Here's a suggestion from an Indian American on immigration policy: Don't force skilled immigrants (even those with graduate degrees from US universities) to work at the same employer for 5-8 years just to get a permit to stay in the country.
I have to stay with the same employer on an H-1B visa while my application for a greencard is pending (currently, people who applied in 2001 with a bachelors degree or 2004 with a masters degree are being considered).
Half of my immigrant classmates (Indian or not) from gradschool would have started a startup if they didn't have to stay stuck with the same employers to be in this country.
Why not start a startup in India?
Internet access to people in India is still on the way up and has not yet reached critical mass.
You could launch a business there targeting India-specific needs. The possible market there is larger and not yet saturated.
shrug, just because.
I was born and brought up in America but my parents wanted to moved back when I was 15. So I did my undergrad in India and just continued living there. Didn't find any compelling reason to go back to America after that.
(Not that I don't like the place - I do. But I'm comfortable living in India too)
Define "bail". I think it's actually illegal to pay for your own H-1B to discourage fake applications or something, but wrt the Greencard, there is usually a negotiated agreement between the employer and the employee about who pays the cost (or what fraction of it). So there is no bailing out.
I fully intend to honor mine and wouldn't actually mind paying the H-1B costs either, were it legal.
bail = you leave. With a greencard you're forced to stay, but with an H-1B, you can get your visa transferred to the new company you're working for (if you have another job).
In such instances, it's only fair that you re-imburse your employer for the fees that they incurred while processing your H-1B.
Why is it "only fair" that I reimburse them if I am employed on an at-will contract? The legal expenses are no different from any other one time expense such as a sign-on bonus. As such, just like sign on bonuses, if an employer believes they would be compensated for their legal expenses only if I stay there for X years, they should put it on a contract. If I think it's fair as well, I'll sign it.
I'm tired of these oh! "why don't you give me a greencard" attitudes. Even on HN, whenever something related to migrants comes up for discussion, there is this invariable rant about "hard-to-get-greencards" tucked in an insightful(at least apparently to HN users) comment.
What's the deal here? If you are saying, oh! only if you had given me a greencard without 5 year wait, I would have started a startup and changed the world, why don't do it in your home country and make it a better place? Yeah right! if only someone had created a silicon valley in my country, ad infinitum.
Seriously, I have trouble coming to terms with the fact that these highly motivated people with the big ideas to change the world think it appropriate to nag about some other country not granting them citizenship.
Apparently you didn't realize that the country as a whole benefits from these startups. By stifling innovation through poor immigration policy, the US is hurting itself.
You are having quite an argument on your own there by putting words in my mouth so I'll leave you to that except to say that I am in this country because the US government thinks it's beneficial to the US in some way.
Meanwhile let me note you haven't presented any cogent argument as to what benefit the US gets by forcing me to stick to one job while I am already here and waiting for a greencard.
Because the reason you were allowed to in to the country was for that job for which there were no acceptably qualified american applicants. H1B is not simply a skill-based immigration policy, it exists to allow American businesses to hire outside talent when our own pool is running dry. There may be different programs for other purposes.. for instance, some other countries allow you to move there to start a business if you are going to make a minimum investment and hire a minimum number of people.
Now that is actually a logical point versus OP's "quit complaining coz this is not your country" logic. I upvoted you.
As an H-1B, I can only shift to other H-1B jobs. Which means other jobs where no acceptably qualified american applicants can be found. I don't even want to change this. I am just asking that my greencard application not restart if I shift from one H-1B job to another.
So in this specific instance, my question still remains unanswered. However, you are right on the general idea that I am arguing for skill based immigration instead of a specific job based immigration.
Because the reason you were allowed to in to the country was for that job for which there were no acceptably qualified american applicants.
The formal reason for a policy and the real reason have nothing to with each other. The phrase "job for which there were no acceptably qualified american applicants" is pure nonsense - the number of applicants is always dependent on the wage, make the wage low enough, you'll get no applicants, make it high enough, and a bunch of bankers will start retraining to go into software.
If it works anything in American companies like it does in German companies (I'm an American that moved to Germany on the equivalent of a H1-B), they decide who they want to hire, take their résumé, inverse it to submit an application for exactly that. I don't think there's another human on the planet that would have fit for the qualifications that they submitted for my residence permits.
My last one included literally every programming language that I'm good at, being a native English speaker, having a background as a music teacher (it was a pro-audio company, so that wasn't a real stretch) and most of the skills that I'd picked up along the way, regardless of if they were relevant to the job I was taking.
Fortunately, the German system doesn't have the no-job-switching provision, in the 6 years I waited to get permanent residence I was able to have two different jobs. You do however run the risk when switching that your visa won't be renewed for the next job.
