[SXX]

What I mean by losing years: when you forcefully immigrate your primary goal becomes to keep your work visa or getting residence permit. You cant afford to work on exact same projects you wish, change jobs as you wish. Until you get permenent residence or citizenship - this takes 3-9 years depend on country.

Also lets be honest here - not all of us are top-notch programmers and finding job and passing interviews is completely different skill that need to be trained. I for instance simply don't have any official degree and while this make no difference for freelancer it's handicap me greatly when it's come to getting work visa.

Also even if I am programmer my girlfriend is not automatically become one too. Finding a good job for her as English teacher (who is not a native speaker) would be much harder in EU / US. So this will put extra strain on my an her life.

Rebuilding social circle and finding new friends also takes a long time. Especially if you dont want to stick to communities of other immigrants.

PS: now this all doesn't matter because we turned into refugees. Yeah we're in much better situation compared to my friends in Ukraine who wake up to bomb shells, but our past life is still destroyed by Mr Putin and his regime.