I’m kind of in a strange boat right now where I’m really comfortable in Canada yet I can’t shake this feeling I need to get over to the US of A in order to take advantage of that strong USD. I, like many Canadians, work for an American firm and have a TN visa. Recently, my employer offered to sponsor me for a green card, if I ever choose to relocate to the USA. I can live pretty much anywhere I want as I’m a remote employee, but I do travel to the USA for client work.
It’s a tough decision to make. While I consider it, I thought I’d ask the community. So, say you good lemmings?
I went to the US for y2k , and was there for 5 years.
I came home with the exact same amount of money as I had when I left. And I also got a deep understanding for the absolute depths of cruel poverty in the US and for safety nets they don’t have.
Do it. You’ll never be the same, and you’ll really appreciate Canada better.
What did you do there, if you don’t mind me asking?
I continued the work to build and maintain the “one true Unix” ;-) and a Linux side project until we sued IBM so they destroyed us.
So. Nerdy IT stuff that today we’d outsource and work remotely back here, but in 2k required working onsite in beautiful 2-person offices with closable doors, visual privacy, and a view of a happy groundhog most days.
Nicely phrased.
deleted by creator
Nah. Don’t feel like being caught up in one of the 15 mass shootings per day where the government will try to brush it off and blame it on trans people.
I may be dirt poor in Canada, but at least my trans neighbour and I are both safe when we leave our places.
inb4 all the comments immediately telling you it’s a bad idea i just wanna say that this isn’t a bad opportunity. america isn’t nearly as bad in day-to-day life as it seems and depending on your field you’ll almost certainly receive a large pay raise versus employment in canada. considering you can relocate anywhere in the US, cost of living shouldn’t be an issue. you very well might be able to find significantly lower cost of living in multiple american localities than in canada. if your benefits are good from your employer and can offset the costs of losing access to socialized medicine, you very well might be able to increase your gross income by a fairly significant amount. it just really amounts to playing your cards right and i’m getting the vibe you have a whole lot of wiggle room with your choices here. if you can square a lot of these issues away, america is a pretty great place to live all things considered. do realize you are entering a very volatile social atmosphere, however, and recognize you might become significantly “closer,” both physically and otherwise, to the primary major hotspots of global political instability. this isn’t necessarily bad, depending on you personally. there’s a unique opportunity for change in america currently, and it would be baseless to claim the mere existence of things like political activism, terrorism, gun violence, etc. inherently discount being here in principle. the vast majority of americans have never experienced an act of terror. in fact, if you care about a lot of global issues currently ongoing, then generally speaking america is likely your best bet for your activism or ideas to have significant impact
Activism only really works if you’re a citizen/PR of the country, otherwise you risk being deported.
The other thing is that a lot of American activism is targeted at problems that are mostly, well, American.
that’s a fair point and i wouldn’t necessarily disagree. honestly i suppose my point is more that when it comes to global issues, typically the largest multi-national organizations focused on them are based in the united states. there’s a lot more opportunities for global work here than elsewhere. that isn’t to say a lot of those same things exist in countries around the globe. but there is certainly a lot of global wealth and soft power focused around the american metropolises, and there’s no real reason to discount that. foreigners work in these nonprofits all the time. for a lot of people, working in these organizations is a capstone
Do you love mass shootings or just hate having healthcare?
Hell no. Alberta is already too conservative/religious for me, I’m not going to go down to some theocratic hellscape to make more money.
It’s not without risk. You’d have to see how much money you’d make, your cost of living including healthcare costs. Weigh them against the benefits including simply a change of scenery or sense of adventure, if it’s worth it then go forth!
Might not be worth if you already have kids, for reason some people there only care about kids when inside a womb.
The whole American political and justice system is so messed up. Look carefully at the city and state you are relocating to, they’re all different.
I sometimes want to go there but many things happening lately make me hug my city of Toronto a little tighter.
Yeah I’m trying to see how much healthcare will cost me. I should find out more by next week. I agree, their political and societal system differs a lot from ours in Canada.
I’m trying to see how much healthcare will cost me.
That’s the thing. You can’t. You never know what health problems you’ll develop in the future, and health care costs are not standardized outside of secret health insurance company formulas. It’s a complete shit show. Don’t come here.
I did as a Software Engineer. No winter (in California) and 3x more money working stateside! The worst part is being so far from my family :(
But… as much as I love Canada I also love America and now I get to have two countries 💜!!
So you’re still in California?
I lived in the US for a while. I knew people in the consular office in California who shared the stats on Canadian movement into and back out of the US. 75% of Canadian immigrants will repatriate within seven years. I was an over achiever, it took me 9.
There are advantages to being down there, but they are all centered in being childless and in good health. Everyone is one chronic illness away from bankruptcy. I was a post-doc at UCLA and my wife was a lawyer. The health insurance we could afford didn’t allow us to get treated at the hospital I worked at. As a matter of fact we basically had to choose between preventative care and acute care because our policy wouldn’t cover both.
