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Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

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Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#201

Post by ulfw »

afafsd wrote: post #195
ulfw wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a Google or Apple or Facebook can bid $100K+ to get someone a visa in this proposed auctioning system. A 10person startup couldn't reasonably.

But that's part of the labour budget. It's like saying that small companies can't compete with big companies for employees, because they can't afford to pay them as much. If your small company wants to employ someone then you have to be willing to pay as much as a big company will for the same employee. And that goes whether you're just paying salary or paying salary plus visa price. The only disadvantage I can see t…

But that's the thing. Labour budgets ARE smaller at smaller companies. Hence your salary at a startup will most of the time be lower than what you could make at a similar position at a big corp. They make up for it by handing out more equity.

Whereas a large company can make a better case for paying say $100K on a visa for a $200K/year job, this is much harder for a startup paying e.g. $100K+1% equity for said job. If I have only $1MM or so in funding as a startup I am limited to what I can pay and couldn't reasonably waste a year's worth of salary on a visa, whereas a $50,000MM revenue company might have more leeway. No?

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#202

Post by amberruth »

wyclif wrote: post #171
davidw wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not job related, but family related: if you're married, here in Italy, you can stay, end of story. Effective immediately. In the US, the process is something like 6 months, although apparently there was/is a backlog, and they were taking something like a year to process applications for spouses . It gives you an idea of how screwed up the system is.

It doesn't take a year for spouses through USCIS. More like a few months.

I'm an American have been trying to live in the US with my spouse for over a year so I can go back to school. I'm still waiting and unsure if we can even get in. Kafka-esque and nightmare can hardly describe the feeling.

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#203

Post by Xylakant »

bdamm wrote: post #166
BrainInAJar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Canadian, and I've rejected countless job offers because it'd mean ~6 years of my spouse not being able to work until we get green cards.

It's not so bad if you spend some of that time raising children :)

What if the spouse does not want to raise children but rather would prefer to work. What if the partners would prefer to both raise the children and both work less? "Just go raise some children" just promotes the gender inequality that people have been trying to fix for ages.

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#204

Post by jarek »

lsc wrote: post #177
0xab wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of immigrants as a percentage of population the US is nothing special. Canada has a lot more (closer to 19% instead of 14%). Many European countries have statistics similar to that of the US (Sweden has a bit more, the UK a bit less, etc). But I digress. The problem with the existing system is that it is insane and a waste of resources. One has to get a lawyer and wait for a long time with no certainty in th…

>It just makes no sense. Now, I'm not saying this is right or wrong; it's a complex issue, and I am personally undecided. But you seem to be missing a major argument against the "points system" you describe. The Canadian system explicitly biases the system in favor of the wealthy and well-educated. That's exactly what the "points" system is meant to do. Now, many people think this is a good thing; their argument is t…

> but maybe weren't wealthy enough to get an advanced degree.

Of course, in many countries the ability to get an advanced degree is not very dependent on being wealthy

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#205

Post by lsc »

jarek wrote: post #204
lsc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It just makes no sense. Now, I'm not saying this is right or wrong; it's a complex issue, and I am personally undecided. But you seem to be missing a major argument against the "points system" you describe. The Canadian system explicitly biases the system in favor of the wealthy and well-educated. That's exactly what the "points" system is meant to do. Now, many people think this is a good thing; their argument is t…

> but maybe weren't wealthy enough to get an advanced degree. Of course, in many countries the ability to get an advanced degree is not very dependent on being wealthy

>Of course, in many countries the ability to get an advanced degree is not very dependent on being wealthy

I... find your assertion to be unlikely. Of course, I could be wrong. Do you have statistics? Is there a country where there is not a very strong correlation between high parental income and advanced degrees?

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#206

Post by jarek »

lsc wrote: post #205
jarek wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but maybe weren't wealthy enough to get an advanced degree. Of course, in many countries the ability to get an advanced degree is not very dependent on being wealthy

>Of course, in many countries the ability to get an advanced degree is not very dependent on being wealthy I... find your assertion to be unlikely. Of course, I could be wrong. Do you have statistics? Is there a country where there is not a very strong correlation between high parental income and advanced degrees?

No statistics, sorry. If you want to look yourself try the usual suspects, India, Iran, ex-Soviet states...

