San Diego, San Diego... I'd like to love it!

[Matts]

really I can't know if I'll stay in the US permanently or just for a few years, as I haven't started my plan yet. Definitely I want to get a great experience of work and study as I'm considreing to attend a college. My first though was SD because the geography location and the weather are so nice and I love living close to the sea and at the same time living in a laid back culture. The things is keep me thinking on chosing SD is about crime, many people do complain that, the other one is about restrect rules on the illegal immigration. I want to get legal jobs only, with regular documents with visa, but what it if I need to work illegally for a first brief period, I don't want to live the country for that, and I know southern California is well monitored for illegal immigrants from Mexico.

I'll do some research on what you wrote. So thanks a lot again

[sliverbox]

Hey Matts,
Probably about the best resource for getting broad information about cities will be wikipedia. Just type in the city name followed by wikipedia in Google. I find the descriptions really helpful.

Almost all US cities are going to have crime problems. Compared to Europe, the crime is fairly high here. But that doesn't mean the cities are dangerous. All cities are going to have bad areas with lots of crime, and other areas that are safe. Generally the more safe that an area is, the more expensive it will be. I've lived in the South, East Coast, and West Coast and my only experience with crime has been small petty crimes: A stolen bicycle, my wife's car had the crappy CD player stolen, and a beat-up scooter was stolen off my porch when I lived in Boston. I lived in Nashville for a few years and out of all the cities I've lived in, it had the least amount of crime. But that was over 10 years ago and the city has grown a lot.So it might be different.

As far as immigration and jobs go, well I'm not 100% sure of how that works exactly. I have had a number of friends from Europe who worked. It seemed like the rules were kind of strict: They had to be consistently employed in the career they had gotten an education from. It also seemed that as long as they were in college, things were fine. Again- I'm not an expert on this. As far as illegal immigrants from Mexico, well a vast majority of these immigrants get low paying service industry jobs, like working as day laborers and cleaning offices and such. Some people say that it is a problem but I've never had an issue with it. When I first moved here the job market was poor and I had to work a low paying job. Most who I worked with were Mexican immigrants and they were all great to work with.

SD is going to have weather that will probably be more favorable to you. The fact that you mention you would likely be a temporary resident and so forth- thus renting instead of buying sounds like SD might be a fine choice. But even if you do decide to stay in SD, I would take the opportunity to travel around and see the country because as you're probably aware, the US is a geographically diverse country. Good luck!

[jessemh431]

you say you want to go to a college. San Diego has some of the best in the nation: University of California San Diego, University of San Diego, San Diego State University.

San Diego has always ranked very close to the top in the most livable cities. San Diego is probably the only big city in the country with not many weather problems or natural disasters (cold winters in New England with hot humid summer, hurricanes in the southeast and also hot humid summers with occasional very cold periods, midwest and south have cold winters and hot summers with tornados, northwest rains a lot, from Los Angeles to San Francisco there are earthquakes)

san diego is pretty much a smaller version of los angeles almost like it was back in the day (same weather, bad traffic starting in spite of a supposedly good freeway system, increasingly expensive cost of living, many illegals.

san diego metro area currently has around 3.5 million people.

what is your budget for all your expenses and what job path are you going down.

IMO means In My Opinion