Here are some important things to know about being on a student visa in the US.
- Most students come to the United States under two types of visas, J-1 or F-1 visas. The J-1 visas are mostly reserved for people who come with some form of government assistance (either through the US government or the governments in their home countries). J-1 visas are also issued commonly to postdocs coming from foreign countries or visiting students or researchers that are not technically students pursuing an US degree.
- Visas and legal status in the US are separate things. You can be legally under student status in the US but have an expired US visa. In fact, especially for most PhD students their visa will expire sometime during their course of studies, and for people coming from some countries this will happen rather quickly. The problem is that with an expired US visa you can not re-enter the United States. Renovating your visa will typically require you coming back to your home country to ask for a new one. This makes it frustratingly hard to travel to third countries when a visa is expired because it requires traveling home to renovate your visa first. This is especially problematic if said third country also requires you to have a visa because you can not apply to most visas in the US if your current US visa is expired, and even if they do allow it, you would not be able to re-enter on your way back without an unexpired US visa.
- Even if the visas are the same for all countries, depending on each country, the US has different rules about how long will those visas last and whether they will allow multiple entries to the states. US Embassies in some countries thought as friendlier to the US will issue up to 10-year visas, others 5-year visas, and some others even 1 year visas with a single entry option.
- There are some differences that make the J-1 visa a bit more desirable, like spouses of J-1 holders can potentially obtain a work permit, while spouses of F-1 holders can not. But overall, the F-1 visa is the most desirable in most cases because it usually comes with no strings attached. The J-1 visa can potentially come with the dreaded "212 (e)" or "Two-year home residency requirement", which means you need to go back to your home country for two years after finishing your studies/program/internship. This might not mean much when you are starting your 5-year program in the states but it could come back to haunt you down the road, because sometimes plans change and in 5 years living in a foreign country, people change.
- Foreign students in the states pay taxes on their income since their very first year. There are usually federal, state, and in some cases city taxes to pay. Some small set of states do not collect income taxes. The way taxes work in the US is that your employer (in the case of students, the university) will keep some fixed amount of your salary and give it directly to the government regardless of how much tax you have to pay. Then, at the end of the fiscal year (in April), when it is time to declare taxes, you as a student will typically find that the government took too much money and they have to send you back some of that money. There are two differences in the way foreign students pay taxes compared to other people: 1) you will not be able to do it online, most online tax services are only meant to be used by permanent residents and citizens (beware!), 2) you will not pay medicare and social security taxes for the first 5 years of your program (which means never for people in 2-year master programs). Do not forget to pay taxes and do it consciously or it will inevitably come back and haunt you later.
