

The Founder Visa Ignores Immigration Reality  - yangyang
http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2009/09/founder-visa-ignores-immigration.html

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pmichaud
He's right, immigration is insane. My wife is British, one in several million
smart, highly educated, and she could barely scrape in.

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tptacek
Why was it hard to get your wife in? I thought it was easy to get spouses in.

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cousin_it
I guess she immigrated before they met.

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pmichaud
Bingo.

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seldo
Three cheers to Kirk for pointing out the particularly demeaning way in which
gay people are treated for the purposes of immigration. Everybody knows that
marriage is viewed as the "easier" way of getting into the US: find somebody
who likes you enough to marry you for two years, then you can divorce and you
can keep the green card. But if you're gay? Get to the back of the line.

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joubert
Hopefully DOMA will get overturned and/or UAFA passed in the current session.

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huherto
The U.S. immigration is definitely insane. I know people that have been
waiting for ten or more years. It almost doesn't matter what qualifications
you have.

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potatolicious
I'm currently working in the US on a TN visa. I like it here, and if given the
chance I'd probably stay. But the odds of me being able to do that, without
jumping through large number of inhumane hoops like a circus animal, are low.

Odds are I will be moving back to ole Canada at some point. The US is so busy
being afraid of everyone else that they're _very, very_ quickly driving
themselves into irrelevance.

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jgrant27
Canada is a great country too. I'm sure that if you asked many people who have
jumped through all the hoops like a circus animal to stay in the US that a
significant percentage of them would tell you that it just wasn't worth it in
the end.

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kevinpet
Better option would simply be the "write us a big fat check" visa. Presumably,
the only people who would be willing to pay, say, $50,000 over the course of
five years would be those who can make enough to make it worthwhile. It would
also get rid of the perverse incentives related to having to stay with the
employer you got the H1-B from.

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pavlov
Don't underestimate the willingness of third world families to send their
children to the US under this "fat check visa" scheme, regardless of whether
they would have any source of guaranteed income.

Currently Africans are commonly paying over 10,000 euros for an illegal trip
to an undetermined European country. The families raise the money for young
men even though there's no guarantee whether the kid will end up in Norway or
Italy (and often no further than Morocco). Compared to this, a five-year US
visa for $50k would be an extremely attractive option. I doubt that desperate
young men whose families are hopelessly in debt are the kind of immigrants
that the US would want to specifically attract.

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ajju
Agreed. Which is why skill based immigration has to be a huge component.
Canada does this exceptionally well.

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radu_floricica
> ...if his firm decided to let him go for whatever reason, he had two weeks
> to leave the country forever.

I love EU. It got something right.

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KirkWylie
FWIW, this isn't an EU thing, it's a national thing. Immigration from outside
the EU is 100% left to the member states, and it's why I can't work in the
rest of the EU until I get off my arse and apply for my British citizenship:
member states have complete control over their visas and citizenship. It's
just that once you have citizenship in any EU state, you're allowed to live
and work in any other without any discrimination based on your nationality
(assuming you're not from one of the New States of course).

I love that the UK has same-sex immigration rights, and had them before much
of the rest of the EU. Now they're common-place, but when the UK did it, it
was pretty new and special.

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radu_floricica
What I meant was, within EU the notion of having two weeks to pack your bags
is already absurd. This, I think, is what should be fought against, not
specific immigration rights. What is needed now is to enlarge this space with
countries like US, Japan or Australia, and slowly with the whole world.

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Ionic_Walrus
Im planning to move back to Bangalore to my roots. Anyone have an idea what
the tech scene in Bangalore is ?

