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Comment by flavius29663 | Hacker News Reader

Immigration in the US is such a joke. I understand and agree that the US cannot let everyone in (you would end up with 100 mil people per year), but the current system is too screwed up.

If you want to do everything legally, you have to wait/work years, and even if you have all the papers in order, too many times it's a matter of luck or a government employee disposition on that day.

Be an illegal, and you can just walk through the border.

The USA could attract much more talent and better immigrants in general, if they just made it all based on qualifications and points, like for example Australia.

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As a European, who’d love to move to the US, I perfectly agree. (Except about the points system, because it’s completely arbitrary, imho the only qualification should be either an advanced degree, or a lined up job offer, subject to annual per country cap, because otherwise it could get completely out of hand)

Going through the L1B or H1B route is below me (as you’re tied to an employer with all the issues that entails, not to mention the H1B lottery, or the fact that to even qualify for a L1B I’d have to already work for the same employer for a year, and then hope they are willing to transfer me is absolutely ridiculous).

And basically nobody is going to sponsor me for a EB-2 outright.

So we’re just applying for the DV lottery every year. If we win, we’ll move to the States. Otherwise we’re not going through the meat grinder that is the US immigration system.

I’m actually not sure what the latest rules are, but what I recall that H1B spouses can’t even get a work permit until there’s an approved I-140 (Green card petition), so H1B route is a complete showstopper. How desperate do you have to be to go through that?

Well EU is not exactly the worst place in the world...

My point exactly. The US is completely incapable of competing for non-top-level talent from the EU.

Very few Europeans in their right mind would consider going through the meat grinder that the US immigration system is, not least of which is the bad rep the US gets for not having a single payer healthcare system (not that it should have one, it’s just that Europeans also have to justify giving that up)

Personally, I love the United States. But the US basically can’t compete for me as an employee, because I’m going to take the offer that makes the most rational sense, which, with as things stand, is extremely unlikely to come from an employer in the US.

It doesn't really deprive US companies of anything since all major ones have EU presence. Does deprive US of tax revenue though

It does deprive the US companies that don’t have EU presence from access to a major talent pool.

In IT space most major ones do though.

Why not work remotely? I can't see any benefits to living in the USA. I assume you already have experience living here, and for the life of me cannot fathom why anyone would choose the USA over most of Europe.

I could list all of the benefits of Europe, but I'm sure you know them as a resident. The USA is a very strange and highly dysfunctional (healthcare, social strife, violence, etc.) country. Most predictions for the future of the US are not optimistic, and there are good reasons for this.

> and for the life of me cannot fathom why anyone would choose the USA over most of Europe.

Because I'm weird like that. I don't care about my "free" healthcare, because what you can get for free either has an extremely long wait times or is absolutely sub-par. I've never had "free" healthcare nor in the UK (except for that one time that made me go fully private), nor in my home country. I'm aware that it'd be more expensive in the US.

I'm also a gun enthusiast, having my hobby in the EU is almost getting more difficult by the day, and I'm from a EU country that has relatively lax gun laws (when compared to other EU countries)

I haven't lived in the US, but I've spent a lot of time there.

> Why not work remotely? I can't see any benefits to living in the USA.

Pay?

Unless you work in Switzerland you're not going to get anything close to what you can get on the US west coast.

You can sponsor your own EB-2. I did.

Takes some effort, lots of time, and a smol pile of money for lawyers.

I wrote a pretty long article about how I managed to pull this off, if you’re interested. https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-used-indie-hacking-to-sponsor-...

I highly doubt that I’m extraordinary enough to qualify for the EB-2 NIW.

I’m just a competent software engineer with a lot of experience.

> If the relationship falls apart, you have 10 days to leave the country unless you stay married.

By the way, this is not true. If you prove that the marriage was bona fide, you keep your green card. Which you don’t really even have to prove if it lasts longer than 2 years.

I wasn’t either when I started on this path.

Nice thing is that building your career to qualify for this also greatly helps your career. Like extra leverage on your efforts.

> Going through the [...] H1B route is below me (as you're tied to an employer [...])

