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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

This was perfectly said, and spot on. (Thank you.)

Reading about how Canada welcomes skilled immigrants, almost brought tears to my eyes. If your English is good and you've studied in Canada (even just a bachelor's degree), you're given a Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP) upon graduation, and are practically guaranteed to eventually get a Canadian green card via the Canadian Experience Class (Express Entry) program.

For folks outside Canada, good English, education beyond a bachelor's degree, and 3 years of skilled work experience, guarantees you'll have enough points to get a Federal Skilled Worker green card immediately.

I haven't looked at countries besides Canada; but I would strongly recommend Canada over the U.S. for anyone seeking to migrate on the basis of skills.

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> I haven't looked at countries besides Canada; but I would strongly recommend Canada over the U.S. for anyone seeking to migrate on the basis of skills.

I would also suggest to consider the Netherlands. The procedure for highly skilled migrants is super simple. Pretty much the only condition is that your employer pays you a sufficient wage.

https://ind.nl/en/work/Pages/Highly-skilled-migrant.aspx

Canada is an English speaking country except Québec. Why would a highly skilled immigrant learn yet another language to immigrate to Netherlands, if given a choice between an English speaking country and non English one ?

Everybody speaks English in the Netherlands. People live there for years without learning the local language. Working language in many companies that hire migrants is English.

Can those employees progress in their career without speaking the native language ?

Will the kids get an education in English ?

Can the immigrant take part in social activities ?

Can they talk to their doctors or to the grocery store in English without misunderstanding.

How is the attitude towards English ? Will a nationalist government change those English friendliness ?

There are things like these a skilled economic immigrant should consider before immigrating to a non English speaking country.

Take the example of Québec, although it's a province in the English speaking Canada, immigrants who speak only English are not welcomed and frowned upon. They find it hard to get by. They end up moving to other provinces. If the immigrant is not white, the difficulties are 2x in Québec. To be fair, Québec's hate for English is well founded if you examine their colonial history and hence the strict language laws.

Because very often English is the language of business, and the highly-skilled migrant visa makes no demands of you to learn Dutch. Practically speaking, Netherlands is (enough of) an English speaking place.

> I would also suggest to consider the Netherlands

Unless you want to become a citizen, you'll need to learn Dutch (which is a good thing IMHO but some disagree) and renounce your other citizenship.

Sweden has an even simpler system, if the employer can prove that you are needed (and for most professions reading here that's less than trivial) you are almost guaranteed to get permanent residency in 4 years and become a citizen in 5 years if you want to

You can get permanent residence after 5 years in the Netherlands too, and the language level required is pretty basic. It's not very hard to pass the required language tests within 5+ years.

The limit to one nationality is maddening, however.

I just moved to the Netherlands after four years of university in the US and a few years of unsuccessful H1B applications. It's fantastic and a lot less stressful than the US!

Why do you dislike the one nationality limit?

>Why do you dislike the one nationality limit?

Because it is deeply arbitrary. Plenty of people can have dual nationalities in the Netherlands, just not me. Even the Dutch Queen has two nationalities. If I married a Dutch person I could become Dutch and have two nationalities, no problem. Hopefully the law will be changed...there has been talk of it.

I'm already eligible to apply for Dutch citizenship...I'm a well-integrated contributing member of society who would love to spend the rest of my life in the Netherlands. I tick all the boxes. I want to be able to vote and have representation (I'm a taxpayer as anyone else, after all). I want to spend the rest of my life here. But it's not limited to the Netherlands...I dearly want to become European. Dutch citizenship would give me the right to live and work anywhere in the EU (and plenty of other EU countries have no issues with people having two nationalities).

I can't give up my US citizenship because of family and other ties. If I needed to return to the US for an extended time (e.g. more than a couple months) to, for example, take care of my aging parents, I would lose everything I've worked towards in the Netherlands. The residence clock would reset and I'd have to find a new highly-skilled job and start all over. Same if I ever wanted to take a (temporary) job in another country. And if you renounce US citizenship, it's hard to ever visit the US again.

