Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

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This was a great read and hits close to home for me. Not many people realise that getting a visa to live and work in the USA is extremely difficult, if not possible.

I recently did some contracting work for a US based startup. I am based in Australia and the startup was in Seattle. I am in this weird area because I am self-taught and have no college/university degree and fall just under the 12 years required experience to substitute for a degree. The rule is 3 years of proven work experience for every year of a standard 4 year degree. So no visas applied to me I could apply for.

I eventually just took a remote contracting position with the company and flew over for the maximum 3 month stay and travelled around. During my time there I encountered a lot of taxi/Uber drivers who immigrated from various countries and nothing personally against them, but I have a unique skillset that this startup was looking for and was struggling to find themselves and yet it is impossible for me to travel and work in the USA? Once again no offence or ill-will, but how is it possible for someone to move to the USA to drive a cab, but a developer can't actually get a job in the US? Kind of perplexing.

Supposedly the US values highly skilled jobs, but it seems they only class professions like a lawyer, doctor or some other profession that requires an extended period of study as highly skilled. For software development maybe considered highly skilled, but not so much front-end development/Javascript.

Comparatively, Canada make it easy to obtain a work/stay visa for an initial period of 2 years and I believe you can keep extending it. You don't need any academic qualifications or jump through any massive hurdles. Why is the US like this, especially with a close ally country like Australia? It's the same story in the UK, if not, you get even more scrutiny trying to get into the UK for work. But as the author writes, the skilled immigration problem seems to be affect people from everywhere.

I guess it's like that everywhere. I studied in Poland with a friend from Nigeria, and the amount of hoops he had to jump through every 6 months to extend his stay permit was unreal, even despite the fact that he spoke fluent Polish, had a part time job and got really good grades. Each time he was asking to extend his permits, it could very easily be denied for whatever reason and he would have to abandon everything and be flown back to Nigeria. Also, he saw hostility towards him in every office he went to.

Meanwhile, if you're illiterate but from Chechnya, you get a free apartment and welfare checks here courtesy of the taxpayer, because apparently "the situation is political". It's ridiculous.

When it comes to visas everyone wants to be special. Unfortunately the international recognized way of being special is having a bachelors degree. If that wasn't a requirement it would probably be even harder skilled workers to get visas. It sounds like if you work a couple of more years you can apply for an E-2 visa and hopefully avoid the H1-B lottery. That is not a bad position to be in. Considering the outlook for someone wanting to immigrate to the US to drive a cab I wouldn't be very bothered by that either.

BC degree is a bullshit you can literally buy it in many countries. By buying i mean you pay for tuition and you visit the school for 2 years and then you get a degree. But not only is that very expensive for most of the people in post-soviet countries but also worthless.

They will not teach you anything useful. Not even when you apply for CS. They exploit the post-soviet system.

And there are many good people in these countries. Not exceptional, not 1% of mathematicians,physicists or ninja programmers but better than the average. Yet they did not get a chance.

Actually if we talk about post-Soviet countries some degrees there have value. They teach physics and math really good, otherwise, why would there be so many talented Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian programmers? When it comes to social studies, economics, law, not so much, but if someone got degree from place like MFTI it's probably gives that person more credit that degree from average US university.

I agree. Post Soviet countries had really good education. My Hungarian Bsc level maths/cs degree was way more difficult than my UK masters or my second masters in Belgium. You needed to learn and you had to think, not only buff back the knowledge. Also the competition was quite high. Still, the universities of my masters' are in the top 200 and the Hungarian university is not in the top 500. Well, that's life. But I still was not able to get a visa (to be ontopic).

Correction, E-3 visa i.e. H-1B for Australians. E-2 is if you want to start a business. Not available to, as in the article, Russians though.

Nope, the US does not have a skills based migration system. It's entirely family based. Opposite of Australia, which is built around skilled migration and does not give preference to family members. It's ridiculous, we turn our backs on the highly skilled in order to admit someone because they are the parent or sibling of a US citizen. Why should we import parents with no guarantee they will do anything but need expensive Medicare and Social Security in old age?

> Nope, the US does not have a skills based migration system. It's entirely family based.

This is false. The US has both economic and family-based components of the immigration system, and the former part includes subcomponents for which special skills are a key factor.

> Why should we import parents with no guarantee they will do anything but need expensive Medicare and Social Security in old age?

Social Security eligibility and benefit levels are based on payments made into the system during working years.

It's pretty easy to qualify for Medicare. You can just live here for a few years.

It's not false. There is no skilled permanent migration system like what Australia has. Over there, you can get permanent residence by being young, educated, skilled and proficient in English -- without a job offer. There is no such method here in the US. In addition, our temporary work visas are extremely limited and cumbersome and capped. The system clearly favors "family reunification" over skills.

> It's not false.

The two sentence unit I responded to ("Nope, the US does not have a skills based migration system. It's entirely family based.") is false.

Its possible to define "skills-based migration system" in such a way that the first sentence alone is true, and it might even be reasonable to do so; you'd have to use an entirely unreasonable definition of "family based" for the second half to be true. There are family-based, employment-based, and diversity-of-origin (which is also skill-based, in that it requires either a specified level of education or a specified level of work-experience is selected employment areas) immigrant visa (which seems to be what you are referring to as "permanent migration") categories.

> Over there, you can get permanent residence by being young, educated, skilled and proficient in English -- without a job offer. There is no such method here in the US.

On a diversity visa, you can get permanent resident status by being educated or skilled in particular jobs without a job offer here -- you don't have to be young, but you do have to be from a country with a low level of immigration to the US.

> In addition, our temporary work visas are extremely limited and cumbersome and capped.

Most (temporary or permanent, including most family-based categories) visas are cumbersome and capped. But I'm not sure why you address only "temporary work visas" and continue to pretend that permanent immigrant visas are only family-based, when that is not accurate. There are immigrant (permanent) employment-based visa categories, as well as non-immigrant categories.

> The system clearly favors "family reunification" over skills.

OR, given the permanent employment-based visa categories -- and ignoring diversity visas for the moment -- perhaps it just prefers actual employment as the concrete evidence of useful skills.

Diversity visa is your example, really? Diversity visa is completely random, that's what it's called the lottery. It has nothing to do with your skills. It's all chance.

Employment based immigration requires an employer sponsor to file a petition. Does not refute my point that there is no independent skilled permanent immigration scheme.

"Entirely" is an exaggeration but the system strongly skews to family based migration. This is not a wild assertion, it's widely known to be true.

> Diversity visa is your example, really? Diversity visa is completely random, that's what it's called the lottery.

All the quota-limited immigration visa categories are distributed, among those qualified, by lottery. Diversity visa aren't called "the lottery", the process for assigning all quota-limited visas is called that. The diversity visa is expressly skill-qualified, permanent, and independent of employer sponsorship.

> Employment based immigration requires an employer sponsor to file a petition.

True. For most employment-based categories, though there are several exceptions.

> Does not refute my point that there is no independent skilled permanent immigration scheme.

"independent" was never stated previously. The original claims were that there was no skill-based permanent immigration system and that it was all family-based. Permanent immigration to the US is not all family-based, as there are family-based, employment-based (most categories of which are skill-qualified), and diversity (which is skill-qualified) immigrant (permanent) visas.

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