Paternity: time your pregnancy to coincide with the start of an X year contract, or they simply won’t renew it.

While you raise good points that should be kept in mind for anyone considering this, in my case (a very specific and incredibly in-demand type of data management) my last position was a great deal better than any offering for the same job in the UK, even including all the public benefits you guys get.

I left that job for personal health reasons (and I got a full year of unemployment from it). I’m lucky, I’m very aware of that. Most people don’t have it anywhere near as good as I did. But for my field, even factoring in all those benefits from the public sector you get in the UK, I was doing way better here than I could have been in the UK (ex: I was making 4x the maximum wage for my field in the UK (tops out at £45,000)). Also my state has a requirement for 4 months of [ma/pa/xa]ternity leave, which isn’t great but is still a huge improvement. And I get 5 weeks leave. And I was union. And and and 'murica blahblah I’ll spare you.

For all the many many problems America has, this is one of the few areas where the UK is somehow even worse than us. Your wages for skilled technical positions are absolutely criminal for the value you produce for employers, and for such a sometimes progressive country it’s mindboggling to me that you haven’t made a bigger issue of it. It’s a huge contributor to the brain drain so many EU countries are experiencing (even Germany, who is much better about this than the UK, is feeling this) - the US is a backwards country slowly imploding into fascism, but who’s country isn’t? At least you can come over here and make bank in the little time before everything burns down around them, instead of having a somewhat comfortable lower-middleclass life in some subdiv row house.

(This me being defensive I confess: my city is one of the most walkable in the world. I think the “americans can only drive anywhere” thing gets a little bit blown out of proportion because people don’t understand the magnitude of the rural/urban divide in the US.)