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Comment by klardotsh | Hacker News Reader

Moving to Europe is anything but trivial. Have you looked at y'all's immigration processes recently? It can be a real bear.

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Yeah. It is much harder now than it used to be. I know a couple of people who came from the US ~15 to 10 years ago and they had it easy. It was still a nightmare with banks that don’t want to deal with US citizens, though.

As Americans, getting a long-term visa or residency card is not too hard, provided you have a good job. It’s getting the job that’s become more difficult. For other nationalities, it can range from very easy to very hard.

Yeah it depends on which countries you're interested in. Netherlands, Ireland, and the Scandinavian ones are on the easier side as they don't require language fluency to get (dev) jobs, and their languages aren't too hard to learn either.

Do you count Finland? I heard that Finnish is very hard to learn.

Finnish people are probably nice when people try to learn their language. Hahaha. Can't say that about the other places.

Most Scandinavians would rather speak English than listen to a foreigner try to speak their language.

Strictly speaking, Finland is nordic, not scandinavian. And their language is entirely different. I was under the impression Fins and Estonians are happy when people try to learn. Am I wrong?

Luckily a certain American to Finland HN:er has been making it slightly easier ... :^)

https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/

... But, no, it's still a very forbidding language.

If you don't have a university degree, most of EU/EEA immigration policy wants nothing to do with you, even if you're American or have several YoE. Source: am a self-taught US dev who has repeatedly looked into immigration to northern/western Europe over the years. If anything it continually gets more stringent every time I look. Forget looking for jobs, there's not even visa paths for most countries.

But isn't the same true for the US? To me it seems it's pretty similar both for Europeans moving to the US and Americans moving to the EU: have higher education, find a job, get a work visa...?

No clue, I don't know much about US immigration policy other than that it is, by all accounts I've heard, a nightmare. I know (from past experience) that Canada has no-degree-friendly paths, but I have no reason to expect the US (with its current set of policies especially) would be that progressive/open.

If you have a US or Japanese passport and want to try NL: https://expatlaw.nl/dutch-american-friendship-treaty aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT . It applies to freelancers.

Yeah, I'm in NL, so this is my frame of reference. Also, in many companies English is the main language, so that helps.

Interesting thanks!

I made a career out of understanding this. In Germany it’s quite feasible. The only challenge is finding affordable housing, just like elsewhere. The other challenge is the speed of the process, but some cities are getting better, including Berlin. Language is a bigger issue in the current job market though.

Counter: come to Taiwan! Anyone with a semi active GitHub can get a Gold Cars Visa. 6 months in you're eligible for national health insurance (about 30$ usd/month). Cost of living is extremely low here.

However salaries are atrocious and local jobs aren't really available to non mandarin speakers. But if you're looking to kick off your remote consulting career or bootstrap some product you wanna build, there's not really anywhere on earth that combines the quality of life with the cost of living like Taiwan does.

+1, Taiwan is a great place

>However salaries are atrocious and local jobs aren't really available to non mandarin speakers.

You make such a hard bargain.

>there's not really anywhere on earth that combines the quality of life with the cost of living like Taiwan does.

Tempting, but I think the last thing I need for what little work I can grab is to create a 14 hour time zone gap.

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