The public school system has been so eroded it is basically useless, so you will have to use a charter school.
I enjoyed my time there, and California is a great place to be rich, but it gets much harder as you settle in and face actual adult life there.
Boy that would be a terrible idea, as an American who had traveled a lot and is enduring a stint here until I get back to first world and safer second-world countries.
I would get the green card and figure out where I want to live later. Nothing about getting it would preclude you eventually settling back down in Canada. But it opens up living in Hawaii or Florida or Texas or New Orleans - very different cultural and climatic environments to anything we have in Canada.
Yeah that’s my thought too. It’ll take roughly 2 years to get my green card I’d imagine. 2 years is still 2 years though.
My bro required about 11 years for his green card. This is important:
-
at the time, you needed to have a visa that allowed you to be working and living in America.
-
each h1b is 4 years. You get 2.
-
there was no grift for queue-jumping back then
I’m not sure you can do it on a TN, nor from outside. H1, J1, etc, may be your only hope.
I appreciate the info. My lawyer said they can do it from a TN and the company will sponsor me.
-
removed by mod
Canadian’s thinking
What ABOUT our thinking? #l2s
I moved to the US (California) for 3.5 years. It was actually a great experience. If you work in tech you should be able to make more money in the US and even in a HCOL city you should be able to save some. As other’s mentioned the US is a very diverse place and you should be able to find a state/city/neighbourhood that matches your lifestyle and values.
Sponsorship for a green card is a very long process, and I don’t think you can do it from a TN anyway, so you’d need to switch to an immigrant intent visa (H1-B, EB, etc.) The whole process can take years even for Canadian born people (if you are born in India or China you could wait decades)
Ultimately I decided to move back to Canada, being close to family was more important to me than making more money. I also didn’t want to raise kids in the US.
I don’t think you can do it from a TN anyway, so you’d need to switch to an immigrant intent visa (H1-B, EB, etc.)
You actually can, a lot of people do that. You just have to time it so that it completes before your TN renews, because after you start the GC process, you will not be able to renew TN again (since you violated non-immigrant intent).
It only really works for Canadian born people, because it’ll take 1-1.5 years for GC, Mexicans will take longer so they can’t really do that on TN. And as you said, India/China wait list is around 60 years now I believe.
We did it for four years. Washington state in the Seattle are is very nice. We met a lot of great people and we have fond memories.
Having said that it was clear early on this was not going to be permanent. Imagine taking your kids to the local park and seeing a sign that said no guns allowed in this park. Wait, guns are allowed in some parks? WTF. That was just a head scratcher. I found it genuinely hard to be in a place where I was decidedly middle class and so many people were so poor and with no benefits at all.
I remember once chatting with a cashier at the grocery store over the weeks as she was pregnant. One day I stopped seeing her and figured she had her baby. Two weeks later she was back. No maternity leave. She took her full two weeks of vacation and that was it. Shit.
Or the conversation I had with a cab driver who talked about still being in debt because his FIL was sick and avoided getting medical attention because none of the family had medical coverage until he had to be admitted.
The medical system is a confusing shambles of insanity. That’s if you have good coverage. Once our daughter was sick and the childrens hospital directed us to a closer clinic. We went. There was a discussion about possibly admitting her but in the end she went home. A few days later she was worse so we ended up going to the children’s hospital and she was admitted. Turns out the near by clinic was not in our medical coverage group and it cost us nearly $1000 out of pocket. Not fun but doable. The thing is, she was two nights in the hospital where we were covered. If we had admitted her the first day at the wrong hospital it would have cost us at least $10 000.
The whole system is a fucking nightmare of land mines and no one has any clue what any particular thing will cost you.
I just couldn’t be happy under those conditions. Side note I’m not happy with the slide in equality here in Canada either BTW.
My job is in high tech and they pay was no better, just even. We lost money on selling buying houses, but that’s just timing. I kept track of taxes paid. After medical expenses it was only a 5 percent savings and one medical emergency would too that the other way. Yes, I had great medical coverage.
Yeah, I was in Oregon and had really good health insurance, but was always a bit terrified of actually ever using any medical services. It’s so much less worrying to know that the emergency room won’t ever cost you anything in Canada. That said, I’m sure if I did ever need it, it would have been fine.
always a bit terrified of actually ever using any medical services.
That’s kinda the problem: in America, ‘preventative’ care is only talked about in past tense, like “wish he’d’ve gotten looked-at before it cost him his 401k AND house as well”.
No one goes for testing, no early warning.
nope. lol. Not unless my salary doubles, at minimum, and that’s just to make sure I don’t go bankrupt from healthcare. Actually fuck that, because if I get an injury that prevents me from working I’m still completely fucked. They’re also notoriously anti union and worker rights are eroding day by day
That place is a shit show. Let’s not even talk about Republicans…
