Engineer's Guide to US Visas
I'm Canadian and worked for over four years a software engineer in SoCal on work visas (TN then H1B).<p>My wife, an Aussie and high school teacher with several years of teaching experience in top international schools in Asia, couldn't legally work in the US. So she volunteered teaching ESL at a local adult school. Ironically many of her students were Hispanics who had originally entered the US illegally. Doubly ironically she got a special commendation award for her volunteering signed by George W. Bush's signing machine.<p>Eventually I got fed up with the bureaucratic farce whereby US visa regulations provide compliant, indentured foreign programmers to US businesses at below market salaries in exchange for the remote possibility that they'll eventually get a green card.<p>So I left and now live in Australia, where I am self-employed, can take time off to work on my own side-projects, and pay less than $300/month for private medical insurance for my family of four. American exceptionalism? Sure--if you're a sucker.