[alephnerd]

> It is not in Turkey

Hence why I called out Eastern Europe and MENA, though Turks who can afford it do try to target the US instead.

For example, all of Erdogan's kids attended IU Bloomington for undergrad and grad school instead of German programs like LMU or TUM, and the Koç family (the family that controls the Turkish economy) sent most of their kids to Stanford, JHU, and Brown.

> I met with a brain surgeon from South Korea who moved to Germany, because he just wanted to live in the centre of the Europe so he can travel around easily

Ofc, yet the largest Korean diaspora in the West is in America, and the 2nd largest in Canada.

> you get a relocation budget from your employer.

In tech we're lucky we have a market that pays so highly for our skills, but other industries don't pay as much or require a significant amount of retraining, and if you're bringing a family, as plenty of immigrants do, you don't want to live in crummy neighborhood, so you need a lot of money to have a safety net.

[mertbio]

> There's no reason to immigrate to Western Europe

This was your initial argument and I'm trying to tell you that there are many reasons by pointing out to some examples. Why is it so hard to understand?

[alephnerd]

Yes, and I stand by it because this is an extremely common conversation in every single diaspora and I have family and friends who have made this very same decision.

There will ofc be people immigrating to Western Europe, and ofc a decent number are skilled, yet at the end of the day, in absolute numbers immigrants trend towards North America over Western Europe, inspite of the difficulty [0].

Immigration, like every product or service follows the law of supply and demand. It is miles easier to immigrate to much of Western Europe simply because the demand, while significant, is not as close to that for North America

If Western European countries wish to attract skilled immigration, they need to understand what truly makes the North American system click.

Australia followed a similar policy after ending the White Australia program in the 1970s and transformed into a truly multicultural country, and that was due to following a program similar to that in North America.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

[snowpid]

More people move from US to Europe https://stateofeuropeantech.com/talent

And this proofs the point that income isnt the only metric for emigration.

[alephnerd]

And most skilled (for the sake of this convo STEM) immigrants immigrate to North America and have done so for decades [0]

[0] - https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/7938614756940962...

[snowpid]

The state of European Tech is about STEM. Do you think they talk about American uneducated refuguess stranding on the European shore?

[alephnerd]

1. I don't appreciate that tone.

2. I have literally provided a peer reviewed paper proving my point, and I can provide a second one as well [0].

It's a well documented trend, and I myself can confirm this within my family, and multiple others in a similar boat.

I'm not saying Western Europe is bad, but the kind of pipeline that exists in much of North America isn't as robust in Western Europe.

Plus the absolute number in the trade paper you provided is ~10k arrivals and ~6k departures from Europe, which is a drop in the bucket in absolute terms compared to North America. Just with EB-2s alone (one of the multiple types of visas for STEM talent) you are seeing 90k approvals a year.

[0] - https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-047_b5373e6a-...