US immigration policy is now somewhat akin to charity rather than intended to maximize the highly skilled talent pool. This isn't intended as a criticism, but by and large most of our immigration pool comes from poor countries and does not have specialized skills. And we're pretty lenient on illegal immigration which is largely low skilled labor as well. There's a movement right now to change it to be more like the Canada system, more closely based on skill. Whether that's better or worse is subjective I suppose.

> US immigration policy is now somewhat akin to charity rather than intended to maximize the highly skilled talent pool.

No, it's not.

It's largely intended to acheive different social values (particularly community cohesion and undivided loyalties, as opposed to optimizing labor pool to serve capital), which is why the major segment is family unification, but it's not a charity, operating on s need basis (the refugee component is charity-like, sure, but that's not a main component of the immigration system, and the US isn't particularly refugee friendly, even before Trump.)

Relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/opinion/canada-immigratio...

> But Canada’s hospitable attitude is not innate; it is, rather, the product of very hardheaded government policies. Ever since the mid-1960s, the majority of immigrants to the country (about 65 percent in 2015) have been admitted on purely economic grounds, having been evaluated under a nine-point rubric that ignores their race, religion and ethnicity and instead looks at their age, education, job skills, language ability and other attributes that define their potential contribution to the national work force.

The Government of Canada enacted that policy because it's what the people of Canada demanded. The government doesn't make us be welcoming, we make the government be welcoming.

Through what means did the Canadian public "demand" this policy? How was this public demand measured (in general, and in detail in order to craft the particulars of the policy)?

But is your policy particularly welcoming? It’s basically, “you’re welcome here, but only if you speak English and preferably have a college degree.” I took the Canadian points-based immigration test for funsies (it’s online). If Trump rolled out the exact same test here—particularly with the focus on English language proficiency—it would be pilloried by our left as racist, classist, and xenophobic.

I don't want to get into political debates, but this is wrong. Democrats have always pushed for a merit-based points-based immigration for a while now. The 2013 immigration bill contained a merit-based system not unlike Canada's. A points-based system would only be pilloried by your caricature of the left.

The fact of the matter is that the GOP is often quite dishonest. In public, they say things that often sound very reasonable, and hold positions similar to that of the Democrats/left (points-based immigration, protect pre-existing conditions, retain medicare, etc) -- and it helps them win votes. But as we all know, what they actually do (with executive action, bills introduced in Congress, etc) is often the very opposite of what they say.

I won't be commenting on this topic anymore.

> Democrats have always pushed for a merit-based points-based immigration for a while now.

This documentary shows how much Democrats dislike this idea, though in some cases they're willing to accept it in exchange for an amnesty.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/hdwn/222701211

> The fact of the matter is that the GOP is often quite dishonest.

The same can be said of the Democrats. All politicians are dishonest; heck, all human beings are dishonest. The degree to which is a matter of opinion. Any reasonably intelligent person should have no problem constructing a narrative that demonstrates genuine dishonesty on behalf of their ideological enemies. An intellectually honest person can easily demonstrate genuine dishonesty on behalf of both sides.

The 2013 proposal was very different from the Canadian system. First, the points based system would get, at most, less than half of visas, and the merit based category (tier 1) would get half of those. So less than 1/4 of visas would be merit based, versus 65% in Canada. Second, even the merit based category had a family ties component. That component was worth 10 points, twice as much as having a bachelors degree, and the same as having a master’s degree. The other part of the points based system (tier 2) was directed mainly to high-demand, low-skill immigration.

Moreover, the system would not replace the existing family ties based system, but been a large number of additional visas on top of the existing allotment. And it would have granted amnesty on a scale never seen in Canada.

Québec is an exception to this. Québec do not follow the Express Entry system. Québec has its own immigration system called Québec Skilled Worker Programme which is currently dysfunctional, plagued with delays. Québec gives more importance to knowing French rather than any other skills in selecting immigrants. As a result, Quebec has a pool of unemployable but French speaking immigrants.

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