If you're not well networked in a corporation, but still work very well, you don't get a higher wage or as much opportunity to a promotion..
non-white ethnicity is a huge network barrier. It's not like people wanna golf with you and then go have a fancy chicken tiki massala or eat injera.
Also, could foreign workers be much more ok with simple lives rather than being ambitious corporate thugs?.. but what's the measure of ambition for higher salary btwn immigrant and native wokers?
If I came from a village I'd settle for any salary. Using salaries for understanding is absolutely pathetic..
This is the part where you say that I don't have all the information, and maybe he was a terrible worker. That's also the part where I say that you likely don't have the full picture of the "company club" either. The cultural divide can be huge. My former coworker grew up in Punjab. He was very apprehensive when he tagged along with me on a roadtrip (he loved football) and my wife wanted to drive. He told me "the women in my family don't drive." This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to get into the "company club."
If we are going to be pulling anecdotes from where the sun don't shine, I can also point at Silicon Valley with a huge number of south asian/chinese immigrants starting companies.
> If you're not well networked, but still working very well, you don't get a higher wage/promotions...
Erm... so ? This is life. Popularity and hard work are not necessarily correlated, learn how to network. It is a life skill. This is like a guy saying that he is a good guy but doesn't get any with a girl.
I'm not saying they can't network, anybody can indeed over come that... but some people, and maybe foreigner workers fall into this category, don't care about the popularity contest.. they're just trying to work
Btw, did you know that women don't make as much as men? maybe female workers are... Salary #'s overlook a lot of cultural things that need to be studied...
Second: other commenters have already pointed out that your comment about being "well-networked", while true, has nothing to do with racism. So don't confuse those things.
Third:
> *Can we talk about racism?
Maybe you're content to just vent your frustration, and throw blame around. Or maybe you want to have a meaningful conversation. I don't know you, I don't know your goals. But if your goal is to have a meaningful conversation about racism, or educate the privileged white people about their privilege, you're doing it wrong.
One of the facts of human nature is that people don't want to hear this shit. If you want to illuminate anyone, you have to make a very careful and thoughtful argument, because when you make sloppy mistakes, that gives people the excuse they need to let themselves off the hook. Just look at the replies you got: you said something that's true ("If you're brown or yellow or black... chances are you don't make the company club (as easily) as well, white people") and then you said a few things that were dumb ("I've seen it with my own eyes...", and the thing about confusing not-wanting-to-network with ethnicity), and look at which part got the replies.
If you want to preach the uncomfortable truths, you've gotta be on your A game. And if you play a C game, you just distract the audience, which makes it harder for other people to explain the situation, which means that the racism will continue. As well as all the other forms of privilege, which I notice you didn't much care about (your "btw women" notwithstanding).
If you want real immigration reform,
make the H1B visa a portable work visa for 5 years.
There are definitely disadvantages to be on H1B.
Asking someone else is not useful to you, because there are several buckets into which one can fall, that have different waiting times.
As I understand it, there are two questions of timing: how long will an applicant have to wait until given an immigrant visa number, and how long will it take to turn the immigrant visa number into a permanent residency. The latter is, I believe, consistent across buckets but varies over time, depending on the wheels of bureaucracy. It's a year or two, I think? The former, however, depends on your level of training and country of birth.
The wikipedia page is pretty good, in particular a few sections:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_S...
In the latter, note the difference between EB-3 and EB-2, and note the bolded footer (b).
EDIT STARTING HERE:
Oh, this helps too:
http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_5885.html
Depending on country of birth, if you have a BSc you're looking at 5-11 years of backlog. If you have a higher degree or 5+ years of "progressive" experience you're looking at 0 years of backlog, except 5 years for Chinese and 9 years for Indians. If you are doing family-based immigration, some category/nationality combinations are only just getting around to applications created in 15OCT98 (Philipinos and Mexicans are worst off here).
Time varies based on country of origin. Each country is allocated a fixed number of spots, and these spots of of similar size for all countries. So, if you're coming from a small country (i.e. Iceland) it's easy. Coming from India/Mexico, then you'll have to wait a while..
2. One becomes a citizen after 5 years of permanent residency. (3 if one is married to a US citizen.)
An alternative hypothesis is that in an industry where getting a raise means switching jobs the H1B program is successful in suppressing wage levels of foreigners.
If an industry (like finance) routinely pays multiple times the compensation of another industry (say, engineering) that requires similar skillset, it's rational that more of the top graduates will choose finance over engineering.
There in lies the problem.
And here's the dirty secret: the best known explanation is that it's economically irrational for a US Citizen to get a graduate/PhD degree in a STEM subject.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Discussed on HN:
Instead, foreign immigrants have saturated the market,
pushing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
students onto other career paths
For most middling to large companies in the bay, the "complicated and costly processes" are outsourced to law firms that are on a retainer. For them, the whole process brings a matter of calling a number. Furthermore, the processes are not that costly (Say around $10K for an H1B application ) compared to the benefits of having an employee who can be exploited. Now, I am not saying it happens consciously at the company level. However, I am pretty damn sure it can happen at the hiring manager level.
Scenario A Shareholder: $100,000, Native programmer: $100,000
Scenario B Shareholder: $150,000, Native programmer: $75,000, H1B programmer: $75,000
There are good reasons in a democracy to favor scenario A over scenario B. It just depends on the following premises:
1) the income of non-Americans is irrelevant to American policy;
2) we care more about the income of the median American than the aggregate GDP;
3) we don't not care about the standard deviation of income
Econ 101 or not, these are not unreasonable premises.