Let me share my H1B experience. I did Masters in CS at a top 30 University in the US, graduated in Feb 2017, got into a major US tech company on OPT, at a high

Let me share my H1B experience. I did Masters in CS at a top 30 University in the US, graduated in Feb 2017, got into a major US tech company on OPT, at a higher-than-median income as a software engineer, unsuccessfully tried 3 times to crack the H1b lottery from 2017 to 2019. In 2020, I received a Canadian PR, and moved to Canada (we have an office here in Vancouver, although I took up a remote position in Toronto). I'm working on the same job here in Canada, although I had to take a bit of a pay cut. I'm happy to be here, and its great. It was a bit of a circus to get my Social number in Canada in the beginning due to COVID, but it's been smooth sailing since then. I miss my girlfriend who's in the US and is on OPT. So I got my company to apply for my H1B again in 2020, and finally got through lottery on the fourth attempt (consular processing), and was going to be back by October 1st. Due to the H1B travel ban, I now cannot travel to the US before Jan 1st 2021 as I don't have a visa stamp yet. I'm now considering not going back, as I don't see the point. My girlfriend is quite capable of moving her job to Canada as well, and her company is more than willing to do so via a work permit. I know for a fact that I'm not the only person who moved an American job overseas due to visa policy. The fact that my company's HR and immigration consultant company (Fragomen) worked on this like clockwork suggests that this is something they're used to doing, as they reached out to me before my OPT work permit was expiring. When a company has an employee for three years, it's a lot easier to hire them overseas than hire someone else, American or not, even if the former option costs the company a lot more. I unfortunately know several people who had visas they couldn't renew follow the route I took, and it worked out for them in the end. I want to start my own start-up eventually, and that's probably not possible on an H1B anyway (or so exceedingly difficult that I wouldn't try). I'm going to miss US National Parks though.