It’s the message every manager dreads: your star engineer, the one you’ve mentored and built roadmaps around, wasn’t selected in the H-1B lottery. Conventional wisdom says the investment is gone and the employee has to leave. The result? Lost productivity, lower morale, and an expensive replacement cycle.
But what if conventional wisdom is wrong? An H-1B denial isn’t an HR problem to absorb — it’s a strategic challenge to solve. This playbook shows how you can retain top international talent with a Nearshore Bridge that keeps your engineers on your team, fully productive, and fully compliant.
The immediate fallout: quantifying the loss
Losing a visa-dependent engineer carries major costs:
- Recruitment costs: Sourcing and hiring a replacement from scratch
- Lost institutional knowledge: Years of context on your codebase and processes disappear
- Team disruption: Morale drops and velocity slows as teammates cover the gap
- Training deficit: A new hire requires 3–6 months to ramp up
The ROI on retention is clear: keeping this engineer is far more valuable than replacing them.
The Nearshore Bridge: a strategy for retention
The solution is simple: change the employee’s location, not their employer. By transitioning them to a nearshore country in Latin America, you retain them as a full-time, integrated member of your team.
- They continue on your projects.
- They follow your processes.
- They stay in your culture.
For your team, nothing changes except where that engineer logs in from.
Executing the Nearshore Bridge with Howdy.com
Here’s how Howdy removes barriers:
- Problem: No U.S. work visa Solution: Howdy.com becomes the Employer of Record (EOR) in a LatAm country, handling all compliance, payroll, and benefits.
- Problem: No legal or HR entity in LatAm Solution: We provide the full international infrastructure — no setup required.
- Problem: Fear of operational disruption Solution: The engineer works in a U.S.-aligned time zone and uses the same Slack, Jira, and GitHub. For your team, the only visible change is their flag emoji.
The Nearshore Bridge turns what looks like a catastrophic loss into a smooth, strategic relocation.
Conclusion
An H-1B denial does not have to mean goodbye. It can — and should — be a simple change of address. With Howdy.com, you have a proven way to retain 100% of your talent and institutional knowledge through compliant nearshore relocation.
Stop letting a broken immigration system dictate your team’s future. Keep your best people, maintain your momentum, and build with certainty.