You aren't tied to your employer with H1B. Once you got an H1B, you can switch employers. There is only a minor amount of H1B transfer paperwork involved, but no more lottery or quotas or uncertainty about whether you are gonna get it or not.

> H1B spouses can't even get a work permit until there is an approved I-140 (Green card petition)

Sadly, this is still the case. Good news is that processing times for I-140 with H1B is currently sitting at about 1yr.

> We're just applying for the DV lottery every year

From someone whose parents went almost through the exact same process (which included that one year [iirc 2011 or 2012] when USCIS had a bug and sent the DV lottery winner email to those who didn't actually get selected, which my family fell under), I genuinely wish you the best of luck. This was extremely stressful for everyone involved, and we ended up just going through the H1B process without ever really winning the DV lottery.

And I still, to this day, have occasional nightmares of losing it all and being kicked out of the country. Which makes me scream in my sleep, and I feel really guilty for my partner being woken up by this. Happens at least once every few months, despite me being a US citizen for a while at this point. Though in my case, I think it was fueled by my extremely strong distaste for living in my country of origin (which isn't in EU), not the process of getting permanent residency in the US.

Legit, I am rooting for you, and I hope things work out in your situation, regardless of whether you get it through the DV lottery or whichever other way.

A US migrant from a Schengen country here, that moved here for family reasons, and I absolutely concur.

I’m currently on my third application for a permanent residency. First one got obsolete, second was denied because of a technical error, and the current one was filed in last August and is still pending. I have been in active process since April 2020. I have close to a thousand pages of filing documents, several thousand dollars, countless stressful moments, a couple of missed weddings of siblings back home, etc.

I am currently waiting for a my I-131 and am not allowed to travel back home unless I can prove it is an emergency (and then only for 3 weeks), and I am not allowed to work (though, rumors have it that illegal work is not enforced for spouses of citizens). You file an I-765 for work authorization which is handled along your I-131. The current average waiting period for that is 10.5 months... I’ve waited 9.

I don’t recommend this for anybody.

and you got it the easiest way possible: by marrying a citizen...

What makes them “better immigrants?” Until the mid 20th century America took the poorest and least educated immigrants and it worked out pretty well. It’s not clear to me that importing other countries’ elites is a better tack.

There is also likely a high correlation between individuals willing to uproot for a better life, and success.

Up until the mid 1800s you had to be rich, at least solidly middle class, to afford the passage across the Atlantic. There’s maybe 70 years of uncontrolled immigration not gated by very high costs before immigration became unpopular enough for restrictions to become large.

Poor immigrants took on debt or worked as indentured servants to afford passage, just like today: https://www.hsp.org/sites/default/files/legacy_files/migrate...

“One historian described the typical German immigrant as a poor farmer or artisan who arrived around 1750 with a wife and two children. They were most likely in debt for the passage across the Atlantic but had family or friends already settled in America. They were affiliated with the Lutheran or Reformed church but only loosely committed to an organized religion. Records indicate that they became prosperous members of the community. However, many were too poor to pay the transatlantic passage so as many as one-half to two-third of German immigrants came to Pennsylvania as indentured servants or redemptioners, as Germans called them.”

My mom's parents immigrated in the late 1950s (from a recently impoverished country despite having advanced degrees) and they were required to show proof of having a job, proof of having healthcare, and proof having enough savings among other things I am sure, or so I was told (I think the requirements can be verified online if in doubt). They would have qualified as poor I imagine since they came with nothing and were fleeing their country. But there were completely different requirements back then.

There are various ways one can immigrate to the US now, such as H-1B, DV, asylum, illegally, etc. I think only H-1B requires proof of employment before entering. I think the requirements previously may have filtered a lot of people in spite of education and net worth. Also, I am not sure what qualifies as being educated back then since having a bachelor's degree was a lot less common than it is now.

Right, that’s mid 20th century. There was immigration restriction in the US starting in the early 20th century, which caused the foreign born population percentage to drop under 5% in 1970 (compared to almost 15% in 1910 and almost 14% today). But prior to 1920 or so those restrictions weren’t there.

