The UK still has Tier1 visas which, now, are basically buy your way in visas. The retired Tier1-General you could self certify and as long as you made enough money (which increased over the years).
The Tier2 is basically the same as H1B.
Tier1-General was great as it was in between work permit and permanent residency (green card) with no company ties. I got it when req'd income was only 40k.
The UK "hates" immigrants too, and since brexit are now paying for it
Rising rents also killed off a lot of NYC family run local businesses - some that had been passed down through generations - and replaced with loss-making chain coffee shops.
It's a weird balance.
There was a hole-in-the-wall family sandwich shop in London that did solid business for decades until they put all kids through school, and retired. No chain has survived there since.
Plus chain-shop jobs =/= wealth (relative) and retirement makers like the sandwich shop
it's even weirder with remote working and WFH these days- there's just nowhere to escape to for an hour or two for a change of scenery without having to drive somewhere.
when I lived in London, there were at least 4-5 places withing walking distance to get a coffee and sit with a laptop, or local shops, or local pubs if you really weren't into being productive although some wised up and got fancy coffee machines too.
old school financial institutions can't conceive of people doing anything differently from 50 years ago, and have no idea why upstart online only banks are taking more and more of their business.
my former business bank would lock me out of my account for "suspicious logins" because it couldn't deal with my accounting software using the bank's own mechanisms to reconcile my books daily. 🙄
Chris Rock had it right at $5000 per bullet. You need a 3rd job, 3rd mortgage and save up for a year (or whatever it was) to shoot someone in the butt.
that's already part of California law, or proposed anyway - the firing pin has to be coded to the gun, so each shell casing will have a stamp on it from the gun that it was fired from