The way I see it: the more skilled labor we can import, the better. The U.S. owes its success largely due to migration (be it through merchants, slaves, or otherwise).
I don't agree with the notion that we must "close off" the country in order to preserve said success.
> I don't agree with the notion that we must "close off" the country in order to preserve said success.
I would argue our success would significantly decline. A majority of Americans believe they’re entitled to the lifestyle and resources they have. A lot of immigrants from poorer areas understand that’s false.
It’s why you see hard working immigrants being successful and their kids riding their coattails.
Immigration is self selecting. People with significant developmental disabilities for example are vastly less likely to immigrate. But, that says little about the genetics of the population so in the next generation regression to the mean kicks in.
> But, that says little about the genetics of the population so in the next generation regression to the mean kicks in.
True but I do think America has a “dumbing down” privilege effect on the population. A lot of Americans are racist, angry, and think they’re entitled to their way of life.
They don’t realize they need to do well in school because the high paying jobs they’re competing for everyone in the world is also competing for.
If you’re against immigration you’re limiting your competitive edge and someone else in the world will put you of business (probably in China).
It’s not about smarts. Funding, culture, infrastructure, and institutions mean on average someone in say India would be more productive moved to the US when doing just about anything.
Advantages like cleaner air don’t care about how smart someone is, their useful across the bord.
I’d push it one step further and include “unskilled” labor too. The value added to society is measurably positive no matter the skill level of the immigrant.
Lots of "unskilled" immigrants certainly find useful things to do. And live better lives than they would have at home.
But I think the counter-argument is something like this. Countries with an unlimited pool of low-skill labor have a lot of bad features. One of these is a class gap, between haves and have-nots, who feel they don't share common interests. Another is that the incentive to invent ways to reduce labor input is reduced, why bother if it's cheap? And inventing ways to do more per person is precisely what economic growth is.
Yes, because you have to work a lot harder to make it in the U.S. than other countries, where you could mostly slack off and be taken care of by robust welfare systems.
But also, the rewards for working harder in the US and having the right bit of luck are much higher than other countries. If you're an immigrant and you're looking to move somewhere for a YOLO shot at a good life, the U.S. is still the best game in town.
You’re clearly not from a Latin American country. I am both Latin American and European.
The experience in Latin America is that you can’t make it no matter how hard you try.
So much paperwork. And you have to pre-pay taxes! (Anticipos)
I am also European. And sure Spain has much bigger safety. But Latin American inherits its dysfunctional bureaucracy from Spain. UK / US culture is free and unleashed.
In countries with corrupt and/or incompetent tax authorities, they try to introduce a fixed tax amount / pay in advance scheme for ... reasons ... where they can.
Usually they squeeze freelancers first. Or random liberal occupations. In Romania freelancers and landlords have to prepay taxes based on last years' income, for example. With the exception of some kinds of freelancers that they just gave up on and make them pay a fixed amount per year. Freelancers prepay taxes in Greece too, as far as i know.
For the high tech case...in Spain, an employer can’t provide stock options to employees. The Silicon Valley case where the first few dozen employees become millionaires is not an option in Spain.
For low-level employees, many are employed in the black market and enjoy no privileges. Because of this they get no credit, phone lines and numerous other benefits that extend to being legal. They can’t make the jump.
These problems extend to Dominican Republic where they exist but are even worse.
US / UK is better for hard working, and smart people be they employees or employed people. Anecdotally, I know so many stories of Dominicans who move to USA and begin to work so hard because they finally get compensated and rewarded for previously unacknowledged work. You hear this everywhere. Dominicans become hard workers in USA.
The US has much lower intergenerational social mobility than other developed countries. So it's much more likely that if you're born poor, you'll stay poor for the rest of your life.
2nd line of TFA: "among Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists, [im]migrants [...]"
These people might be under-paid, relative to silicon valley, but "slave wages" is pushing it. And while they are not a group known for being really on top of their paperwork, few of them cross borders illegally. Unless you mean the ones who escaped the USSR without permission.
I make $400k/yr as an immigrant, and boy do I feel exploited :)
Edit: Sorry for being sarcastic and flexing here. I’m friends with many IMO and IOI medalists (per the paper) who are studying/working in the US and I think it’s an amazing opportunity for them. Where I grew up in Singapore, tech salaries are way lower, and as a new grad I think I easily 3xed what I could’ve made back there. I’m not representative of all immigrants but I believe I can represent a class of highly skilled immigrants who appreciate the opportunity. It’s extremely insulting to call people like me exploited, because the next line is - I’m bringing down your wages.
The paper is specifically talking about highly skilled immigrants in math & science, though. Their dataset was a few thousand IMO gold medalists. Grandparent poster's experience is a lot more representative of this sample than a random agricultural worker who crosses the Rio Grande.
The vast vast vast majority of migrants to the US are random agricultural workers and the vast vast vast minority of them are IMO gold medalists from Singapore.
Post history seems to say he won a trading competition. To whoever downvoted this did you think I needed to add "so presumably he works in something along those lines"?
When group health insurance is provided in the US, employers and employees usually split the cost of insurance premiums. Both employers and employees can treat their premium portion as a tax deductible expense.
Additional copays and out of pocket expenses are completely on the employee.
Even some of the worst possible HDHP plans that employees can get have a max out of pocket of $10k/yr (pre-tax) with HSA. So you can say in the worst case OP makes $400k and pays $10k in insurance if he has some major health issues to be addressed. Or maybe just say he makes $390k and has totally free insurance? Even if he’s spending something ridiculous like $50k/yr on a family of eight’s insurance he’s still way better off.
