> Why would a person who is supposedly having rare skills come to a country and spend their best years here without reasonable guarantee of permanency?

I agree with your overall point but the answer here is money. The earning potential in the US vs. e.g. India is drastic.

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aprilthird2021 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes but if you are worth that money to any company why would you assume one day it will all just end? That's not typical or normal for most careers

	▲	achenet 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that in general, expecting a 'career for life' with one company, as was common in the 1950s, is a bit naive today. Companies change, needs change, people change, just because you like the job now doesn't mean you will in ten years. To give a tech industry example, right now you could be working for a cool startup, in a few years the startup gets acquired by a large tech company, they change the management style, it's not fun anymore. Like imagine you got hired at Github around 2010, would you definitely still be there today? Or even in 2020? Also, you have plenty of people who will have career plans like "work in finance in NYC for 5-10 years, amass a fat pile of cash, and retire to a small farm in the middle of nowhere". If I were living in China or India, I might see "spending 5-10 years in the US earning large piles of money and returning to my homeland to retire and live a life of leisure" as a valid career path.

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bubblethink 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not really money. Frankly, no 20 year old thinks that much about money. They do things that they like, whether that is going to school, working at a job, or starting up. And you don't know about the broken immigration system from the outside. The reason this problem is unique to India is due to country caps/DEI which prevents people from India on H-1B from getting a green card.

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achenet 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I disagree that no 20 year old thinks that much about money.

If you're lucky enough to have had rich enough parents to not have to worry about money too much, yes, you'll probably optimize for doing things you enjoy, but people who spend a lot of their younger years with money issues will sometimes obsess about it and really focus their lives around 'getting rich'.

I've noticed have similar phenomena with people who are deprived of certain important needs in their youth - people who are starved of a certain type of parental affection overcompensating by orienting their lives around getting more of it (eg women with daddy issues who are very promiscuous), people who feel disrespected and downtrodden who become obsessed with social status, people who get bullied and get into martial arts...

If you've ever read Gone With The Wind, there's a line where Scarlett O'Hara says "with God as my witness, I'll never go hungry again". I suspect that many people who have similar experiences will react by orienting their lives in a similar manner. "I was deprived of something important, so I will react by over-indexing on that important thing I was deprived of, to avoid the future pain of being again deprived of it".

	▲	dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		* If you're lucky enough to have had rich enough parents to not have to worry about money too much, yes, you'll probably optimize for doing things you enjoy, but people who spend a lot of their younger years with money issues will sometimes obsess about it and really focus their lives around 'getting rich'.* I think you’re in the right ballpark, and I have seen it play out exactly that. However, I think it is even more common for rich kids to obsess about getting richer. In my experience, as long as their needs are being met, most people get used to whatever lifestyle they are raised in, and stick with it. if they grew up in a family that chases wealth, and equates income with self worth, then they tend to keep doing that.