[hideo]

Maybe I’m missing the point - all these issues are because of various governments’ policies. how could startups possibly address immigration policy problems? I can’t think of any way a startup could e.g. help someone waiting months for a visa appointment.

[nicbou]

I help people with this in Germany.

Good information goes a long way, and the government is terrible at it. I just tell people what they have to do, which pitfalls to avoid, and how the process usually goes. That makes the whole thing a lot less stressful.

I'm slowly adding more tech to the problem. For instance, I'd love to build a residence permit picker that tells you exactly what your immigration options are. Again, this information is very hard to gather from official sources.

It's not a startup, just a website. Does that still fit?

[Vibgyor5]

Just wanted to mention out there that this is one of the topmost reasons why I left Germany (and moved back to Asia).

- Lack of political will to fix the bureaucratic mess: I had to come to Immigration Office standing in the queue at 3-4am due to lack of appointment slots online.

- One of the biggest companies in Germany didn't know how to move my employment permit from Berlin to Hamburg. No complicated case even! I was on visa, single, residence tied in Berlin and for 4 weeks their HR and Immigration partner kept deliberating on where/how the application should proceed. I worked at small startups as well as some big ones and I felt a major lack of empathy for foreign workers among German/European colleagues who never had to deal with such paperwork.

- I felt tons of virtue signalling here but minimal support for once you were in the country. Eg. Poland had had Immigration Advisory Centers you could call and seek advice on your case for free, in multiple languages incl. English. Poland! - the country "infamous" for not being very foreigner-friendly. Zero such support in Immigration Center (Auslandsamt) in Germany with silly argument of "we can't speak in English even though we work in an office where we must interact with foreigners every day because what if legal repurcussions?"

Long story short, it left a poor taste and I chose to leave.

Turned out for the better but just wanted to point out: I still believe that problem is not just collecting information (there are sites like allaboutberlin that are good at it) but handholding/support (like Jobbatical/Localyze are doing and some lobbying/support to the govt. to fix the bureaucracy that is living 20 years back in time.

[hideo]

Ah, that makes sense. So the focus is on helping people navigate the policy, not changing the policy. I can see how that can help.

[saradhi]

Here are some websites that are helping US non-immigrants. h1bdata.info provides a list of companies that sponsor H-1B visas along with the job titles and salary

checkvisaslots.com informs about visa slot availability in India

visaholics.com a community that shares US visa experiences

boundless.com .. . ..

[hideo]

Those examples help, thanks. I misunderstood your original post and thought you were planning on doing something to _change_ policy.

I see now your thought is more about helping people navigate existing policy. I do think this can be very helpful.

I'd be willing to pay actual money for a "one stop shop" to navigate all the H1B issues that unifies all these things :)

[marymkearney]

Shameless plug for visabuilder.com here. Informational site on O-1 and EB-1A extraordinary-ability visas. Side project, currently writing first paid product. (Back to work as soon as I close this HN tab, LOL.)

[yellow_lead]

There is a big service sector around helping people immigrate to various countries (Law area). A startup could productize this.