You can't buy certainty. You can compute a number.
If you hold an H1B, are years into the EB-2 or EB-3 India queue, and find yourself refreshing the Visa Bulletin on the 8th of every month, the anxiety is not irrational. It is information. The useful response is not meditation or a forecast — it is a Plan B with a number attached.
This piece is for the chronic version of the question: not the one-night "what if I had to go back tomorrow," but the years 3-through-7 version, where the uncertainty has stopped being an event and started being a weather pattern.
The base rates are real
The H1B cap is a lottery. USCIS runs an electronic registration each spring for the 85,000 cap (65,000 plus 20,000 US master's). In recent fiscal years registrations have run roughly 4–7× the cap, putting initial selection odds in the 1-in-4 to 1-in-7 range, depending on the year and on whether USCIS ran additional selection rounds. The FY2025 cycle introduced the beneficiary-centric selection rule, which moved odds for honest single-registration applicants — but the system is still a lottery. Authoritative source: the USCIS H-1B Electronic Registration Process page.
RFEs and denials move with policy. The Congressional Research Service and AILA have tracked H-1B RFE issuance and denial rates over the past decade and documented sharp swings tied to administration policy rather than petitioner quality. RFE rates have ranged from the low teens to well above 50% in particular cycles. AILA and the USCIS Ombudsman reports are the cleanest public record. A clean petition can still draw an RFE in a tightening cycle.
The EB-2/EB-3 India queue is measured in decades. The Department of State Visa Bulletin publishes monthly cutoffs by country of birth. For India-born applicants in EB-2 and EB-3 the gap between priority date and current cutoff has been measured in decades for years. CATO and David Bier publish updated wait-time projections; none of them produce "5 years."
Job loss collapses the timeline to 60 days. 8 CFR §214.1(l)(2) gives an H1B worker a discretionary grace period of up to 60 days, or until the I-94 expires, whichever is shorter, to find a new employer to file a transfer.
None of this is new. All of it is on the public record.
The financial anxiety is louder than the immigration anxiety
Lottery odds are scary because losing the lottery means losing the income, which means watching the brokerage balance you spent five years building get spent down at a US burn rate during a 60-day job hunt. The Visa Bulletin is scary because every additional year of queue is another year your assets stay in USD while your eventual liabilities — a parent's hospitalization, a flat in a city that keeps repricing, a child's education — remain in INR.
The H1B is not the wound. The H1B is the pressure on a wound that is fundamentally about asset-liability mismatch. That distinction matters because asset-liability mismatch is a problem you can work on. Immigration policy is not.
What a real Plan B looks like
A Plan B has four properties.
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Liquid. The money you would actually live on in months 1–24 after a forced return is in taxable brokerage, cash, and Roth contributions — not locked behind a 10% IRC §72(t) early-withdrawal penalty (IRS Publication 590-B) or in an illiquid asset.
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Two-currency aware. You know what your USD assets are worth in INR at today's RBI reference rate, not at a hopeful forecast. FEMA rules govern repatriation and the operation of NRE/NRO accounts on return — those mechanics matter when the move is real.
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Tier-calibrated. You know what that INR buys in your target Indian metro at your target lifestyle tier, sustainably, at a 3–4% real safe withdrawal rate. Pattabiraman Murari's freefincal walks through India-calibrated SWR methodology.
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Tested. You have actually run the scenario, on paper, before you needed to.
The difference between a real Plan B and the WhatsApp-group versions is not sophistication. It is whether the plan ends in a number or a feeling.
What "tested" looks like, concretely
Pull cash, taxable brokerage, vested RSU at current FMV, 401(k), Roth. Subtract US debt. Convert at today's RBI rate. That is your liquid INR position.
Pick a target city and lifestyle tier. Write down an honest annual run-rate for a household of your size at that tier. Divide INR position by run-rate. That is your raw runway in years before any portfolio growth.
Apply a 3–4% real SWR. That is your sustainable annual draw. Compare to your run-rate. The gap, or the surplus, is most of the answer to "would I be okay."
Run the same exercise for "stay 5 more years and then move," accounting for additional savings, RSU vests, and a haircut for USD/INR drift and US capital-gains tax on liquidation. Two trajectories. They will cross somewhere. Where they cross is the real decision date.
The inputs all have ranges. That is the point. A Plan B is not a prediction; it is a recomputable artifact you can re-run in twenty minutes the next time the policy weather changes.
Three mistakes that show up almost every time
Over-concentrating in US-only, mostly pre-tax assets. Every dollar in a Traditional 401(k) is a dollar that, on a forced return, faces either the 10% IRC §72(t) penalty plus ordinary income tax, or a multi-decade deferral problem with India-side tax interaction governed by the India-US DTAA, including pension treatment under Article 20. The fix is not to stop contributing. The fix is to maintain a deliberate liquid taxable sleeve sized to Plan B months 1–24, not as a residual.
Buying Indian real estate as insurance. Round-trip transaction costs north of 7%, GST and stamp duty, opaque rental yields in the 2–3% range in tier-1 cities, and a tenant-and-maintenance overhead you cannot run from the US. Real estate may earn its place as an investment after the rest of the plan is computed. As insurance against an immigration outcome, it is one of the most expensive forms of comfort an H1B household buys.
Ignoring the RNOR window. Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident is a transitional Indian tax status under Section 6(6) of the Income-tax Act, 1961. Most H1B holders returning after 5+ years abroad qualify for 1–3 financial years during which foreign-source income is generally not taxed in India. For some returnees, the window creates a strategic opportunity for partial Traditional → Roth conversions taxed only on the US side. The mechanics are fact-specific and a cross-border CA is non-negotiable, but the window itself is real, time-bound, and forfeited by default if you don't plan for it.
The point
Uncertainty without a number is anxiety. Uncertainty with a number is a plan. You will not get a guarantee from USCIS, your employer, the rupee, or Bengaluru rents. You can get a tested Plan B that says: if the worst version of this happens on the first of next month, here is the city, the tier, the run-rate, the SWR, the runway, and the curve.
Most people who compute this don't move. They keep building in the US, often for another five or seven years. But they build by choice, not by inertia.
👉 Run your Plan B in the Crossroads Simulator
This article is editorial, not tax or legal advice. Cross-border tax and immigration positions are fact-specific; consult a qualified CA with US–India practice and a licensed US immigration attorney before acting on any of the above. Public USCIS, Department of State, IRS, and Income-tax Department sources cited here are accurate to publication date; verify current-cycle numbers at the linked official pages before relying on any specific figure.