What are North Eastern and West Coast parts of USA like?

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oh, I don't know.

LEGALLY, one cannot earn less than the prevailing wage set by the state in question's department of labor. If the reverse is found to be true, the H1B visa becomes invalid due to fraud. You do NOT want "immigration fraud" to deal with if you are an employer.

Again, LEGALLY, you will be "out of status" and subject to deportation. You will, if caught, be banned from entering the country for a period of not less than 10 years. That is, once they finally deport you. Depending on your ethnicity, you can rot in "detention" for quite some time before they get around to dealing with you. If you have family here, they're screwed if they depended on you.

ICE can and will, eventually, deport anyone they catch who is not here legally. Until you are a citizen you are not immune from deportation. The fine print on the adjustment of status immigration paperwork is pretty clear. Once you are a citizen, unless you have been found to have lied on any of your paperwork leading to citizenship, you're safe from deportation. You break the law or stray from the other caveats to the permanent residency status granted, and you're out.

Last edited by Nan on 16 Sep 2008, 3:20 pm, edited 3 times in total.

There is an extremely low-income federal healthcare program, Medicaid, but it's managed by the individual states and you may not qualify except in cases of dire emergency. Not only do your assets/net worth normally have to be extraordinarily low to qualify for most Medicaid programs, but you must fit a particular category in many states. That is, you must either be a single parent, or certified as disabled by the federal or state government, or similar. Texas, for instance, had about 40 different Medicaid programs when I was in grad school and studied them. NONE of them would provide care for an able-bodied, healthy, single adult without children under the age of 17, who did not fit one of their other categories (disabled, kidney dialysis patient, etc.) for any reason. If you were unemployed but able to work, you were expected to work and provide for yourself. The fact that you could no more afford healthcare while working than not didn't (and probably still doesn't) come into the picture....

When I was a "single healthy adult" and had just left home I made minimum wage. If I became ill, I had to go to work anyway. If I missed more than two days' work, my employer required a note from a doctor before they'd excuse the absence. It cost, at that time (late 1970s) more than a day's pay just to get in to see a doctor. And it would entail almost an all-day wait to get in to see one. So, you lose the pay you should be earning that day, plus the day's pay (plus) to pay for the doctor. Purchasing the medicine was out of the question. It really hasn't changed much.

The kicker to a lot of the federal programs, such as MediCal, is that you can't find a private provider who will take you on as a client, because the reimbursement rates are so low that they lose money on every MediCal patient who comes through the door. Hence, you end up at the Emergency Room for a sinus infection....

Care Oregon is probably (I am guessing) funded by federal Medicaid funds, as is MediCal in California. The feds funnel the money with some basic guidelines, and the states are able to create their own programs using whatever guidelines those states decide upon. SSI (supplemental security income) is for persons with serious disabilities who are extremely low income. It is a federal program, funded by tax revenues as a whole (do not confuse with social security withholding, that's a different program). It's the equivalent of what welfare is for other categories of people (single parents, etc.), but specifically for the disabled. It provides cash for housing, personal needs, etc. Persons who qualify for SSI typically qualify for Medicaid programs in other states - they're low income enough they qualify on the "resources available" test and unable to work and, thus, fill the "can they work?" test.

Medicare is a program for those over age 65, under age 65 if you have specific disabilities, (or are a end-stage renal patient) that is funded by taxes taken out of your paycheck every payday. For more, see the medicare web page

The end point being, don't expect to find healthcare in this country unless you can pay for it. You need to be either employed with a salary high enough to pay for care or purchase private insurance, be provided such insurance by your employer, or stay healthy. All hospitals are required by federal law to treat you if you are critically ill - if you get run down by a truck and are bleeding internally, they have to stabilize you. Once you're no longer in danger of dying, they can (and have been caught) put you in an ambulance and take you to skid row and dump you on the street in your hospital dressing gown. If you have a serious health issue that is a chronic thing, but not immediately life threatening, you're screwed unless you are in a state that has chosen to use its medicaid (and any other) funding to set up a program to help you. And you'd better have family and friends who will let you live with them while you are ill or recuperate, unless you have a sizable amount of cash set back to keep up with your rent and utility payments. Othewise, you'll end up sleeping in the gutter.

Mental health care... let's not EVEN go there.

Hope this was helpful. If you need the sources, you might try googling them - anything with a dot.gov is typically going to be more reliable than just a generic "about" website.

Only for the math impaired. 400 bodies a year. Yet we rarely get the Murder Capital of the US Award. The national rate is stable at 25,000 bodies found, 75,000 vanished and never found, a mear million a decade, 1 in 300.

There are major cultural differances from Europe. The crime rate is a big one, and the idea that self protection makes more sense than having your death investigated.

Fifty years ago the Upper East Coast was an economic center, it has been in decline. It is littered with brownfields now, old buildings where the homeless, the illegals, live. Surban commuters have one view, live on Long Island, take the train through the Bronx to the city center. Their protection comes from riding a train to work, and living in their gang controlled, by income, suburb.

Income has a lot to do with what America you live in.

15% are here illegally. That is one in six, with no name, living by Middle American rules. Drugs are big money, and the El Salvadore gangs, the Hatains, Jamacians, work with the Columbians, and their marketing puts drugs everywhere.

It is not all drugs, a local Mississippi business that produces for government contracts was recently raided, 315 illegals working there, with their families, living in a very small town.

We do not have real numbers, they do not have papers, but best guess is 45,000,000 are here.

Liberals say they are seeking freedom, Conservatives say, from the Police where they came from, and the other gangs, both of which would dump their body in a ditch. America, it beats being in a South American jail, or dead. They have not learned our ways, so still play by their home town rules. The kid's bikes, the lawnmower, and even the dog vanish from the yard, someone has been shopping.

