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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

I considered trying to get visa to USA and work there, but honestly last year makes me really worried about living there

is it safe to live there?

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Of course it is, don’t trade the headlines. But it’s important to know your experience in the US will vary dramatically based on economic status.

If you’re high income/above-average educated (which you pretty much have to be to immigrate to the US due to the overly strict/broken immigration system), there’s no better place to be. You will be able to reach the absolute peak of your potential here. 10/10, would immigrate again.

If you’re middle of the road on income/education, you’d be better off in other developed countries that have robust socialized services (healthcare, pension, free education, etc) like the Nordics. Most developed countries have a better lifestyle for the average person.

If you’re below average on income/education, the US is the worst of the developed countries to live in. I’d stay far away.

I disagree.

I live in Pittsburgh, and we recently had the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting.

There were also people being threatened along the route of a Black Lives Matter protest, who just happened to be there and did not join in enthusiastically enough, in the eyes of the marching protesters. No one was injured, but from the videos it seemed very close to getting out of hand. (Marchers coming off the street to verbally accost people sitting outside at a restaurant, grabbing drinks off their tables. Marching into a McDonalds and verbally harassing the manager...about something.)

And of course police going off on protesters, looking for excuses to escalate the use of force.

And with police reluctant to engage in communities where they are...unpopular...(with reason), murder rates are at their highest rates in years in many cities.

And now the unprecedented attack on the capitol.

I feel like I will get responses saying I am understating or overstating the violence from "one side" or the other. But my point is no one can deny the amount of violence is rapidly increasing, and no one really knows if it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

I wouldn't recommend anyone coming to the US right now, without a good reason.

Those are certainly some scary anecdotes you have, but the stats don’t support them. Things just seem worse because the media (and social media) likes to make a political spectacle out of everything to drive engagement. Shootings are no longer murders, they are events to argue over gun control. Terrorist attacks are no longer about the attacks, they are used to argue about encryption, the free flow of information, and censorship.

These events just seem more frequent because rather than being a one day headline they get talked about ad nauseam for weeks.

It seems you spend a lot of time watching sensational news media and not a lot of time looking at actual data (don’t feel bad, it’s a trap I’ve fallen into before).

Look at any chart of violence in the US, it’s a steady downward slope over the past 30 years. There’s never been a safer time to be alive: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...

https://www.toonpool.com/user/128241/files/on_average_361368...

Don’t feel bad, it’s a mistake we've all made before.

Depends very much where in the US. And to some extend how you look, how you talk and what your gender is. The overwhelmingly large majority to places is safe. But every large enough city has unsavory places that need at least being aware of what (not) to do. But that is similar in a lot of countries.

> is it safe to live there?

This varies a lot depending on where you live, your skin color and your socioeconomic status.

>Is it safe to live there?

As someone who has lived here my entire life I'm not sure how the next month is going to unfold.

Historically though the United States has crime issues, a few of the most dangerous cities in the world (not in a war zone) are in the US (St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

https://apnews.com/article/homicide-st-louis-coronavirus-pan...

Surprisingly, Orlando is apparently also one of the most violent city in the US.

It is turning into a police state and I think that the crime rates have never been lower.

"In the long term, violent crime in the United States has been in decline since colonial times."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

I doubt you can get a visa just because you want to work here. You need to be invited by a firm like google and even then, your chances are like 20%. Or you can be an exceptional scientist of some sort. Or you can be just rich and invest a million into usa. In either case, your social class will be too high to worry about personal safety.

Yes, it’s super safe. The news is playing a game of reality TV trying to control narrative in a big political struggle.

This has literally no impact on the day-to-day lives of people around the country. Even when the BLM protests were in full force, you had to go to specific downtown areas of large cities to see anything.

The only thing that happened to real people this year is covid, and that does suck. The vaccine should help though.

Do not throw away your future plans based on this drama.

You probably can't get a VISA. Trump really turned the screws to the # of available ones, only 85K H1B last year (200,000 people applied). Might want to wait a year for Biden to fix that.

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