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Comment by eigenvector | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, this is the most helpful comment on here. OP, I understand the psychological pull of America, and perhaps it is the first Western country you have visited, but it is not worth it to work illegally (as you are proposing, even if no money changes hands) in America.

You may improve your life temporarily but it will all come crashing down one day when the immigration authorities catch up to you. You will be deported and banned from re-entering the US. There are many developed countries where someone with your skills can obtain a temporary work visa easily. You can live and work freely and legally, get on your feet financially and maybe attend university there to help you get into the US legally in the future.

Maybe it will help if you tell us where your citizenship is and we can help you with suggestions of other developed countries that will allow you to come for a 1-2 year temporary work visa.

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I concur. There are in fact good reasons to get a permanent status in those countries, such as for passports and travel purposes.

http://flagtheory.com/

I agree. It is definitely better to move to a different country. Perhaps Canada, or some country in Europe? Australia has lax immigration requirements as well.

Not sure where you heard this, but Australia's immigration policy is .. agressive .. at best.

It's a points based system, which is punitive of age and education.

30 years is the cut off for the 'easy', one year, restricted 'working holiday' visa that you may have been thinking of.

For regular immigration, you'll need a working visa, which requires your hiring company to handle the paperwork.

Likewise, if you're trying to immigrate without an already found job, with no college degree, the OP will find the point system probably weighing heavily against him.

One of the most flexible countries at the moment is Spain. The weather is great, the food is great, and it's a fun country.

> It's a points based system, which is punitive of age and education.

Pretty much the same than Canada but still way less restricting than USA.

>One of the most flexible countries at the moment is Spain. The weather is great, the food is great, and it's a fun country.

Spain has still a pretty significant unemployment rate, also (this may vary depending of the region and where are you originally from) some people are not very polite with some immigrant even if they are Spaniard-decendent (anecdotical experience from some friends living over there)

That's actually one of the reasons they've been pushing the new (2013, very new in terms of how quickly most visa situations evolve..) entrepreneur visa(s) in spain.

There's two types: one gives you 1 year residency (can be extended, of course) - application is decided within 10 days.

Another gives you 2 years, decision in 20 days.

Entry requirements are low. It's worth checking out.

In 10 days, you could be in Spain. There are many decent tech companies hiring as well.

http://foundersgrid.com/spain-entrepreneur-visa

Err this is not true. There are so many illegal immigrants in America that deportation is unlikely. You'd have to do something pretty bad to get deported.

Or you could just be living a normal life:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/07/experien...

This history sounds weird for me as he was in a relationship for 5 years and haven't even tried to marry with the girl to fix his status. The only safe way to stay in US is by getting married, what give to the skilled workers the same level of opportunity given to illegals. An immigration policy that encourages the fraud.

Those millions of illegal immigrants are living on the margins of society in order to avoid the authorities. They are unable to get well-paying work, they are at the mercy of employers who can rat them out to the INS at any time if they complain about poor labour conditions, they cannot get health insurance, they cannot get mortgages or college loans for their kids. You can't hide like this while working in the tech industry. Do you know of many illegal immigrants working at Google?

Also not fully true. Not working at google doesn't mean you live in the margins of society. It's possible to have a pretty okay life as an illegal immigrant here in the united states.. It's also possible to have a bad life as well... you def won't have a job at google but many times whatever you can get is still a better life than what some people get in their native country...

Huh? I knew many illegal immigrants growing up with professional parents and comfortable middle class lives...immigration is more varied than the experience you see on TV although admittedly many immigrants are poor.

I have also had various family members overstay visas for very long periods of time and they weren't dirt poor. On the other hand, this kind of hiding in plain sight is hell when kids turn 18 and can't attend a university. That's the most sad part of the existence and a big reason for support of the DREAM act.

Pretty high up at Goldman Sachs: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-25/how-an-und...

I know a large number of people in the tech industry with questionable immigration status.

Counterpoint with a few points of anecdata: 2 good friends, 1 Stanford CS, the other Stanford Econ (minor CS), both got kicked out of the US -- one due to an H1B issue, the other because he visited home in Uzbekistan and didn't get let back in.

Was he forced or escorted out? More like he was told to leave. He could prob stay as an illegal if he wanted to.

Well educated as they are, skilled people usually don't prefer to live illegally. And that's why you will most likely see ex-illegals and unskilled people receiving green cards or citizenship in US.

Sure but thats not the point. My point is that a forced deportation is rare. Please read the thread before voting me down or commenting, thanks.

Do you mean being arrested? Because having your permission to stay/work revoked with a given time to leave the country looks like being deported for me. After that, even a touristic visa will be harder to obtain again.

Please, don't get offended. I'm not a heavy user here and I don't have permission to downvote posts.

Deportation as i understand it is when you are forced out of the country like an eviction.

https://www.google.com/search?q=deportation&espv=2&biw=1600&...

"Told to leave"; sure he could stay an illegal and just live off the radar, but the expected value of that is really low given his options anywhere else in the world. I guess if you want to argue semantics, his risk of being physically flown out of the country was probably not substantial.

I think the purpose of all this discussion was whether OP should come to the States and work under the radar, and the general consensus is that being here illegally strongly caps your upside, and has a pretty uncertain downside.

PS - My friend's now the chief engineer of a successful business in London... I always thought it was such a shame for a guy who worked his way from being an orphan on a farm in Kenya to live 90% of the American Dream, only to be kicked out of the country after putting in his all at Stanford and at a few startups.

> deported

in capitalist America, we ALSO deport intelligent workers

Not so intelligent if you risk everything on risking eventual deportation it seems.

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