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Comment by bjornedstrom | Hacker News Reader

This happens over and over again in Sweden: skilled worker immigrants get deported over small technicalities, that is often not even their own fault. There have been many examples of this affecting highly skilled engineers in some of Swedens famous (and not famous) tech startups.

What I find disturbing is that immigrant criminals, who haven't contributed to society at all, often do not get sentenced to deportation. So we have the situation that people who are a benefit to the Swedish society get deported, but the criminals get to stay.

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This is a story playing out in a lot of western countries, especially in Europe.

Same here in Finland.

If you are an immigrant outside of EU and you are working legally, but you happen to miss some small details in the labour code of Finnish law, you might get kicked out and there is nothing you can do. The faceless bureaucrats don't give a fuck. However if you are unemployed and wielding knife at a local subway station, you will get both the leftist party and Finnish government to act as your personal bodyguard and you'll never have to leave the country against your own will.

Unfortunately, it's because highly skilled people are "boring" (definitely don't mean it as an offense) and don't elicit sympathy. They usually do well for themselves so people don't feel sorry enough to help them

It's kind of a paradox

In the US, if you're perfectly productive, legal, highly qualified and well-behaved member of society on H1B from China or India it might still take you 10-15 years to become a resident, so the situation isn't totally rosy here either. And you certainly won't have the right to work on your own idea while you're on that visa, so that's a long time to wait before you can even get started.

Probably explains why so many people will try to game the system and claim to belong to the O-1 category.

O-1 stands for...?

https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker...

If you are a benefit to society prove it. Pay slips should do it. Easy.

Nobody likes mass immigration in Europe because unlike the US everyone is entitled to housing, healthcare, education. That adds up. And we don't have much need for low skill black market jobs.

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