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My Immigration Story

ilyasemin.com

91–100 of 108 posts

Re: My Immigration Story

#91
Hi, I am part of a team of three immigrants in the US building an app to help people settle in a new country (initially, the US).

Like Mint.com, Credit Karma, or TurboTax for immigrants, YourOwn.com provides an interactive, gamified tool, with customized action plans and to-do lists, budgets, reminders, community support, and step-by-step guides that help immigrants quickly and easily establish a home of their own in a new country. Our first site will help people move to the US, then we will add other countries. Have a look at http://yourown.com - we will soon launch, by invitation only. Thanks!

Re: My Immigration Story

#92
post #71

Ok, for others who might be interested in immigrating, a few other things that I learned from my experience: - If you already are done with your studies, look for jobs at educational institutions. Universities, research laboratories, think tanks. They are exempt from the quota and can hire at any time of the year and outside of the quota. There a few downsides. First, most of the openings at these institutions will r…

+1 on the Canada hack. Canada now has an "Express Entry" process for skilled workers that grants permanent residence in months 6 months or less. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/express/express-entry... However, applying for a Work Permit is still rather cumbersome (which is typically the first step after the job offer and before Express Entry) I just went through this process with an employee. While there is n…

It will take 6 months before you're covered by a provinces health plan.

Re: My Immigration Story

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expe…

> 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 el…

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.

Re: My Immigration Story

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 el…

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 cap…

> 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.

Re: My Immigration Story

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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).

Re: My Immigration Story

#96
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice story! How did you get your first few clients/customers. Did you get investor funding for Datanyze?

It was bootstrapped to a pretty significant (>$1m) revenue and then we raised some money. I'll write about it one day - another crazy story.

I'm looking forward to reading it. Your visa story is well-written.

Re: My Immigration Story

#97
post #66

It seems the author spent a lot of time messing with a horrible bureaucracy. Is it an article against the corrupted system written in so elegant manner?

I would not call it corrupted. I would probably call it ineffective.

Re: My Immigration Story

#99

Interesting read. I have a somewhat provocative question currently roaming trough my mind - you said that you "really appreciate the opportunity this country gave" to you (which is nice, BTW, but that's from a patient frame), considering now all what you've paid and what you're giving (i.e. from an actor frame), do they deserve you?

Absolutely. This country gave me more than I gave it back (yet).

Re: My Immigration Story

#100

Didn't Obama introduce a startup visa a few months ago? What happened to it?

The most recent article I saw on it [1] says that "within the year" Obama is likely to sign an executive order that allows for the founders of funded startups to get visas, dependent on the amount of funds raised. If you raise $200,000 from a qualified U.S. investor you will get a two-year entrepreneurship visa to come live in America. If you raise $750,000 or more from a qualified U.S. investor or group of investors…

I don't think raising money should be an indicator here though. For example, we bootstrapped the company till about $1M in ARR, and I know a lot of great startup that were 100% bootstrapped.
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