family moved to America, I still carried the mindset and spirit of a much younger man.

This was my third continent. Korea, Germany, and now America. But to me, this was never meant to be the final destination. I always kept a quiet belief in the back of my mind that I could leave whenever I chose to. So the need — or even the reason — to apply for a green card never felt pressing.

The Day the VP Rushed Into My Office

In our fifth year, one day, the VP came rushing into my office.

“Why haven’t you applied for a green card?”

I didn’t have a good answer for him. The truth was, I still held onto the hope of returning to Europe someday, if the opportunity ever came. I had quietly reached out to a few research institutes and companies. Nothing came of it.

By the sixth year, I finally started facing reality.

Much like someone who lives for years without any real retirement planning, only to wake up one day and realize retirement is suddenly right there in front of them — the green card issue landed on me with that same kind of abruptness.

A Beginning That Felt Ordinary

When the company sponsored my green card process, I wasn’t especially worried. I had already been in the U.S. for six years on an H-1B, and while the expiration was approaching, I believed the PERM labor certification process would work itself out one way or another. I’d heard that professionals with my kind of experience usually received their green card within six months to a year, so I didn’t feel any real urgency.

Then, in April 2013, my PERM was flagged for a random audit.

The Department of Labor was notifying us that they intended to re-examine the entire hiring process behind my case. Once a case is flagged for audit, review times typically stretch to anywhere from several months to nearly a year. The company scrambled to prepare and submit the required documents, but the clock kept running.

When the H-1B Deadline Collided With a Government Shutdown

That fall, my six-year H-1B limit was closing in fast.

Under AC21 rules, an extension might have been possible — but with the PERM delayed by the audit, even that path wasn’t certain. And then, on October 1st, the federal government shutdown began.

With the Department of Labor’s systems frozen, both the PERM review and the LCA approval needed for an H-1B extension came to a complete stop. Every process I had been counting on had simply frozen in place, right along with the government itself.

The company made its decision.

“Staying in the U.S. any longer risks falling out of status. Take your family and leave for now.”

What We Left Behind

We left the United States on December 4th, 2013.

There was a reason we picked that exact date. Once the green card eventually came through, we would need to re-enter the country within whatever time remained on our prior status, complete a medical exam, and submit the necessary paperwork. The timeline was brutally tight.

We left our two cars and our belongings in a condo owned by the company, and boarded a flight to Germany.

In Germany, pieces of our family’s life were still scattered across our friends’ homes, exactly as we’d left them. It felt as though we had never truly left at all — we were simply returning to where our things had been waiting all along.

We were stepping back into the Germany we had longed to return to, in a way none of us could have imagined. Carrying the quiet joy of seeing dear friends again, we returned to Germany having spent almost six full years in America, and nearly seven years since we’d first left.

And this was only the beginning of my green card story.

A film I watched in theaters just days ago comes to mind — the story of a man’s long, difficult journey home after years of wandering. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think back on the winding, eventful path of my own immigrant life.

(To be continued in Part 2.)