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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

Ireland and the UK have the worst planning processes in the world leading to worse housing crises than even California. Having zoning would imply that it's legal to do something somewhere, which it basically isn't.

In particular the Irish think their island is full of "nature" (when it's actually open fields because the British deforested all of it) and become ecofascists when you suggest any of it could be a building. (Or just regular ones since they think you'll want to put African immigrants in the building. Someone suggested this on Twitter last week and I've never seen so many replies afraid of "Somalis".)

This is why more Irish live in America than in Ireland and the population is lower than it was in the 1800s.

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> open fields because the British deforested all of it

Ah here. It's unfair to solely blame the Brits for that. By the 1600s less than 20% of the island was forested, down from 80% at the start of the neolithic period[1].

[1]: https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/general-topics/...

> This is why more Irish live in America than in Ireland

This is nonsense. Are you telling me there are over 5 million 1st generation Irish people living in America? Of course the number will be significanty greater if you include descendants

If you were born in Ireland then your grandchildren born in America are Irish citizens if they apply, aren't they?

Anyway, Americans consider themselves Irish/Korean/Iranian/etc down to 2nd or 3rd generation even if the original countries don't. (In fact, all white Americans think they're Irish even if they aren't because it lets them drink in more bars. That's also how America stole all the credit for inventing Halloween.)

The few million people that moved in the 1800-1980 era have a lot more to do with the prevalence of nth generation Irish descendants than people who have moved in the last two decades of property shortages

Not famine then?

That's been over for a while. They can't move back because there's nowhere to live.

I've met thousands and I don't know a single Irish American that has expressed a serious desire to move back.

Don't get me wrong; I'm an Irish American and I'd love to live in Ireland. But I was born and raised in the US and would have to abandon all my friends to move there.

Yeah, it is pretty hard. Mine actually moved back to the UK but we have more immediate family there than usual. (Except for me since the tech industry isn't as good.)

Apparently Australia is actually the only country with net immigration from the US.

> Apparently Australia is actually the only country with net immigration from the US.

The E3 visas help with that. Otherwise as a tech worker you're generally stuck with either a H1B (which is a lottery) as a new hire, or L1B (which requires working for the company for a year) as an existing employee.

Not all of the allocated E3 visa slots get used though, so IIRC, there's been continued discussions on Irish citizens being offered the remainder for the last few years, but nothing concrete yet.

Are tech workers not eligible for EB-2/EB-3? I haven't gone through the process myself, but from a number of people I know I have, it seems pretty automatic for my EU citizen contacts to get US visas compared to the drama the process causes for Indians (my understanding is that this is due to many limits being per-country, but not considering population)

It's not really practical to move to the US on an EB-2/EB-3 green card since even at best its an 18 month process if you're not from one of the countries that reached its per country limit, so you're unlikely to find an employer to sponsor you to start a job so far in the future.

So usually what happens is you move over on an H-1B but those are subject to an annual cap for which you only have a 1/4 chance of being selected unless you work for a cap-exempt non-profit employer.

Employers will usually sponsor a green card after you start working for them.

Hi! I’m Irish and living in NYC these last 20 years or more. I’d like to move back but the problems mentioned here are the barrier.

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