[mahyarm]

You can actually get an immigration (green card) visa from outside the country from the start. You could work for Google Berlin/Zurich for example, and then move over when its all processed for a green card on arrival. One co-worker for the startup I work for came from Chile that way.

You can also just work for Google in Europe for a year or two, and then get transferred over on a L1/L2 visa where your wife can also get a work permit/visa as part of the package.

Also if you work for a company like google/facebook, you get very good health care, can send your children to decent public schools, you have decent working hours, good amount of vacation time, far more pay than you would get in Europe, free meals and I think google offers on site kindergarden too. Also while you just have a work visa, you can still change employers through more paperwork, but no practical ill effects in the end.

[ozgune]

That's the theory, I'll share my reality.

I'm here on an L1A visa with my spouse. She quit her high paying job and followed me here after our lawyers said that getting the visa was the hard part.

We have been waiting on her L2 work permit since May. Processing time is supposed to be three months. We called, scheduled an appointment with the USCIS, all that. They say it's being processed, and the lawyers say there is nothing to do but wait.

If you search the internet, you'll find plenty of people waiting to hear back from the USCIS for trivial stuff. Apparently, sometimes they even sit on your application for years, wait for the visa to expire, and then reject on that basis.

[parennoob]

I don't exactly know what country's visas you are talking about, but if it is the US, these are the sticking points:

1) Not everyone works for Google or Facebook. Some of us work for smaller companies that no one has heard of.

2) "Also while you just have a work visa, you can still change employers through more paperwork".

Said paperwork is toxic and suffocating to the point where it is extremely detrimental to your mental and physical health to change jobs.

[mahyarm]

I'm talking about the USA. I work for one of those VC funded smaller companies, and they provide comparable services by just hiring immigration lawyers. The fee per employee are around several thousands of dollars and $10-20k for green cards. The new hiring firm also hires the lawyers to switch you over to make it relatively painless on your side. Compared to getting a new H1B visa hire, the switchover employees are much easier to hire.

A smaller startup company will ask more hours of you and wont provide such things as an on site kindergarden, but the benefits can be fairly comparable. Some of those startups also have a foreign office you could work at for a year or two and do the L1 visa thing for you too.