It's not so bad if you spend some of that time raising children :)

Try to raise children on one salary living in a high-cost city like San Francisco/Bay Area when the spouse can't work for six years. Then try to find a job after six years out of work. I have friends whose marriage broke because of similar situations.

To be fair, that one salary is likely $100-150K/year. The median household income in SF is $72K, so you're probably going to be OK.

Plus, the partner who's not working has some very real imputed salary value. In fact, the economic value of a non-working partner is much higher in a high cost of living area than a low cost of living area. If they save you from paying for professional childcare, the expense saved may be $4K/month rather than $500/month. Ditto for other services, especially meals at home.

As a Canadian who did three years of immigration horseshit in the US with a non-working spouse, the real issue is that your spouse is making a huge sacrifice of their freedom. Being a kept person can chip away at your sense of self-sufficiency and self-worth. The people I met in my situation all left the country (the majority) or had kids (one couple).

Well, I'm doing it. It hasn't been all that easy but nobody said immigration would be.

The spouse is free to find a job that sponsors their H1B...absolutely no restrictions on that.

What if the spouse does not want to raise children but rather would prefer to work. What if the partners would prefer to both raise the children and both work less? "Just go raise some children" just promotes the gender inequality that people have been trying to fix for ages.

Are you assuming BrainInAJar is a man and the mentioned spouse is his wife, and not vice versa?

I'm not assuming anything: It's the same response both ways round. It should be the couples decision on how to organize their life and their child-rearing duties.

I agree with your general sentiment, but either you were assuming that the husband was working and the wife staying home, or your statement "just promotes the gender inequality" makes no sense.

No, gender equality is if both sides can choose to pursue a career. Just flipping that around and defaulting to "male partner cannot work because he has to raise some kids" is inequal as well. In any case, that already assumes it's a male-female couple.

You know what does not involve any gender stereotypes? One partner working and the other staying home with the kids. You don't need to flip it around and default to the male staying home. Many couples choose this for perfectly good reasons.

Like I said before, I agree with you general sentiment that the couple should be able to make that decision.