Ask HN: What country does better than the U.S. in immigration law? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What country does better than the U.S. in immigration law?

7 pointstokenadult6 comments

I see there have been some threads recently discussing pg's proposal for a founder's visa as part of United States immigration law. Those threads reliably lead to a lot of replies from persons in other countries who desire to immigrate to the United States but find it inconvenient to do so.

But is there another country more welcoming of immigrants, or at least more welcoming of hacker immigrants? I was born here in the United States, and I have lived abroad about six years of my life (two stays of three years each) and have visited a few other countries besides the country I lived in. Where could I go and get a job fresh off the plane? What would be the best country to immigrate to for

a) a high-tech engineer from Norway?

b) the same from Britain?

c) the same from India?

d) the same from China?

e) a peasant from China?

f) an AIDS orphan from Africa?

Where can people go and find work immediately without immigration hassles, or with minimal hassles?

If you speak good English (either as a native speaker, or have good scores in TOEFL or equivalent), and have qualifications and work experience in an field which has a short supply of qualified workers (engineering, medicine, software, social work, and plenty of others), New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK have fairly easy paths to permanent residence. (Prove qualifications and experience, fill out forms, pay fees, wait for approval, get permanent resident visa, move.)

Getting a tech job fresh off the plane is pretty unrealistic, but shouldn't be any harder than getting one in the US. (White, native English speaking) immigrants I've met in NZ have done the interview circuit and picked up jobs over the process of a few weeks.

(I'm a New Zealand citizen, currently in the middle of the H-1B process.)

Thanks for the good level of detail in that reply. My proclivity as an American who lives at about 45 degrees north latitude would be to look for work on New Zealand's South Island if I wanted to move to an English-speaking country, so that helped a lot.

De facto or de jure?

De facto, tons of countries won't notice if you live and work in the country while on a tourist visa. You just need to take a trip out of the country every 90 days and get a new tourist visa to come back.

Like Phil says, there are plenty of places that will let you show up and start working immediately, off the books. One of those places is the United States, particularly in California.

If you're talking about legal immigration for purposes of work, however, I can't name a single place that would let you just show up and start working. The places with the easiest application process would likely be countries looking for English teachers from abroad (Japan, Korea, China), or places looking for cheap labor (formerly Dubai, Saudi Arabia, etc. getting Filipino, Pakistani and Indian laborers, or Cayman Islands seeking Jamaican workers).

Yes, it seems that the current global economic slowdown has especially hurt persons who move to other countries to work construction and send remittances home.

I know that Taiwan was relaxed in just the way you describe when I first lived (and worked) there, although I eventually got visas with explicit work permission for most of my two long stays there. And I hear that there are still a lot of English speakers who make the rounds of various countries teaching English, although that's a rather low-income career compared to most high-tech employment.

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