FirmsConsulting (@firmsconsulting)

As someone who immigrated 3 times in my life, I am part of a group that I call professional immigrants. Meaning, I am really good at navigating the steps needed to pick up my life and move to another country where I don’t know anyone, and build a professional career. I can also call myself a professional immigrant( https://www.firmsconsulting.com/professional-immigrants/ )because I am considered to be highly skilled and highly educated. I worked at top consulting companies in the world, where I received accelerated promotions. I was a corporate finance director at a top-3 Canadian bank where I managed a portfolio of over 1 billion dollars and received an accelerated promotion. I run a very successful business that influences strategy thinking and management consulting around the world. What makes professional immigrants exceptional leaders We are often highly trained and highly motivated, and highly educated professionals who leave behind everything, to take huge risks to have a better life, bigger opportunities, and earn more for ourselves and our families. We make the journey alone. We are not kids following our parents who protect us. We have no protection. We were not born in the countries we end up calling our homes. We often are from poorer countries. We leave behind our families, often not seeing them for a decade or more. At the time of writing, I have seen my parents and brothers only twice in 20 years and my sister 3 times in 20 years. We leave our friends. We leave all the comforts of home: our language, our reputations, sometimes our credentials, our food, our culture, and our safety net. We have dependents, our extended families, before we have children. Some of us decide not to have children or have only one while we would love to have more, because the level of responsibility we already have for our extended family makes it very hard for us to add another dependent. We are often the most talented and hardworking members of our family. Millions of us are stuck in limbo around immigration rules. My immigration journey I moved for a better life four times. I first moved to Moscow, which is hard to do without the right residency permit even though I am Russian. That was not a successful trip at all but I kept at it. In fact, it was harder than any of my 3 moves to another country. I then moved to Africa. I moved to North America. And within North America from Canada to the USA. And I also moved between cities within some of those countries. For example, in the US I lived in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego. I had no relatives in any of those countries, no mentorship or guidance. I had no friends to meet me at the airport and no community on which to rely. When I first immigrated my pianist diploma was not even recognized and could not even be found in the educational certification database. It was as if I did not have any education and I had to start from scratch. Even the paid legal help was often a nightmare which ended up costing me time and money to fix. Yet, I had to do it because I had to take care of several family members. When I started my journey, there were times when I did not eat lunch to save money and wore older clothing with holes, including shoes. I still remember the burgundy shoes I had in Africa with holes in the sole. No one could see the holes, but I could feel them. H1B / green card Quitting is often not any easier. Moving back to our home countries is often a difficult option. Many immigrants study in the West, like me, and often take on expensive student loans. They need to stay and work in the West to pay down these student loans since their employment prospects in their home countries do not pay enough. In the US, the H1B visa is a lottery. It’s a competitive process where most will not get a visa. Those who do get it often need to stay with their employer. Their employer may or may not file a green card application. The green card approval may take up to twenty years. I read that 200,000 Indians will die of natural causes before their green cards are approved. Think about that. 200,000 talented and generous professionals who are very hardworking, and making tremendous sacrifices to care for their immediate and extended family, will not live their full lives. Many cannot buy homes for fear of having a firesale so that they can leave the country within the time limit, should they lose their jobs, to avoid being banned. For this reason, I rented for a long time. By renting, and not buying, we give up the primary method to build wealth: equity growth in a home. We have to build wealth with the best option often out of our reach for a very long time. Children may age out of the process. Spouses often cannot work. It’s tragic that most H1B holders who lose their jobs did not do so due to poor performance. Technology companies, for example, simply changed their strategies and decided to cut costs in the face of rising interest rates.