I am in this country because the US government thinks it's beneficial to the US in some way
This is factually correct but it's half the truth, and is probably misleading. Any transaction executed by two entities at their own free will is generally supposed to be beneficial to both the entities, otherwise the transaction wouldn't have taken place. Yo mentioned only one side of the deal and it sounds as though you are here purely to help the US.
Coming to my argument part, I was not actually arguing that the immigration policy is good; it has its own problems. I was wondering about why ambitious people behave this way when they face obstacles. The fact that I have been seeing this attitude for quite sometime including on HN drove me crazy and I probably sounded more sarcastic than I would have wanted. Sorry about it.
Anyway, my point is this:
People who are ambitious and want to achieve face many obstacles. If you are really serious, you jump over them, work around them, crawl under them, move ahead and work towards your goal. Obstacles won't stop people from realizing their dreams.
In Randy Pausch's words "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." [http://www.cmu.edu/uls/journeys/randy-pausch/index.html]
Look at this guy for inspiration,http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500021 he finally did what he wanted when he found himself under similar circumstances. I would say he would have probably done better; why waste five years? Probably US did a disfavor to itself by not giving him greencard.
But what I'm trying to figure out is why are people saying things like "if immigration policy would have been that way" we would have created startups, etc., Well to me at least, that sounds like "If only those angels had put in money, I would have my business running by now". Things don't quite work that way in reality; do they?
Yo mentioned only one side of the deal and it sounds as though you are here purely to help the US.
When did I imply I am here to help the US?
People who are ambitious and want to achieve face many obstacles. If you are really serious, you jump over them, work around them, crawl under them, move ahead and work towards your goal. Obstacles won't stop people from realizing their dreams.
If one of my obstacles is the law, then arguing that it should be changed is one way of trying to overcome the obstacle. There are other ways of trying to do the same thing, which I am pursuing. Your assumption that the only thing I am doing is sitting here and cribbing about immigration policy is just that - an assumption. The article about is about immigrants and immigration law, so I commented about the law.
I see your larger point about not thinking that the country I am in has to be a constant instead of a variable and I am not.
Here's a much better metric for immigrant quality what ever that means. The more expensive the trip is, which has very good correlation with distance, the higher IQ the immigrants will have on average. Bonus points if the only way to get here involves a plane.
No wonder Indian immigrants are doing so well in America. Considering they are located on opposite end of the earth, and given the average income in in India vs the price of plane tickets, it's fairly obvious you'd have to be pretty extraordinary to even make to the US.
As an Indian American, I appreciate the attention. I truly do. But comparing an IQ score derived from the average score of immigrant Indian American kids on an arbitrary memory test (it was 112) to the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews (110, claims the article) to show them in better light is scientifically wrong in so many ways, (not to mention, an indicator of nothing) it made me want to stop reading the article.
The forward digit test is a memory test. The backward digit test is a staple of IQ tests and correlates pretty well with the whole. I think the article used that because it was the best data available.
I came here to say exactly that. Since you already said it, I will merely add that it is bizarre that the article would veer into the IQ explanation after discussing self-selection, which is sufficient to explain the success of Indian Americans as well as the observed memory test scores.
"When statistical adjustments are used to convert the backward digit span results to full-scale IQ scores, Indian Americans place at about 112"
I don't know how you can meaningfully relate a score on a "backward digit" memory test to an exact IQ score. Nevertheless, I am editing my comment to reflect that it's an IQ score derived from the test and not the score on the test.
The suggested action ("A new immigration policy that prioritizes skills over family reunification could bring more successful immigrants to the U.S. By emphasizing education, work experience and IQ in our immigration policy, immigrant groups from other national backgrounds could join the list of model minorities.") is similar to Australia's immigration policies which is based on a point system.
(this is just one citation among many for this often-replicated result) and digit span is not related to important cognitive functions that sum up to "rationality" as distinct from IQ.
But in general about articles in the popular press posted to Hacker News about IQ, what I say is that the obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.
A new immigration policy that prioritizes skills over family reunification could bring more successful immigrants to the U.S.
And they would earn as much money as they could, and then they would leave. Because people like being with their families, especially parents, especially when they kids.
The most successful hack of the founders of the United States was to found a constitutional and economic system that could bring in people from different countries all over the world, and have them all work hard to build up a new nation. There must be some reason that the smartest people (however we define smart behavior) in many other countries see more opportunity in the United States than they see in the countries where they grew up. Read the Federalist Papers to become a better political hacker.
At the end it could be read as just another lobby attempt.
Using the same statistics, we can say that the majority of H1B visa fraud is committed by Indians, and 100% of the arrested for that kind of fraud are Indians too... that proves anything?
