As one of those highly skilled professionals, I'm starting to have doubts about my decision to immigrate to the US. I'm treated as a second-class citizen, viewed with a great deal of suspicion (the government audited my H1B application three times, at great expense to me), and am not even allowed to start my own business until I get a green card (if they don't reject me for some bullshit reason).
Be glad you didn't bring family with you. Growing up I had a number of friends from South America and the Philippines whose parents came over and gotten their green cards. The children had to wait though, and when they all turned 18 the process started over from scratch for them.
Imagine living here since you were 7, 8, 9 years old and spending your whole life here not knowing anyone in your home country and not knowing if you could stay here either.
Some of them had to leave. One of my friends took until he was 31 to get his green card and the first thing he did when he got it was get a job overseas. Most of them spent a number of years here in some sort of legal limbo, with some living here outright illegally. The Brazilians among them especially had to arrange marriages to be able to stay.
These are all the hardest-working people that I know, because they had to be to stay. It's really shameful how we treat you all here.
I find it funny that you say you're treated as a second class citizen. You're not a citizen so why would you be treated as such? I immigrated to the US many years ago and was treated very well considering I was a guest in this country.
I was 18 and had just graduated from high school. At the time I had a vague idea about wanting to study computer science, and my home country's universities did not have good CS programs. When I got into one of the top CS programs in the US (UW), it became a no-brainer. (Ironically I ended up studying Information Science instead!)
What I didn't know at the time was how difficult the US government would make it for me to first get a job and then to become a permanent resident. Every dealing I do with the government I feel the undercurrent of not being wanted here - as if they are looking for an excuse to reject me, as opposed to actually wanting my skills and intelligence to contribute to the economy and doing everything they can to make me stay.
If I return home now, with my degrees and five years of experience in a software company, I can easily start my own firm. I'm telling myself that if the US government throws one more obstacle my way, I'm going to say fuck it and do just that. (When I go back for vacations and talk to younger people who are considering coming here, I tell them don't do it - it's just not worth the hassle.)
Cool. As I understand it, Turkey has a relatively dynamic economy compared to Europe; it seems like it benefits from straddling the European continent and west Asia.
I don't know what to say about immigration being inhospitable to you. Obviously, I think we'd be better off with more skilled CS grads, and shipping them back to economic competitors does not seem like a great long-term strategy.
