Great read, I spent years trying to sort out a US visa but gave up in the end, kudos for your determination!
Thanks. Where did you end up?
My Immigration Story
101–108 of 108 posts
Re: My Immigration Story
#102I enjoyed every line of your story, to be honest I was surprised when I read "my wife" with all this tough work you could still have your own life.
It would not have been possible without her :)
Re: My Immigration Story
#103Ilya, great story that many of us can relate with. Stories like these (very similar to our personal stories) were the inspiration behind Unshackled. Our goal is to help entrepreneurs / startup teams who are held back from building great companies simply because of their visa. While we couldn’t help you (coz we didnt exist), Unshackled aims to make an impact for many other brilliant people like you. #innovate
Re: My Immigration Story
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In that case you should be able to get an E-2 treaty investor visa fairly easily.
Re: My Immigration Story
#105DigitalSea : I agree. It's really hard to live and work somewhere other than your own country. To add to all the hardships that come with the situation, I didn;t know the language. I had to use Skype to learn Ukrainian. I had to start from scratch. I enrolled in http://preply.com/en/ukrainian-by-skype to get me started. The instructor was pretty good but of course, I couldn't learn the whole thing in a month. Although I am still struggling with the language, I realize this comes with the job.
Re: My Immigration Story
#106This 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 experien…
DigitalSea : I agree. It's really hard to live and work somewhere other than your own country. To add to all the hardships that come with the situation, I didn't know the language. I had to use Skype to learn Ukrainian. I had to start from scratch. I enrolled in http://preply.com/en/ukrainian-by-skype to get me started. The instructor was pretty good but of course, I couldn't learn the whole thing in a month. Although I am still struggling with the language, I realize this comes with the job.
Re: My Immigration Story
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: My Immigration Story
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 migr…
> 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.