My company tries to hire the best person we can find for any given job. And it just so happens that a lot of the best people turn out to not be American. Add to that the fact that we’re running a global business marketing to customers all over the world where local expertise can be useful, and you end up with employees from all over: US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, etc.
And all we want is a place in the world where we can all stay for an extended period of time and work together, and it seems crazy that it’s so hard! Immigration laws are weird.
Like things that have happened in the four months since I moved to Hong Kong:
- walking to work and passing smashed and burned-out storefronts from the previous night’s riots
- my coworkers getting tear gassed
- having to get my temperature checked every time I want to enter my apartment building
- apparently there’s a toilet paper shortage now
and yet Hong Kong is still just clearly a better place for us to be running a business than the US, on many dimensions. I’m impressed how badly the US has fucked this up, and surprised by what proportion of world-changing startups are nonetheless headquartered there.
weird to think it was only a few short months ago when rioting and coronavirus were considered disadvantages of Hong Kong relative to the US