> when the US exists.

I don't think you realise how hard it is to move to the US for work.

The UK's immigration system is notoriously difficult for skilled workers to migrate under too in many, many cases so not like the UK system is setup to take advantage of this at all.

Speaking as someone with experience of both UK and US immigrant work visa systems in the software industry, the US provides significantly more visa options and paths to permanent residency, especially to folks who didn't come to the country to study first. It doesn't help matters either that in most cases equivalent software roles pay better in the US too.

i'm sure that was Brexit. now if you earn a high wage, work for a big company that has big time lawyers. you will have your skilled visa in about 2 weeks depending on the country.

let's not start on the nightmare called h1b.

yeah current cost of living in the uk, is kinda fucked but us isn't faring better. if you only look at raw salary number then yeah US is ahead, but once you start factoring other things - uk / us are on par.

Not really sure I agree - particularly for skilled engineers. The salary gap at the mid to high-end between the UK and US is large right now, even at FAANG-grade firms. I have recent first hand experience of watching US based FAANG employees who were otherwise keen to do it turn down an offer to work in London for a year due to the drop in salary and living conditions.

The "other things" aren't what they once were either - I'd take my US private health care over the current state of the UK's NHS any day of the week right now. The wait times for even basic treatments are insane, and thats before we consider the wider state of the UK economy and public services.

> you will have your skilled visa in about 2 weeks depending on the country.

You can't really generalize like this in my experience - there are so many individual factors - just where you were born is going to affect how long your visa takes in many countries. The systems also vary enormously, from opaque hard to navigate like UK/US to open points based like Canada or Australia etc. It takes far longer than two weeks just waiting for an H1B decision result too in most cases.

It can be pain in the butt to get your wife to the USA if you marry a foreigner! Source: am American & married a foreigner.

And even harder (nearly impossible) for anything else than work or study, e.g. if you are a consultant or want to start a company.

Some people don't want to live in the US.

A UK Tier 2 Skilled Worker visa takes 3-8 weeks to go through; the US EB-3 visa wait time is typically measured in years (more than 10 for some countries it seems).

That alone is a big reason people move to countries other than the US for tech work. An empoyer can wait a month or two for a visa to come through, they can't wait years. I'd love to work in the US, but it needs multi-year planning and for lots of stuff out of your control to line up.