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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The USA took literally all of India's top engineering talent for the past ~25 years, but thankfully that trend is reversing now. While improvements in standard of living, more urbanization, emergence of a real middle class, more local opportunities etc. are definitely all valid reasons for this, I believe the biggest one is that there is no path to US residency or citizenship for an Indian today. Even those educated at top universities there have to eventually come back (and that is great!).

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Not sure that it's necessarily great. I love my home country and all but I hate that I don't have the same freedom of movement other Nationals seem to have just by birth no matter how hard I work for it.

I stay in Canada. My parents are from India and my in-laws are European. My in-laws basically pack their suitcase and turn up to visit us. Meanwhile my parents had their visa rejected twice, we spent close to $10k on legal fees and lost couple of flight tickets (can't apply for visa unless you show flight tickets but visa is not guaranteed) and my brother was never ever allowed to visit us. And it's extremely common for other skilled immigrants (even if they are citizens) in Canada as well to have their family visit visa refused.

Paradoxically, US tourist visa was the easiest for all of us.

When I hear people complain about how the "Government prioritizes immigrants over the local people", it's just mind boggling how they come to this conclusion?

Since last year getting a Canadian visa doesn't require any tickets being booked. You get them for a good ten years as well.

Source : Parents, siblings and I went to Canada for a trip. They applied in India and I applied abroad.

Sure but one of the clause is "satisfy an officer that you will leave Canada at the end of your stay" and the best way to do it is via a ticket especially if you are retired/self-employed. At the end of the day everything is a crap shoot and it depends on the visa officer's mood. The whole process of biometrics, documents, evidence, itinerary , tickets, forms took me 4 months for a two weeks visit of my parents to see me.

It's highly enraging and I agree with parent poster that birth country heavily restricts their movement even if they have the resources or are skilled.

My Vietnamese gf was just approved for a Visa to visit the US, so we figured lets also try Canada since US was no problem... and then denied to Canada for exactly that reason. Her response was priceless... 'Why would I want to live in Canada?'

At least in VN, you pay a broker a couple hundred to supply the paperwork and the deal is that if denied, the broker does the next attempt for free. We will just try again after her trip to the US. The whole point at least for Vietnamese is just to get a record of travel (and coming back) so that it makes it easier to get visas to other countries.

I wasn't aware that tourist visas for parents in Canada can be very difficult. I was planning on applying for PR to Canada precisely because I thought it'd be easier to have parents over there (what is this thing called a Super Visa?) - does this change if you have a PR?

It doesn't change even if you are a citizen. Super Visa takes a very long time and is for longer duration. All in all its a draw of the luck, give it a shot.

Freedom of movement will happen when the countries are on equal footing. India has a lot of problems to solve before that can be a reality, and it can only do so with the help of its best and brightest.

Absolutely fair point, and my comment was not a diss at the immigration system, but at that reality itself.

That will never happen

Already started happening. I’m already a data point, and I know a few more. The generation going to grad school now is no longer thinking of settling in the states as their primary option; it is too cumbersome for most.

Salaries for top talent in Bengaluru are better than almost everywhere on earth except the US. While that may or may not last, the immigration process is still very painful and there are many more opportunities here than before.

There are lot of other options like canada. Can you compare the salary/revenue to the people who make better in Bangalore than in Toronto?

Well a direct currency conversion might not work, but in purchasing parity terms Canada seems to be less well off.

Consider the conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21107264

200k CAD is roughly comparable to 3 million INR in PPP terms, and that salary is for senior folks. Most senior engineers at Google Bangalore/Hyderabad or well established software companies are likely to make more than that.

Both might be considered to be salaries for remote offices of American companies or internationally funded startups. But if I look at the market in general, I’d rather be a software engineer in India than in Canada. The market is too big and the possibilities are too varied to ignore, even considering all the known problems (Canada might also have some of its own, I’m sure).

I absolutely love Canada. The IT is growing and the people are exceedingly polite and nice. The weather is brutal though even compared to NY.

I know the parent talked about salary but that's not the only important factor. The reason for coming back to India could be spending time with old parents(who usually don't like moving to other countries at old age), kids' future, and weather.

I completely agree that those are important factors too (sometimes much more so than salaries), but good salaries, type of work and first-world benefits are usually the reasons why people emigrate in the first place (often leaving family and good weather behind), which is why I talked about those. The more India closes the gap on these, the less incentive there is for people to move.

You can consider me for this example

That's very exciting and a great and maybe leading indicator for India. I really hope the wealth and expertise that flows from that can help India's economy grow fast like in China.

Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just curious ... Does hn have some kind of system that parses short comments (and other types that does not fall into guidelines) and presents it to the mods for flagging? Because the alternative that mods will be reading all the comments is tedious ...

Nope. And yes.

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