There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin."
Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more difficult than English or French, but there are fewer learning resources to do so.
So, your best options for the greatest amount of opportunity is to learn English -- you have the UK, America, Canada, and Australia as potential landing spots. (This is, of course, not universal. Developing countries with French as a national language will prefer France, for example.)
Australia has an uncapped temporary migration program for skilled workers (http://www.immi.gov.au/Visas/Pages/457.aspx), the situation described in this article can not happen in Australia.
On a permanent level, Australia has a permanent program of around 180,000 places a year in a country with only 22 million people.
And those 180,000 places is only the front door into Australia. The back door is to immigrate to New Zealand, become a NZ citizen, then move to Australia. Because Australia and New Zealand have a single labor market, citizens of both can live and work in each others countries without any special permission or numerical restrictions. From my personal observations, virtually all immigrants to NZ move to Australia once they can, and frequently refer to New Zealand as Australia's back door.
Not sure what you mean by "potentially harder". I've met many people who immigrated to NZ because they couldn't get into Australia. They then moved to Australia within a month or two of qualifying for and getting NZ citizenship. It used to take 3 yrs of NZ residency (tho with very lenient allowances for time out of the country every calendar year) to become a citizen but was changed to 5 yrs around 10 yrs ago, so maybe the situation's changed a little since then.
But I don't understand why you'd want to leave, having lived in the US, UK, Australia, South Africa and NZ, the choice of NZ for ease of doing business and life is easy.
In the 1990's it was easier to immigrate to NZ than Australia under the different points systems of the two countries. Virtually immigrant I spoke to in NZ got in because of qualification and work experience in China.
Given that, why aren't more people trying to get to Australia to work? Aside from spiders (a personal fear of mine) it seems to be a pretty awesome place.
I'm from the UK but have been staying in Australia for a little over a year now. I'm making a hardware gadget from scratch, and some of the people involved are here. I've also lived in the US for a while.
On Bloomberg I listened to an interview with the founder of Jetstar airlines, currently owned by Qantas, and who is now expanding a renewables business, who called Australia a resource exchange economy. Reading how cooks can earn $325K a year in gas projects, and noticing that the just signed Australia - Japan free trade agreement is mostly beef and agriproducts in exchange for TV's and other electronics, the sense initially is of lack of diversity in tech.
There's no way I could make my hardware project in Australia, not that I ever intended to. I haven't been able to find a single viable option for PCB manufacture. And if a company can provide them they're almost always farmed out to China in any case.
In the UK and the US, but also Europe it's just much richer in scope and size. There are some outstanding hardware facilities in the US. They're virtually non existent in Australia, at the right level of expertise and scale.
However, one big deterrent is proximity to the rest of the world. If you want to travel home to visit family, or due to an emergency - it's going to cost a lot of money and time.
Because of the distance, the logistics of physically moving there are also that much more difficult.
Then there are the mainstays - cost of living in/around major cities is quite high (though in the ICT sector earning potential is quite good), there are lots of scary critters, etc.
Lots of people are trying, but it's not that easy. You can't get a 457 temporary working visa without an Australian company willing to sponsor you. The hurdles for skilled migration are fairly high (and getting higher all the time) and the process takes several years.
It's far away, and as a developer I don't think you can earn as much as you would in the US. Certainly to be more HN specific, the startup scene is not much to talk about.
I was interested in migrating to Australia for a while, mostly because it's closer to where my wife's family lives. But it's just so expensive to live in Australia and the pay scale isn't nearly as good as the US or UK. On top of that, they have so many barriers to getting a skills visa it's just not worth it.
Can I do my own plumbing if I do it according to the codes and I am not in a union? Also why do I have to pay for a plumber that is qualified in drainlaying, gasfitting and roofing when all I need is to fix a small leak in my faucet? It's like when you need to reinstall Windows on your PC you cannot do it yourself and have to get a software engineer for $500/hr who can write assembly code and knows the difference between merge and quicksort.
Is `educated worker` some kind of euphemism for genius/top of the game or something? I am an educated worker, and probably everyone else around here.. Seems like a bit-too-broad statement(I for one am not currently interested in immigrating not one bit)
Anyway, I always thought the best would want to move to the US because it's there's top work, e.g.: there's no Tesla or SpaceX elsewhere and a top engineer would probably want to be doing this kind of work... Same with scientists that are working on ambitious research. But maybe I'm thinking about H1b as more of `top of the top, get your asses here` and it's more like `ye you're skilled enough you can try`, dunno.
With the advent of remote work upon us, I find it hard that you'd be limited to those countries.
In fact, literally the ENTIRE WORLD is your oyster, assuming you can reliably, regularly find power, wifi, and a team that'll work with you on your timezone's timeframe.
Remote work is lowering some barriers, but others aren't so easily fixed.
I'm a first-gen immigrant. My family originally moved because of rampant pollution due to unrestrained industrialization, as well as geopolitical risks (having air/bomb raid drills in school isn't really that fun). Telecommuting doesn't really fix these.
Suffice it to say, emigration/immigration is a Big Deal for the people who do it, and for the most part it isn't being done simply because the jobs are better. There are usually far more fundamental concerns behind the decision, a better economy is just one factor out of many.
