On a permanent level, Australia has a permanent program of around 180,000 places a year in a country with only 22 million people.
But I don't understand why you'd want to leave, having lived in the US, UK, Australia, South Africa and NZ, the choice of NZ for ease of doing business and life is easy.
On Bloomberg I listened to an interview with the founder of Jetstar airlines, currently owned by Qantas, and who is now expanding a renewables business, who called Australia a resource exchange economy. Reading how cooks can earn $325K a year in gas projects, and noticing that the just signed Australia - Japan free trade agreement is mostly beef and agriproducts in exchange for TV's and other electronics, the sense initially is of lack of diversity in tech.
There's no way I could make my hardware project in Australia, not that I ever intended to. I haven't been able to find a single viable option for PCB manufacture. And if a company can provide them they're almost always farmed out to China in any case.
In the UK and the US, but also Europe it's just much richer in scope and size. There are some outstanding hardware facilities in the US. They're virtually non existent in Australia, at the right level of expertise and scale.
However, one big deterrent is proximity to the rest of the world. If you want to travel home to visit family, or due to an emergency - it's going to cost a lot of money and time.
Because of the distance, the logistics of physically moving there are also that much more difficult.
Then there are the mainstays - cost of living in/around major cities is quite high (though in the ICT sector earning potential is quite good), there are lots of scary critters, etc.
Many plumbers are also qualified in drainlaying, gasfitting and roofing as well. If you work with gas then lives depend on the quality of your work.
You also have to be physically fit, willing to get up early and sometimes deal with really unpleasant situations (e.g. wade through shit).
"Average" plumbers in AU might only get 60-80k (seriously, check the ads), which is actually not that great an ROI on the investment.
It's not until you specialise, become senior, go out on your own or start doing lots of overtime that you make money.
Anyway, I always thought the best would want to move to the US because it's there's top work, e.g.: there's no Tesla or SpaceX elsewhere and a top engineer would probably want to be doing this kind of work... Same with scientists that are working on ambitious research. But maybe I'm thinking about H1b as more of `top of the top, get your asses here` and it's more like `ye you're skilled enough you can try`, dunno.
In fact, literally the ENTIRE WORLD is your oyster, assuming you can reliably, regularly find power, wifi, and a team that'll work with you on your timezone's timeframe.
I'm a first-gen immigrant. My family originally moved because of rampant pollution due to unrestrained industrialization, as well as geopolitical risks (having air/bomb raid drills in school isn't really that fun). Telecommuting doesn't really fix these.
Suffice it to say, emigration/immigration is a Big Deal for the people who do it, and for the most part it isn't being done simply because the jobs are better. There are usually far more fundamental concerns behind the decision, a better economy is just one factor out of many.
So, this is about what the parent said.
Am I substantially missing something?
In US, if - and that's a big if - you're lucky enough to win H-1b early April, you may start working early October. Is there anything as fast with Canada? Without employer agreeing to hire you even though you don't have a working visa - i.e., you have to apply for one?
You need to pull your eyes out of your ass. The countries you mention are far from being superior; perhaps "good enough", but frankly nothing too fancy. You need to visit Hong Kong or Singapore to see how highly qualified immigrants live there like kings.
Japan has serious environmental problems and their government does not stand up to the transparency one would love their government to comply with [1]. They are rolling into huge economical depression too.
Australia. Have you ever been there? Spend couple months you will be surprise how alienated you will feel. My friends live there for 15-20 years and they will never be a part of the community. They will always feel like outsiders; mostly recognized by their accent. Australians divide themselves among those who were born here, and all outsiders who came to steal jobs. Its the mentality. It wont change. Australia has their own environmental problems too and politics & taxation goes through the roof (viva la Queen that fixes everything through more taxes).
European Union is on a brink of collapse; some countries are openly discussing living EU. Its rotten to its core by very well hidden corruption [2]; Ukraine situation that helps Russia shows their real aspirations does not help either.
Canada, they are still under Queen that can suspend the parliment anytime she wants to [3].
Then we come to US. I think its a matter of "the grass that is greener on the other side". I mean, how many of those folks applying for visa know anything about US more than from movies about "land of the free home of the brave?". Politics? How many know who Nancy Pelosy or Henry Reid are? For all they know America has this good man named Obama who gave everyone free healthcare so it can't get better than that. Did they hear about Justina Pelletier, Cliven Bundy, Kelly Thomas or hundred of thousands other cases of governmental abuse?
[1] http://enenews.com/japan-times-sources-reveal-fukushima-radi...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10614864...
[3] http://stevescomments.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/the-queen-of-...
This is inappropriate language for Hacker News. Please don't address another user this way, regardless of how wrong you think they are.
You lambast Japan for a lack of government transparency just as you finish extolling the virtues of Hong Kong and Singapore. You also conveniently fail to mention the salary required to live "like a king" in either of those two locations. Singapore ain't cheap. In fact, it's the world's most expensive city by several measures [1].
H1-B is pretty broad, and most applicants are certainly not eligible for mid six figure salaries in the finance hubs of Asia. "Highly qualified" for the purposes of this discussion does _not_ necessarily mean rolling in the dough.
Lastly and most comically : Canada's parliament being desolved by the Queen? That's patently absurd.
It would be great if we had a way to correct all false statements on Hacker News, but we don't. That shouldn't prevent us from addressing the corrosion of the discourse by garden-variety incivility. Pulling out those weeds is one of the big things we all can do to make HN more conducive to truth-seeking discussion in the first place.
I'd say it's a pretty small portion of the planet that has a decent internet connection, but the detail is how you define "decent".
Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more difficult than English or French, but there are fewer learning resources to do so.
So, your best options for the greatest amount of opportunity is to learn English -- you have the UK, America, Canada, and Australia as potential landing spots. (This is, of course, not universal. Developing countries with French as a national language will prefer France, for example.)
So, the answer is that it's a way out.