The kids of the poorest and least educated immigrants are the ones who created the Italian and Irish gangs/mafia. We see the same thing in Western Europe today, where people fled their pretty bad countries, only to have their un-integrated kids repeat the same behaviors that made the origin countries bad in the first place.

I love the idea of the diversity visa lottery, I think it's a great way to spice up the population. But mass immigration of low educated individuals is not good, they won't integrate as well as highly skilled workers.

Also, in the 1800s, you needed millions of farm workers, miners, rail workers etc. These jobs were dangerous, no skill required, no language required, making it feasible to just import whatever immigrants you can. Today it's not the case, with such a sophisticated economy.

> But mass immigration of low educated individuals is not good, they won't integrate as well as highly skilled workers.

It’s not clear to me the highly educated individuals are integrating well. (E.g. high caste Indians bringing caste-based elitism to the U.S.) They're obviously prospering but that's somewhat different.

Intermarriage rates for Indian Americans are very high which would suggest that they’re integrating. If caste lasts in the US it will be the first place in the Indian diaspora that it does. For US born 29% marry outside of ethnic group. At those rates once mass Indian immigration ends it’ll be two to three generations before the ethnic group are pretty much completely American, like German Americans or Italian Americans.

https://www.brownpundits.com/2021/06/27/indian-american-surv...

Compare with ~80% intermarriage rate for "poor" Italian immigrants

https://books.google.com/books?id=Tj1E7-j8w1MC&pg=PA290&lpg=...

When was that data for Italians collected? Nobody in this thread was saying that Italians in the 1990s were forming Mafia...It was about the mass immigration at the end of 19th-beginning of 20th centuries.

Just look at the bigger picture: when the US imported large amounts of un-vetted immigrants, you had several ethnic based gangs. The Italian mafia was hard to get rid off once established, but in general you didn't have new ones popping up - that stopped with tougher immigration.

Now the only ethnic based gangs are the Spanish speaking ones...it's such a coincidence that the latino gangs started around the time of mass immigration...

> Be an illegal, and you can just walk through the border.

This comparison makes no sense. The "legal" waiting years to get citizenship is still far, far ahead of an illegal who just walking across the border, yet you've presented this as if the illegal is somehow being treated better than the legal.

> Be an illegal, and you can just walk through the border.

The funniest part is then the woke crowd would start complaining how _____X group is being discriminated. Impose strict visa requirements like everyone else, then you'll see all the discriminations are gone.

The current system makes no sense. Legally it's very easy to get in (just have a look at the legal requirements for various visas, there's barely anything) - easier than most countries. Hell, even citizenship is a piece of cake once you have a green card. But in practice it's 10x harder than it looks. I guess they need to control immigration somehow, but passing new laws is hard, so they just fallback to making it a bureaucratic nightmare based on luck.

And the most absurd thing of all: Republicans are supposed to be pro-business, so they should support immigration, but don't. Democrats are supposed to look after the low class, but they're willing to let in more and more low wage workers that put pressure on the wages of their voters...and they keep doubling down on this. So you end up with neither R or D caring about highly skilled workers

Why? That used to be the US's exact policy. It's even carved into the Statue of Liberty.

What? That’s just propaganda — it’s a poem, not a historical record of United States immigration policy.

Any county actively seeking to import those in poverty is gonna have a fun time competing on the international stage.

Australia used to be a dumping ground for literal convicts, so maybe the OP has a point

So all the Irish that came over weren't poor?

Kinda fucked go to only steal away the best and brightest from poorer nations though, no? It’s bad enough that every genius South America produces immigrates to America at the first opportunity. Seems less fucked if we take a broader swath of immigrants than just the geniuses.

They’re not being stolen, they love it. It’s even more fucked that you think the best and brightest should be trapped in the awful countries they were born in

I don’t want them trapped at all. However, those countries are never going to rise above “awful” if the top 10% of the population continues to be skimmed off every year.

The US exists to funnel resources, military power, etc into the hands of the rich. Using coups, the CIA, and full out wars. The hyper-concentration of wealth that is felt in this country happens on a larger scale with the rest of the world countries funneling their wealth into 'civilized' nations.

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