In the last couple of years, I've been working on www.duoflag.com a side-project.
I migrated from Brazil to Australia, and almost instantly, my life got 10x better. I've helped some of my friends to emigrate too and then started helping other people online. This side-project became how I can scale the advice I used to give 1:1 from cold emails.
I'm a Software Engineer, currently the CTO of a growth-stage startup, but I'm posting here as, after my current company, I'm extremely interested in committing the rest of my career to international migration.
How can I find EA-adjacent projects in the field?
Duoflag aims to make immigration more achievable to the 16% of adults worldwide who desire to migrate to another country.
We're starting by building a database of worldwide migration pathways. Users come to the website for two main reasons:
Immigration rules are complex and scattered across unfriendly government websites. It's too hard to find out your realistic options, especially when moving from developing to developed countries.
Ultimately, the mission is to increase the share of immigrants around the world.
I picked this idea because that's exactly what I needed 15 years ago when I was desperately trying to find a way out of Brazil.
I settled in Australia, and have also lived in the UK, US and Chile. In the last 10 years, I've been helping friends and strangers on the internet on how to get a job with visa sponsorship or find an immigration pathway to countries like Australia and Canada.
There are approximately one billion adults in the world who would like to permanently move out from their birth country (Gallup World Poll, 2009). And one of the most substantial factors stopping them is access to information on how to make it happen (Hatton and Williamson, 2006).
The goal is to be the single source of truth for immigration pathways.
A good analogy is to think about a software developer in Nigeria who needs to adopt a new Javascript library. They will think of GitHub right away to be able to investigate each library's star ratings, how many people are using it, how easy it is to get started, etc.
We want to be the same, but for people investigating how they can legally migrate to another country.
Currently, there is no easy way for people to compare their options in different countries. They need to browse through country-specific advice websites and manually curate their options.
There is also no way to find a significant number of jobs offering visa sponsorship. They need to run customised search queries in different Job Websites such as LinkedIn, Angel List, Stack Overflow, Indeed, among others.
And lastly, the lack of available information on immigration options worldwide, cause some people to invest their hard-earned money in illegal immigration.
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Thanks so much for taking the time!
Question, if we were to increase emigration out of developing countries, do you think this could lead to brain drain that would leave the country worse off in the long-run? Remittances would definitely help reduce this impact, but idk about how much in the long-run. Have you looked into this at all?
Do you have or know of some data on post-move (SWB vs prior, income vs prior, etc)? I’d find that more interesting than pre-move interest.
Thanks, Josh! A few helpful ones: