Ask HN: What is your story of immigrating to another country?
Ten years ago I moved from Canada to the US.<p>I was 2 years out of college, and the tiny local software consultancy I worked for went out of business after our clients refused to pay their invoices. (My hometown is notoriously stingy). My two friends&#x2F;coworkers both took that opportunity to move away, one to Ottawa and one to NYC.<p>At the same time, I had a friend on IRC who worked for Mozilla and she sold me on moving to the Bay Area. I have since come to believe that she sold me a bill of goods, but at the time she made it sound like an amazing place to live.<p>I didn&#x27;t have very many social ties back home, and I was too naieve to have any understanding of the costs and difficulty of going to a different country (even one so similar to my home). So moving seemed like not a big deal. Worst case, I can just move back. If I knew how stressful it would be, I probably wouldn&#x27;t have done it. But I&#x27;m glad I did.<p>As for how I did it? Well, I came on a TN visa, which is a NAFTA thing that is very easy to get and entitles you to work at a specific employer for a period of up to 3 years. So before I could move, I needed to find a job. I started cold-applying to Rails jobs posted here on HN as well as on a bunch of other job boards. I interviewed at three or four other places (each time getting flown out to SF for the process) before finding a job that wanted me, and that I wanted. As for timelines, I started applying to job postings in mid February, and I moved at the start of May<p>Finding a new job was very easy, all things considered. Based on what I hear from junior programmer friends, it&#x27;s much harder now. I&#x27;m not sure why it is. I&#x27;m not sure if things have changed, or if I had some kind of special situation that made people notice me.<p>Overall, I absolutely hated living in the Bay Area, for reasons I&#x27;m sure have been discussed by a billion people on HN already. I moved to Texas in 2018 and it&#x27;s much more my speed here. But as for the US vs Canada as a whole? If I never set foot in Canada ever again (and that&#x27;s looking more and more like a reality every day), I&#x27;m fine with that. As far as countries go, Canada is pretty good. There are certainly worse places you could go. But here&#x27;s a scattershot list of some things that stick out to me when I think about my different experiences<p>* I make way, way more money in the US, and pay way, way less in taxes. The money goes farther (everything in Canada is expensive compared to here). Economically, I am so much better off. For every conceivable consumer good, there are 3x as many choices here vs there. And the one that surprises people: my healthcare is actually cheaper in the US (if you compare the premiums that I _and my employer_ pay, vs the extra taxes I would pay back home).<p>* I appreciate American culture more. I like that people aren&#x27;t afraid to take risks here. I like shooting guns. I like that so much of the cutting edge of science and technology is here. One thing I noticed in Canada (maybe it has since changed) is that, since they don&#x27;t have nearly the talent pool that the US does, everything in tech just felt like a constant game of catch-up.<p>* There&#x27;s so much more to see and do here. Canada is like a string of cities, each surrounded by five hundred miles of nothing. It&#x27;s incredibly beautiful nothing, and I&#x27;d like to see it again some day, but it is what it is. In the US, I can hop on a plane and go to any kind of geography within 3 or 4 hours (at ~1&#x2F;3 the cost of a Canadian flight). I can see artists who would never come to where I grew up. I can see cities that are meaningfully different from each other and explore all kinds of historical places.<p>* The obvious contentious current cultural and political things. Leaving this one vague because I am not trying to start an argument and don&#x27;t want this to devolve into a flame thread