This whole "model minority" concept is so incredibly degrading and haughty. It's a bunch of white people thinking they are doing a group of people a favor by applying a label to them.
Oh you should be so proud - you're not like how most other dark skinned people are! So smart and able to succeed!
That's funny--as a member of the group under discussion, I didn't feel particularly degraded. Nor, for that matter, did I feel proud; rather, having always felt that the curious facts mentioned in the article deserved scientific study, I was glad that this was getting some attention in the mainstream press. Maybe this will prompt some research into the cultural factors in my community and how they translate into the observed behavior. I have anecdotal explanations, as does everyone else, for why my people prefer certain professions, but that's not science, and it doesn't answer why the effect is so strong, even in comparison to other Asian groups.
As the article says, "Most Americans know only one thing about Indians--they are really good at spelling bees." I'd much rather be labeled than ignored :-)
Do you really think it's something about Indians, or just the large numbers of candidates and the selection process?
In my experience Indians are a lot more willing to commit to long-term, difficult projects at the urgings of elders. But they share that with other Asian cultures. This also helps explain the spelling bee thing; Indian families are used to the idea of rote education being very important, and even participating in the education of their child that way. Really, almost anybody can get that good at spelling, it's just that more European-American parents would tend to see it as pointless.
The one thing I do find interesting is how the gender split works. Asian minorities (in the American sense: China, Japan, SE Asia) seem to have very different expectations of boys versus girls. But modern Indian families, from the castes that are likely to produce US-bound immigrants, seem to encourage their daughters to go for technology jobs. For me at least, almost 100% of the female engineers I've worked with in the Valley were Indian-born.
And the other thing I've always found strange: the QA departments of many companies in the Valley are dominated by Indian-born women.
Uh, I have? Also, I am half Indian, half mix-of-all-European-countries-Canadian, so I know what North American families are like as well as Indian immigrant families.
In Indian families, children obey and rely on their parents well into adulthood. At pretty much all levels of society. I am a committed Western-style individualist, so I actually think this is a very bad thing.
So you're right that not everyone is a careerist, and that immigrants are self-selected for ambition. But, the thing I was drawing attention to was that an Indian parent can and will suggest a long-term career like going to medical school, and many Indian kids actually do it just because their parents said so.
This is changing -- today, Indian kids assert their own choices more and more -- but it is amazing to me that there are Indian bachelors I know in their 30s, even some living in North America, who still expect mummy and daddy to find them a bride.
"Maybe this will prompt some research into the cultural factors in my community and how they translate into the observed behavior. "
I think it is not good to jump ahead in these conclusions.
what you missing is that the way filters are set up, a major part of indian immigrants that came here are the white collar types. Plus just by sheer numbers (there is one billion+ indians) there is more likely to produce a larger amount of smart/capable people, from a country with lests say 200million people.
When you look at the whole indian society, I would not call it a model. The caste system is still alive, and most indians live in slummy conditions (by european standards anyways).
Why? I think the "model minority" label fits. If a minority is fairly successful (low crime, high achievement, etc...) it makes sense to increase immigration from those countries.
Also, once a minority is a "model minority" things such as affirmative action can be changed to only apply to struggling minorities.
> Oh you should be so proud - you're not like how most other dark skinned people are!
Aren't most "model minorities" in the USA far more successful than white people?
If a minority is fairly successful (low crime, high achievement, etc...) it makes sense to increase immigration from those countries.
The reason the "model minority" label is bad is that it's designed to help the human mind draw racist conclusions. Like the one that you appear to have just drawn.
The logic seems to go something like this:
A. The average Indian-American in the United States is more successful than the average member of Group X.
B. Therefore, smartness and success must have something to do with being from India.
C. Therefore, if a person is from India, we should give them a preferred immigration status over someone from another country.
But C is explicitly racist. It discriminates against (e.g.) a smart and potentially successful African, or Mexican-American, or American Indian by holding him or her responsible for the "average" success and test scores of an entire U.S. ethnic group. (As if the woman standing before you were somehow responsible for the test scores of every other U.S. resident who looks like her!) And it ignores a very, very obvious alternative theory: That Indian-Americans living in the United States are successful "on average" because the "average" person of Indian descent lives in India and can't afford to move to the United States.
Another problem with the "model minority" label is: Who designs this "model"? The editors of Forbes? I note that, this week, winning a spelling bee in English is a "model" behavior, whereas hairstyling, short-order cooking, psychological counseling in non-English languages, installing ceramic tile, picking strawberries for minimum wage, or volunteering to serve in the military are absent from the list of American civic virtues.
> Like the one that you appear to have just drawn.
I'm getting kinda sick of all accusations of racism. It is like a proverbial universal stick with which you can hit everyone with (even with just an accusation).
