> The most realistic one would be to save up all your money and apply for the eb5 investor visa. If you're making 6 figures, you should be able to save up the required million dollars in about 10-20 years, depending on how much you make, and how frugal you're willing to live.
I'm an early career engineer, and this is something that a few of my friends have looked into. The number was 500k when I started working 3 years ago. It's now 800k. It looks like how much ever I work, the number will increase faster than I can save, cause there will be more people like me. Unless I become sufficiently senior and comparatively rich like a VP, I can't realistically beat the trend.
> The other possibility is you marrying someone who isn't born in India. If you did that, you can use your partner's country of birth instead of your own, when waiting for the priority date. But obviously this isn't something you can plan for, and I wouldn't recommend letting this guide your life decisions.
This is true. Your tradeoff point hits the nail on the head. I have heard some cases of people feeling like they were married to just for the GC, and some from the other side who stand some abuse. But your broad point stands.
> The last option is progressing your career to the point where you can mount a realistic eb1 application. I've heard anecdotally that it's very hard, but not as hard as people may think it is. If you work at it over a 10-20 year time frame, it may be very realistic.
Need to progress outside the US though. Unless I become a Carmack/Jeff Dean/famous inventor, the logic of the law seems to suggest that if I could rise to this position here, then an American could too. That's why the EB-1 has an allocation for applicants who became managers outside the US and transferred in.
I have upvoted you and I feel you make some great points. I wanted to iron out some details in case a third person was reading this.
I remember my employer mentioning how questions can no longer ask what the candidate is working on, but can only ask the candidate's experience (no pointers about timeline of such experience).
ex-Microsoft, this is not necessarily true.
Managers I knew see changing <2yrs in as not great. Then again, switching orgs is essentially changing companies without a different Company name. Companies that hire >10k engineers cannot be a monoculture imo. In MS, different orgs might as well have been different companies - none of the orgs trusted the other org's hiring standards and made internal candidates go through full interview loops.
In the last 4 months, I've already seen more than 5 friends in my circle who've left the US for good. They do not plan on returning to the US until the pathway to a green card is sorted out. They work at companies like Microsoft, FAANG, etc. Over the next year, another 10-15% of my friend circle is moving out of the US - most of them cite the green card issue as the primary cause of returning back.
They've already worked at good tech companies here, most of which have offices around the world. Their choices directly cause the shift of their jobs from US to outside. Couple this with the fact that many of my juniors at the best universities in India (harder to get into than Stan/MIT here) now no longer consider moving to the US because of these cases, there is already an effect of really good talent not arriving here. The effect is not obvious in a year or two, but surely over time you will notice the secondary effects: a lot of engineers coming from India/China would not be the countries'best - the best do not want to put up with this, more employees leaving earlier/not settling, the expansion of India/China offices for these tech companies, or China/India companies doing better than the US counterparts (in cases where this is already happening, a lot of the HN crowd blames Chinese protectionism rather than acknowledging the talent that already exists in those countries).
A good chunk of Olympic National Park seems to be an opportunity zone. Can anyone fill me in on what an 'investment' there might entail? IIRC, commercial activities are usually heavily restricted in national parks.