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#207

Post by Schweigi »

wyclif wrote: post #171
davidw wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not job related, but family related: if you're married, here in Italy, you can stay, end of story. Effective immediately. In the US, the process is something like 6 months, although apparently there was/is a backlog, and they were taking something like a year to process applications for spouses . It gives you an idea of how screwed up the system is.

It doesn't take a year for spouses through USCIS. More like a few months.

K1/IR1/CR1 processing times are still around 6-8 months. A nightmare if a couple just got married or is going to and need to live apart during this time. Additionally the process is not straight forward and a lot of people will need help from a lawyer which makes it expensive.

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#208

Post by raverbashing »

afafsd wrote: post #183
0xab wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of immigrants as a percentage of population the US is nothing special. Canada has a lot more (closer to 19% instead of 14%). Many European countries have statistics similar to that of the US (Sweden has a bit more, the UK a bit less, etc). But I digress. The problem with the existing system is that it is insane and a waste of resources. One has to get a lawyer and wait for a long time with no certainty in th…

It's interesting, actually. In some ways the US is actually the small-government low-regulation country that it likes to pretend to be, but in other areas it's just a labyrinth of aggresive mollases-paced bureaucracy. Examples: Example: the DMV. In both Australia and the US the procedure for getting my licence renewed is the same. I go into an office, I fill out a form, they take a picture, and I get a licence. The d…

> It's interesting, actually. In some ways the US is actually the small-government low-regulation country that it likes to pretend to be, but in other areas it's just a labyrinth of aggresive mollases-paced bureaucracy. Examples:

Exactly this. There's a myth that the US is less bureaucratic than Europe, for example, and while in Europe you have the things like Italy which are horrible (in Bureaucracy terms) a lot of things are simpler.

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#209

Post by sireat »

hkmurakami wrote: post #162
WildUtah wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An auction is the obvious solution. Submit bids with your application for the fee to be paid yearly to the USA and the highest bidders get the H1-B visas. There's no need to raise the cap and all the Apples and Googles get all the applicants they want. Today the majority of H1-B visas go to Wipro and Infosys and the like for low paid tech grunts; Apple won't have any trouble outbidding them. And those tech grunt comp…

With an auction system like that, basically every small business will be out of the picture then.

The more I think about it, the more I like the auction system.

The big companies that need highly skilled employees can afford to pay en masse.

Now if you are a US based small business and you found a dream employee in say Australia. Either this employee is so valuable that you would be willing to shell out something like 50-100k to bring him/her over, or what is more likely you become flexible and let him/her work remotely.

I do not foresee many small businesses who would actually need to bring a foreign employee in for a constant presence in US. Does a barbershop really need to bring a foreign born barber. If it does then that barber would probably qualify as an alien of extraordinary ability...

My views is biased as a European who programs for a medium sized US business and sees no need to visit US more than once every year.

Re: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

#210

Post by jakobsen »

mschuster91 wrote: post #137
disbelief wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me, EU countries have their own immigration demand problems. Especially a place like Germany which has one of the few functioning economies in the block lately. People flock there looking for work. Other countries with huge immigration demand include England and Spain. There are simply better ways of dealing with high immigration demand than "dump everyone into a pot regardless of education/experience/viability…

> Other countries with huge immigration demand include England and Spain Spain is just wanted due to the proximity to Africa and a lot of African immigrants/refugees using this vector. > There are simply better ways of dealing with high immigration demand than "dump everyone into a pot regardless of education/experience/viability/urgency and randomly select a few". We Germans deal with asylum seekers by putting > 2.5…

> Spain is just wanted due to the proximity to Africa and a lot of African immigrants/refugees using this vector.

I hear this from time to time, but data paints a radically different picture. What you describe is only the case for sub-Saharan immigrants who are just a tiny, tiny minority of the inmigrants coming to Spain. Most inmigrants come from:

1-Romania (for which Spain is obviously not in the path to any other country)

2-Morocco (the vast majority of whom arrive legally since the late 90s)

3-UK (and contrary to popular belief, only 21% of them are over 65 years old)

Then, the largest component of immigration is from the former colonies, due to the shared language (so, again, not being used as a vector)

All of this data is available online on the INE (national institute of statistics)

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