> B. Therefore, smartness and success must have something to do with being from India.
The smartness have to do with culture. People coming from a fairly poor country will work harder and will generally be more driven to achieve than a privileged person (in some countries your status is determined by the position you work in).
Also – the education level of most countries differ widely. It is no secret that the education (both at tertiary and other levels) in Africa is a giant step behind other developing nations (such as China or Brazil). So it would make sense to allow immigration from countries which have a good education system.
> C. Therefore, if a person is from India, we should give them a preferred immigration status over someone from another country.
If other immigrants from a country integrates well and is successful they should be given preference over another country - it is simply common sense. The immigration services of the USA should act in the interest of American citizens – thus it should select people that have the highest probability of making a positive contribution.
Also, people coming from countries where English is widely spoken has a much better change of integrating (e.g. common wealth countries).
> That Indian-Americans living in the United States are successful "on average" because the "average" person of Indian descent lives in India and can't afford to move to the United States.
Several countries work on a quota system. In this, the immigration quotas are designated for each country. It only makes sense to make the immigration quotas larger for groups who more easily integrate into the country – whether they are more successful based on work home education systems, work ethic, culture, etc..
> Another problem with the "model minority" label is: Who designs this "model"?
As far as I know most of the “model” minority is ascribed based on positive outcomes (e.g. university admission, SAT scores, unemployment rate, income) and negative outcomes (incarceration rate, welfare dependency, etc...)
I'm getting kinda sick of all accusations of racism.
I'm not accusing you of racism. I am pointing out that one of your statements is racist. Those aren't the same thing at all. I invite you to read point one of this interesting essay that went round the other day:
That’s a starting assumption for me — the world is racist, the culture I grew up in is racist, I’ve internalized and carry around a hell of a lot of racist baggage, and on some deep level, many of my basic assumptions are racist. So are yours. That sucks. But I also don’t feel particularly guilty about it, and neither should you. It’s something you’ve inherited, living in this world. The onus now on you isn’t to wallow in guilt — it’s to be aware of these deep-buried attitudes, and consciously try to avoid letting them dictate your choices in life.
All of us draw racist conclusions from time to time. I've done it more than once, and doubtlessly will do so again. If nobody bothers to point this out I'll just keep making the same mistakes forever.
As for whether or not a statement like this is overtly racist:
If other immigrants from a country integrates well and is successful they should be given preference over another country
Here's the deal: When someone says "people who work hard tend to succeed", that is not overtly racist. If someone says "people who speak English tend to succeed", that is not overtly racist. When someone says "people who win math competitions succeed", or "people with a family history of entrepreneurship succeed", or "people who can afford to pay an immigration tax succeed", these statements are not overtly racist. (Though, obviously, people might disagree with them, or dispute their relevance to immigration policy.)
But when I read "people from Culture X tend to succeed; therefore we should give them a preference" what can I call that statement but racist? You're generalizing about people based on their race. It's an unfair generalization -- unfair to the millions of people who work hard, learn fast, and integrate, but who are unfortunate enough to have a less-marketable ethnic background.
> But when I read "people from Culture X tend to succeed; therefore we should give them a preference" what can I call that statement but racist?
Firstly, culture is not equal to race - it has nothing to do with race. The criticism against racism is usually because it is immutable (a person can not change his race) and race does not have any bearing on how a person acts (i.e. your personality is effected by the environment) or his intelligence.
Culture is the opposite of race - culture will determine how a person will react in certain situations. Culture can also be changed. People of all creeds can have “western” culture – i.e. democracy and respect for human rights. Other cultures have aspects that is undoubtedly perpendicular to western cultures (e.g. in its treatment of women). To each his own.
Not allowing someone to enter the US (which undoubtedly have a western culture) because he will not fit in (based on his own culture) is doing both the USA and the particular individual a favour.
You sound like my Sunday school teacher. "All of us draw blasphemous conclusions from time to time. I've done it more than once. The onus on you isn’t to wallow in guilt -- it’s to be aware of these deep-buried attitudes, and consciously try blah blah blah."
I listened to this speech a couple hundred times before it dawned on me: I was having those blasphemous thoughts because my Sunday school teacher was, in fact, full of baloney, and that speech was his way of preempting my critical thinking.
If you know an idea is false, you don't have to work to suppress it. Your brain is good at doing that for you. I think as a rule, if someone tells you to suppress an idea, you should do the opposite and follow it further. Even if it shocks you.
I have to stay with the same employer on an H-1B visa while my application for a greencard is pending (currently, people who applied in 2001 with a bachelors degree or 2004 with a masters degree are being considered).
Half of my immigrant classmates (Indian or not) from gradschool would have started a startup if they didn't have to stay stuck with the same employers to be in this country.