Re:Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet ...
by RestlessMind on Friday July 06, 2018 @12:45PM
(#17472894)
As an Asian, I have been to 10+ cities each in the US and Western Europe, and have spent considerable amount of time on both continents. While being a data point of one, here are my observations:
- Residents of European cities were less welcoming to foreigners like me. (Maybe due to language issues? I speak accented German, a bit of Spanish and English, which can explain why Parisians were rude).
- Immigration to USA, along with path to its citizenship, was a hard but straightforward process (6-7 years once you get H1B). In Europe, I found that UK and Switzerland has a simpler process, but other countries (eg. France) make it very hard to be their citizen.
- Stereotypes abound on both sides of Atlantic (eg. "socialist countries stuck with horrible economies", "rednecks, puritans, prudes, ignorant" as your comment says), which seem highly exaggerated.
- both US and Western Europe offered a far better quality of life compared to my home country. And such debates (USA vs Western Europe) seem farcical from that perspective, or "first world problems" as they say.
- Residents of European cities were less welcoming to foreigners like me. (Maybe due to language issues? I speak accented German, a bit of Spanish and English, which can explain why Parisians were rude).
- Immigration to USA, along with path to its citizenship, was a hard but straightforward process (6-7 years once you get H1B). In Europe, I found that UK and Switzerland has a simpler process, but other countries (eg. France) make it very hard to be their citizen.
- Stereotypes abound on both sides of Atlantic (eg. "socialist countries stuck with horrible economies", "rednecks, puritans, prudes, ignorant" as your comment says), which seem highly exaggerated.
- both US and Western Europe offered a far better quality of life compared to my home country. And such debates (USA vs Western Europe) seem farcical from that perspective, or "first world problems" as they say.