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In my experience, Canada does an excellent job where this program fails. I entered on the high skill “express entry” visa for a tech job. After 18 months we had permanent residency. After 3.5 years, we had citizenship. It was all online and easy enough for us to do ourselves with minimal stress.

During the express entry period where you are employer sponsored, unlike in the US, if you get fired, you have until your visa expires to find another sponsoring job (the visa is valid for 5 years IIRC).

I’m pretty happy with how it went and glad we can settle, I’m not sure we would have chosen Canada if a rapid permanent path hadn’t been clear up front.

Were you very specialized in a certain field, filling a senior position?

As a Canadian with a CS degree who's been trying to get into tech for years, this is horrible to hear. We have thousands of new grads in Canada who end up working in fast food because they get passed over for cheaper immigrants. I've seen it first hand, all my tech friends have seen it. We're worse than the US for this, and we have even less tech jobs here.

We don't need to be bring more entry level talent, we have tons of that not being utilized here.

There's plenty of talk about greedy corporations until the topic of using immigration to increase their profits comes up. Then it's silence.

I was coming in as a ‘normal’ developer design manager, but that is likely fairly specialized. I’m guessing that was in my favor. I know others with a couple of years engineering experience under their belt having a similar experience. But yes, the lack of jobs can be an issue. Lots of folks I know, myself included, now working remote for US-based companies.

In tech in Canada, usually we aren’t hiring immigrants because they’re cheaper—visas, moving someone, etc, is a huge expense. It’s often more that they’re the best possible fit for the role. After Covid with remote work etc, I don’t think there’s as much of that immigration going on, though—I don’t know of many Canadian companies sponsoring right now.

Sorry but that's simply not accurate at all.

The entry positions are FLOODED with new comers. We aren't hiring them because they're the best fit, we have plenty of unemployed locals begging for work. To say we only bring in the best because we cannot fill the roles is a blatant lie.

You sound like you're describing senior position, which I would say is fair.

I’m talking about intermediate to senior—we haven’t had junior roles for a while, and junior roles have never _really_ been good for immigrants anyway. I’m a hiring manager and can tell you that it’s true in my experience that it’s not about money or being ‘cheaper’ but who is the best fit.

The weirder thing that’s going on right now that’s counter to all of this is US-based companies _only_ hiring Canadians, rather than Americans, when people leave because Canadians are cheaper overall—even though American companies tend to pay more. It’s kind of a paradox, but works out well.

Maybe that's your experience within your specific company but that's not the normal.

If you guys have vacant positions, I'd love to apply. Anonymously of course.

Sorry to be harsh, (start rant)

But this one of those places where I with a boomer voice have to scream, “stop being a victim”. The picture you are painting is a complete misrepresentation of reality. I think this stems from the fantasy of thinking that tech workers right now, are akin to factory workers and are being exploited by greedy capitalist overlords, who are using immigration as cudgel to ground them down further. Tech is nothing like a factory job. The demand for talented people in Tech has never gone down (probably higher because of the AI boom). Just consider the fact that openAI is willing to pay 800k+ to employees and it is not even profitable yet. And OpenAI has hired quite a bit of immigrants, and most immigrants come from much poorer backgrounds than natives. Develop your skills and you will easily find a place in the tech industry that will pay you 200k+. The fact that your friends can’t means they did not put in enough effort to develop their skills, while an immigrant from a likely poorer country did.

End rant

This was probably true a few years ago, but Canada’s tech market has shrunk a lot. I had the option to move to Canada or Germany, and I chose the latter, even though I wasn’t happy about having to pick up German and dealing with EU bureaucracies. I had trouble finding a well-paid job in Canada that would give me an okay lifestyle in somewhere that's not Alberta.

What's wrong with Alberta? (Genuinely asking, I know close to nothing about Alberta)

It's remote and gets extremely cold in the winter. Life is sort of lonely there if you come from a warmer region. However, at least for me, all the opportunities I was getting was there.

The market is still going, it’s just pretty tight right now, yeah. For what it’s worth, I lived in Europe for 5 years (NL) before this and honestly I think you’ve made a great choice there too. I learned a lot working in the Netherlands, and there’s lots of great things about living there you can’t find in North America. I miss not being bound to a car!

>After the Twitter saga, two of my acquaintances had to leave the US after being sacked. The H1B is tied to your job, and switching employers is incredibly stressful since you need to find someone willing to sponsor you.

Easiest way to fix this issue. Tie the Visa to a state or federal government. They check in and can stay as long as they are working in X industry in potentially Y state. Still not as easy to move, but the company has much less leverage to keep an H1B hostage.

> It’s hard to get excited about learning German and joining a local tech company for peanuts in salary.

I don't know about Germany but in the Netherlands there is also a minimum income restriction in order to get a knowledge worker visa. I would be surprised if Germany didn't have one as well.

BlueCard has very specific floor too. The Op describing the process using some super utopian terms excluding all the same thorny bits but I suspect Op is not familiar with the requirements too.

