There's not that many legal hoops at all. WIth a bachelor's degree it's pretty simple to get an H-1B visa. I'm from Canada and a ton of my friends get jobs at tech companies after graduation with no problem. Larger companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Zynga are obviously more open to this type of thing, but many of my friends have gotten jobs at early-stage startups as well. You can also start your own tech startup via this "loophole".
You may also want to look at the expected value of being one of the early engineers at a tech startup. My prior is that it is significantly lower than the expected value of starting one.
My friend is looking for some advice on what he should do after graduating from Harvey Mudd College. Some relevant bits of information about him are that he
He's currently looking for a grad school where he could tackle interesting problems with possible high benefits in the future. I've made my own suggestions, but I'd like to get a (somewhat) independent set of opinions from the LW community.
So please suggest away!