The "advent of remote work" may be upon us, but a lot of places aren't really on-board yet. Go look at any job listings site — remote work is very much not the rule.
It's not that easy to emigrate from developing world to slightly more advanced developing world in many cases. Sometimes, it's easier to go straight to the top 20.
> In fact, literally the ENTIRE WORLD is your oyster, assuming you can reliably, regularly find power, wifi, and a team that'll work with you on your timezone's timeframe.
I'll add that part of the US has mild weather, and that makes it more attractive than Canada or Northern Europe to a lot of immigrants (someone from Ghana might not want to spend winters in Sweden for instance).
You missed South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, New Zealand, most of South America, Malaysia, Middle East and so on and on. Personally I put New Zealand on top of the list - as many other lists do along with the Nordic countries.
What do you mean by "take"? Canadian employers aren't very familiar with a concept of working visa in practice - they prefer you to first have a permanent residence, then they can talk about hiring you. To get permanent residence, you have to pass the process, which is many months long.
In US, if - and that's a big if - you're lucky enough to win H-1b early April, you may start working early October. Is there anything as fast with Canada? Without employer agreeing to hire you even though you don't have a working visa - i.e., you have to apply for one?
Not really. To get sponsored by an employer you need a labour market opinion and there are certain conditions (like no Canadian candidates applying for said position during a certain time period).
> There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US.
You need to pull your eyes out of your ass. The countries you mention are far from being superior; perhaps "good enough", but frankly nothing too fancy. You need to visit Hong Kong or Singapore to see how highly qualified immigrants live there like kings.
Japan has serious environmental problems and their government does not stand up to the transparency one would love their government to comply with [1]. They are rolling into huge economical depression too.
Australia. Have you ever been there? Spend couple months you will be surprise how alienated you will feel. My friends live there for 15-20 years and they will never be a part of the community. They will always feel like outsiders; mostly recognized by their accent. Australians divide themselves among those who were born here, and all outsiders who came to steal jobs. Its the mentality. It wont change. Australia has their own environmental problems too and politics & taxation goes through the roof (viva la Queen that fixes everything through more taxes).
European Union is on a brink of collapse; some countries are openly discussing living EU. Its rotten to its core by very well hidden corruption [2]; Ukraine situation that helps Russia shows their real aspirations does not help either.
Canada, they are still under Queen that can suspend the parliment anytime she wants to [3].
Then we come to US. I think its a matter of "the grass that is greener on the other side". I mean, how many of those folks applying for visa know anything about US more than from movies about "land of the free home of the brave?". Politics? How many know who Nancy Pelosy or Henry Reid are? For all they know America has this good man named Obama who gave everyone free healthcare so it can't get better than that. Did they hear about Justina Pelletier, Cliven Bundy, Kelly Thomas or hundred of thousands other cases of governmental abuse?
This is a silly and hypocritical critique. All countries have their flaws, but you're really not being fair or objective.
You lambast Japan for a lack of government transparency just as you finish extolling the virtues of Hong Kong and Singapore. You also conveniently fail to mention the salary required to live "like a king" in either of those two locations. Singapore ain't cheap. In fact, it's the world's most expensive city by several measures [1].
H1-B is pretty broad, and most applicants are certainly not eligible for mid six figure salaries in the finance hubs of Asia. "Highly qualified" for the purposes of this discussion does _not_ necessarily mean rolling in the dough.
Lastly and most comically : Canada's parliament being desolved by the Queen? That's patently absurd.
I don't think it's inappropriate language, but I find your statement that the Queen can suspend Canadian parliament any time she wants is totally incorrect. The case you link to is an exceptional one that had no jurisprudence, and was most likely decided by the Queen's representative, not the Queen herself, which is not an insignificant difference. This was the aftermath of an election with a minority government result, which almost never happens in our First Past the Post system. Your misrepresentation of this case is more offensive to my eyes than your language. My HN values intellectual correctness over proper language. :)
Of course truth is more important than civility. But the two are compatible—there's no tradeoff.
It would be great if we had a way to correct all false statements on Hacker News, but we don't. That shouldn't prevent us from addressing the corrosion of the discourse by garden-variety incivility. Pulling out those weeds is one of the big things we all can do to make HN more conducive to truth-seeking discussion in the first place.
I've traveled pretty extensively across the world for work and very few places have an internet connection that compares to even a modest broadband connection in the US. Not only that, I deal with this problem weekly from our partners in 75 countries across the world who don't have good internet connections. As well, you're discounting the world's oceans. I've worked on a ship where we provided an extremely limited internet connection that would not be suitable for rapid development work.
I'd say it's a pretty small portion of the planet that has a decent internet connection, but the detail is how you define "decent".
"Large portion of the planet"... you've got North America, South America(some exceptions), Europe, a good chunk of Asia and Australasia. That's a pretty reasonable selection of places to live isn't it?
Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more difficult than English or French, but there are fewer learning resources to do so.
So, your best options for the greatest amount of opportunity is to learn English -- you have the UK, America, Canada, and Australia as potential landing spots. (This is, of course, not universal. Developing countries with French as a national language will prefer France, for example.)
So, the answer is that it's a way out.