I went through the process a year ago, and it wasn’t easy. Yes, there’s a minimum income requirement, and European bureaucracy is a nightmare. On top of that, salaries here are peanuts compared to what I used to make.

While the US is more expensive and its healthcare system can be a pain, I still managed to save more money there than I can now. Europe is just poorer, and the tech industry is much smaller. In terms of opportunities, cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, or London don’t even come close to North Carolina, let alone SF/ NYC.

On top of that, the language barrier is frustrating—I can’t imagine anyone being thrilled about learning a new language, earning less, and working in relative obscurity. Still, I moved because dealing with the H1B process in the US was even worse.

> I still managed to save more money there than I can now. Europe is just poorer,

In Europe (at least speaking from the perspective of the Netherlands) a lot of money / resources go to fee's employer have to pay, unlimited sick days, maternity leave (also for men), protection from getting fired, the fact that you have more humane rights with your blue card then a H1B, etc. That stuff costs a society money and someone has to pay for that. It's all money which is there, but you don't get to "see it" because often it is paid directly by employers. It is basically all wealth redistribution which is simply not there in the US. So sure, it means you will be able to pocket less money, but that doesn't directly mean there is less money in the system.

As far as I know, the Blue card income requirement is the same across the EU, and also quite a bit higher than the HSV income requirement in the Netherlands. If you have a choice, the Blue card is better as it gives more mobility and more time to find a new job if you get fired (in general, I think it's the same for the first 6 months).

It does have an income requirement. In Germany, it’s around 50k Euros per year, and many companies just pay the bare minimum.

That said, I was fairly lucky and found something that isn’t terrible, so I moved. Other than the language barrier, I don’t have many complaints. I’ve heard the language situation is better in the Netherlands than in Germany.

As long as you’re not Indian or Chinese, you can get a green card in 2-3 years in US

Indeed. As you should. Indians and Chinese are no longer considered minorities in the US, so it makes sense to curb the influx.

However, the problem is that the US tech market is volatile, with zero job security. Since H1B makes it difficult to switch employers, tech companies often exploit this and pay these workers disproportionately. On top of that, there’s always the looming risk of getting fired before securing a green card, and the stress of that hangs over you constantly. This part could definitely be improved.

How is 3% of the population not a minority?

The quota is fixed per country. For India and China it gets filled immediately. So the sentiment is that they’re no longer considered minority as quotas from other countries are barely filled.

And honestly, it's kind of nuts, when you think about it. For India at least, it's better compared to the EU than a 'country'. The concept of 'India' is like 'Christendom'. It describes a very broad cultural region. But realistically, the gulf between culture in one state in India and another is as different as the gulf in culture between the UK and France. It's a bizarre accident of history that they even are under one sovereign jurisdiction. The languages are different (even more diverse than Europe, since there's two independent language families), the writing system is different, the food is different, the religion is different (despite what everyone says, Hinduism is a broad spectrum of beliefs; it's like classifying Judaism and Islam together as the same thing not to mention massive non-Dharmic cultural groups that have also been there a very long time and are sufficiently 'Indian').

That is to say... if the goal is diversity, which is a good goal, you should probably split some of these larger countries up. Especially countries like India which are not dominated by any one ethnic group. There is no equivalent to the Han Chinese in India.

Unfortunately, the basic precept here seems to be 'has brown skin' makes you exactly the same as anyone else with brown skin, which leads to absurdities, such as California's old anti-miscegenation law that considered Indians and Mexicans the same race.

It's nuts but at the same time, removing the limit isn't viable as in that case India and China will clog up the entire system.

I was suggesting a limit based on subnational distinctions or another form of delineation. Although in general, I tend to be anti immigration, so I would rather just see a total cap and no quota.

India has had those borders long, long before the British. It was initially formed under the Mauryan empire in 300BC and quite a few times again since then. Infact if you consider the Mauryans, Mughals and the British, India has had these borders for 1000s of years.

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

India has had those borders in the same way the 'greater Mediterranean' has had those borders.

Mauryans were an empire which means that they ruled over disparate nations

No the country of India is in fact not at all united. The various jatis worship different gods, speak different languages, have distinct cultures. Just because they all celebrate a few holidays in common and have some shared cultural beliefs does not make them the same

This is like saying every Roman Catholic is an Italian.

Lastly, the Mauryans never ruled all the way to South India. This is the first time in history the entirety of 'Bharat' has been under one polity (although arguably with the exclusion of Pakistan and Bangladesh, even this is wrong).

Every place in the world was small disparate kingdoms until the rise of nation states. If anything India has been united longer than almost any other place in the world.

Since when does a country mean a single cultural group? By that metric Switzerland, Russia, the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Central Asia, most of SE Asia, any country in Africa, large parts of the Middle East and South America are not countries. For that matter, all of China isn’t Han Chinese, there are Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Zhuang, Hui etc.

> For that matter, all of China isn’t Han Chinese, there are Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Zhuang, Hui etc.