Small town America is by religious gangs. First Church Economics. Class, education, income, we have a church for that. Those who do not join a gang are hated by all, and seen as a Gift from God. The Major Faiths are strict, The Ten Commandments! Others go for eight, six, and some have it down to three.

As Tim_Tex points out, for most the New Testament overrides the Old. Many also follow the first five chapters of the old, and ignore everything else. "God has given all this to you, kill them all, take only the metal and girls that have not laid with a man."

Hardly anyone lived on the West Coast fifty years ago. Everyone who did not fit in where they were born went far west, after they got out of jail. Many were the poorest of farmers, uprooted by the Dust Bowl, going where there was water, and looking for any work. It was not settled by the brightest and best, and you cannot outrun genetics.

It was a case of dream chasing, buy a big house, live off it going up in price. Prices are down by half and falling, the States are broke, taxes and utilities rising, and they are all looking for someone else to cover the cost. Income always has to be judged by what it costs to live there.

New Orleans has lost 22% in the last year, on top of 50% after Katrina. Most of the city is in ruins, and the business owners I know are reporting a 90% drop in sales compared with pre Katrina. Leases and house payments keep running, the survivors are dumping their assets and moving out.

The newspaper ran a poll, how many are thinking of leaving? 75% of the surviving holdouts said they would be out in a year or two. The nearest economies are Atlanta, an eight hour drive, and the remains of Houston, an eight hour drive. They are facing months to get power, water, and most people cannot live for months without income. Many are from New Orleans, waiting to come home, three years now, and another city in economic ruins.

North we have Jackson Mississippi, then St. Louis, Detroit anyone? Chicago is the one living city in the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, region. Going west over a thousand miles, the Denver region, then 1,500 miles to the West Coast.

The Wall Street meltdown is taking the last East Coast earner, and like New Orleans, when you lose the economy, you also lose the tax base. There is a lot less to work off of, and it costs a lot more to try.

America has run on leveraging debt, on a rising market, it pays 5-15% a year, on a declining market, everything is lost in two years. 75% of the economy is consumer spending, now there is no home equity, and the credit cards are maxed out. Gas costs three times what it did a few years back, food is up, unemployment, and we keep breaking old records, most foreclosures, bankruptcies, bank failures. We have just equaled the crash of 29, the market is down 22% from it's high.

Far beyond the billions that have vanished in the last few days, like 1929, the real damage comes when people cannot make their payments, homes, offices and apartments stand empty with homeless people in the streets.

On the international front were are going bankrupt over the occupation of Iraq, losing a war in Afganistan, have just attacked Pakistan, and are threating to invade Iran. Our trade leaves us a debtor nation.

To top that off we have the worst education and health care of any industrialized nation.

So what is the future view through rose colored glasses?

We have football hooligans (except it's American football ), binge drinking, severely overpriced property in parts of the country (especially the northeast), bad architecture, brand-worship... I don't think moving to the US will relieve you of any of these.

I do like having no state religion and no aristocracy (and add to that no monarchy) but let's face it - how much of an impact does the state religion, the aristocracy or the monarchy have on everyday life in Britain? Almost none.

I am not going to say that the US is not a better place for some people than Britain is, but I don't know if it would be for you. Major cities in the US tend to have similar problems as major cities everywhere else, and the US outside the major cities can be extremely unwelcoming to outsiders.

Well, it is actually market rate, and they DO! Sorry, I am just going by what I KNOW about the IT industry(Take my word for it, I have more experience on this subject than maybe anyone else you will know, INCLUDING supposed "government experts"), and what I have seen, and what I have heard.



They don't even enforce such laws for mexicans! Frankly, it is amazing anyone would DARE to take credit for preventing a 9/11 event! It would be SO easy to do it again. The US government MUST know it since, TO THIS DAY, it is ILLEGAL to get up in a commercial airliner within 30 minutes of Reagan Airport! If you DO, the plane must be DIVERTED, and you could be fined $11,000 and WORSE! 9/11 was an inside job, and illegal aliens were working in and around LAX even AFTER that!



I would even doubt that they CAN, since so many workers at so many levels, etc... now sympathize. if they aren't actually in the same group.

They are STILL making laws that are VACUOUS, because they don't even APPROACH existing laws! Yet the government does it to appease the public because there is "OBVIOUSLY" no law NOT because there is no law, but because such laws AREN'T ENFORCED! Case in point? The ban on "assault weapons"(NOT made for assault!), or "semiautomatic"(that they claim are basically machine guns, though they aren't), and talking about how such laws will prevent criminals from owning guns. FOUR PROBLEMS!:

1. Criminals can make guns or worse.
2. Criminals have STOLEN LOADED POLICE CARS!
3. It has been against the law for a LONG time for a felon to even HOLD a gun!
4. Criminals do NOT obey the law!

And with ALL THAT, they easily get away with what they do.

Hey hey guys take it easy on us believers will ya We are not all the same and every Apsie ought to understand that one.

Don't know about the not crowded part I live in the midatlantic area and there is constant construction and an increase in traffic. The cost of living is inching up as well.

The winters have not been near as cold and snowy as they were when I was a child. They have become more mild and with oil and utility prices that is a plus. Beware of the humidity as that can be so oppressive we like to say "you can cut it with a knife". If you live here you will become a southern sweet tea guzzler! We are known for it for good reason.

And yes research carefully as my sis married a Canadian and even he went through red tape for years to become a dual citizen.

Although Houston has the most jobs in my field, I am not moving back there because it's too much of a liability to live there, as we all found out this past weekend.