The difference is that no one clan in India comprises any majority. Again, imagine a country where the french lived next to the english and the italian (like literal next door neighbors), but kept their own languages, customs, etc and only intermarried people like them. That is India. There is ample evidence for this. The differences between the cultures can be extreme.

It is relatively recently that any person in India would even claim to be 'Indian'. Most identify with the state / jati they belong to. Yes, they're 'Indian' in the same way that an Indian is 'Asian' or an Englishman is 'Eurasian', but it's not a coherent identity.

The indian gov't is certainly trying to make that a reality (this is the source of their 'Hindu nationalism' -- which is really a particular kind of North Indian hegemony), but it's been a long time coming, and there are a lot of issues with it.

Also, this is wrong.

There is no quota for the H1B visa.

There is a quota for the number of H1B visa holders who have then additionally been sponsored by their company (something which costs a company $20k at a minimum) that can get permanent residency in a year.

White people are 10% of worldwide population. The concept of "minority" changes depending on what you're analysing.

Is the H1B a worldwide visa?

> Indians and Chinese are no longer considered minorities in the US, so it makes sense to curb the influx.

Why would this ever be rational a basis for immigration?

It's not rational at all. India and China are huge, and subjecting them to the same quota as a tiny island is irrational.

What would be rational quotas for countries that have over 1B people?

How about no quota at all based on nationality (actually place of birth) when you already have a limit of 65k visas a year being apportioned by lottery.

Very unlikely. The per country quota is to limit influence of any one country via immigration.

Then one country would clog up the entire system.

Why should the population of the country even be a factor in deciding how many immigrants we'll accept from there?

Not saying it is the actual reason, but one rationale is that you don't want a sudden influx of a single demographic taking over the nation and disproportionately affect policy making and culture.

It would take 100 years for a single demographic if they were using all the 65000 annual H1B visas to reach 2% of the population assuming the population doesn’t grow for a century.

This argument makes no sense at all.

Hasnt happened at the country level but has happened at the company level

As someone mentioned:

> Hasnt happened at the country level but has happened at the company level

Yep, I've seen a company completely taken over by a single nationality and the result wasn't anything to be happy about.

First, are we talking about the green card or H1B? There is no quota on H1B and we already see a shift in culture and demographic in many companies.

Second, an immigrant can take their spouse, have kids, sponsor their families' visas, etc. Any one of these will double their demographic's representation, and they are not mutually exclusive, i.e. it can easily be triple or quadruple, or more.

> There is no quota on H1b.

There is no per-country quota on H1b, but the total number of H1bs are capped to 85000, (and close to 100k if you include research / non profits) a year.

A lot of this feels like a worry over the fact that many tech companies now are no longer majority American (or white), with Meta being the first tech company that’s fallen below the 50% threshold. Probably other companies will fall soon, looking at the trends. Has Meta’s culture been destroyed? I don’t know, feels like Mark has far more control over Metas culture than the immigrants who choose to work there.

India is about as diverse as Europe for most dimensions of diversity.

I will push back on that. "India is about as diverse as southern or western europe for most dimension of diversity" is probably more fair. As diverse as europe, especially if you include the Balkans, southern europe, northern europe and "eastern" europe (in a large sense, including Georgia, and western Kazakstan), seems quite hard, for a subcontinent at least.

India has 270 languages with at least 10K speakers; Europe has ~200 languages. India has ~1.4B people; Europe has ~750M people. India has about ~2000 distinct ethnic groups; Europe has ~200.

Don't let the subcontinent bit trick you.

s/immigration/skilled immigration

is there some stat that supports this?

because I feel like foreign relations between India and the US have never beeen better

I saw it first hand. My Indian colleagues mentioned that their queue to transition from H1B to green card is impossibly long. It’s just how the numbers work. There are just too many Indians applicants and not enough seats.

This is presumably about the per-country limits on H1Bs- i.e. most countries aren't hitting their quota, so if you apply for one as a citizen of most countries, the wait is comparatively minimal.

ahhh I misunderstood I thought there was just one global pool for H1B did not realize there were per country limits

What do you mean? My green card application has been pending for 9 years. Based on current projections I won’t get it in less than 100 years or so. Indian. This is a well known fact.

my bad I misread I thought this was for the H1B which I read had a fixed quota hope all goes well with your application

does this mean if you change your citizenship to a low population country by paying 100k and then applying it would speed up the process? or does USCIS have some law that prevents that

It's not about foreign relations but how long the queue is.

The current date for India (Employment-based green cards) is most backlogged, followed by China, Mexico, Philippines, and Others (Others being its own category).

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

It's 3-4 years these days, unless you qualify for EB-1. Every step in the process takes a few months longer than it used to.

But those numbers are not comparable. In most European countries, you first spend a number of years on a temporary residence permit, and then you can apply for permanent residence. That application typically takes less than a year to process. In the US, you can apply for permanent residence any time, but the application process takes several years.

2-3 years are no longer true. rest of the world (aka not Indian or Chinese) wait time if starting now is more like 5-6 years and possibly longer