Yes, affording health insurance is not much of a concern for someone making 400k/yr. The financial concerns faced by the vast majority of people are never experienced by someone in that privileged a situation.
It's a much bigger story for people make closer to the median income.
Immigrants everywhere are brought in to work for smaller wages than locals. What’s so new or unusual about this? The situation is unfortunate, of course. But the U.S. is not much different here. However, doing the same thing as everyone with less damage to economy (and therefore local working people, taxpayers, etc.) because of productivity is not necessarily such a bad thing. IMO, it should be much easier for productive people to enter any country than it is now. And it should be harder for non-productive ones (it’s too easy now in many places).
Germany. 21 months working on a Blue Card gets you the right to apply for an unlimited permanent residence. And the Blue Card is rather trivial to get. All you need is a degree and a contract with a company. No visa sponsorship required, i.e. it costs a German company 0 to hire someone outside the EU.
I think Canada’s express entry is a good example as well.
German education accreditation for Blue Card is rather fickle.
Germany maintains a rather short list of universities per-country which it recognises as institutes of higher learning.
You may have a rather ordinary uni degree in mainstream occupation, but if your uni is not on the list, you can't do anything.
If you passed a university program in a recognised university, but your program is missing from a dropdown list on their website, again, you can't do anything.
And if you have both, but your degree does not state in its title verbatim that it is a bachelor, or masters program regardless of years of study, again, you can't do anything about it.
You're right, that happened to me in 2014. My then-employer had to drive to some government office and ask them to give a go-ahead for my degree. But I've never heard anything like that since that time.
At-will employment has pros and cons. It’s not like citizens have permanent employment contracts and immigrants have at-will arrangements. Employers are more willing to hire if firing someone who doesn’t work out isn’t ruinous for the employer. It’s true that someone who emigrates from a country where they have a permanent employment arrangement is giving something up to come to the US. Presumably, they think it’s worth it.
All together this has the effect of increasing employers' leverage over employees, especially in industries with limited jobs and lots of competition for them.
Even at the 'slave' wage, they still get paid significantly higher compared to wage in their home country. A lot of them would happily be 'exploited' for the opportunity.
I believe part of the argument is that this is precisely why it’s exploitative. Employers are taking advantage of something the employee has zero control over. I.e., they are essentially being punished for where they were born.
I’m torn on this topic. On one hand, it does seem exploitative. On the other, I don’t know that stopping the exploitation makes the employee better off to if it essentially limits their job prospects. I assume there’s middle ground but I don’t know what it is
I'd love to move to the US from Canada in order to "exploit" the fact that my salary could almost double overnight simply by changing currency - and the less expensive real estate in pretty much everywhere that isn't in California, New York or some other giant city.
Undocumented wages are yes, low, but calling them "slave wages" indicates you really do not understand the depths of inhumanity and cruelty associated with actual slavery.
There are no "slave wages" because slaves did not get wages. I know it's a bit of rhetoric now, but it's IMO important to remember the distinction between being underpaid, and being literal property.
The main take away is that there is advancement for global scientific community by having a significant portion of the smart people migrate to one part of the world and collaborate.
What is not discussed
1. The fact that it happens a to be USA is a minor turn in the history in favor of this particular country
2. Post COVID world could be significantly different
I can’t easily download this paper but it is measuring specific things in research scientists and mathematicians and doesn’t really say much about us migrants in general or what you may think of as productivity. The title feels like a bit of an overstatement of the results.
The only thing that is overpriced in the US is Education and Health, anything else is cheaper than any other developed country and no other country has so much variety it terms of cost of living like the US.
No, if you're ex-EU with a working visa and you lose your job, you can lose legal status in the country (unless you get another visa, whether that's another employer or something else)
It’s actually really different in treatment, at least in Germany. Yes, you can loose your job but you get to stick around until your visa expires, which in my experience is tied to the visa term rather than the employment.
When you loose employment you’re also allowed to collect unemployment.
My visa class (basically the equivalent of an H1B) also allowed me to work as a contractor in my field.
Finally, getting the visa transferred to another employer just requires you to show up at the immigration office with an employment contract. Your employer doesn’t have to do anything.
There is also an assumption here that you’re a guest who is trying to do the right thing rather than someone who is trying to game the system or steal a job from Germans.
So, the reality is that it’s hugely different from the experience I’ve heard of people having with the American immigration system.
I can only speak for German and Swiss work visas, but my experience is that they are very different than US work visas.
The systems feel very much like you are being treated as a guest. Yes, there are rules but the rules are fair.
You lost your job? Well, you’ve been paying taxes, so you’re entitled to all the benefits that any other tax payer gets.
You lost your job? Well, you can take contract work in your field until you get a job? You want to change your visa type? You can do that without leaving the country?
You want to visit you family back in the USA for three months? Sure, family is important. So are vacations.
Listen, this isn't all that difficult to understand.
Migrating to US is much higher effort than migrating practically anywhere else in the world. You don't expend that effort if you don't plan on making the best of it.
Also US makes it very hard or impossible to migrate if you are not already high earner in your country of origin. Being high earner would normally correlate with being productive, at least when it comes to jobs requiring high level of expertise, ie. practically the only ones that US lets in.
> Migrating to US is much higher effort than migrating practically anywhere else in the world.
This is a surprising statement to me. Maybe it's true. But my understanding (which might be wrong) is that it's considerably more difficult to receive legal status in most other OECD nations.
As someone whoo immigrated to the US, most of the difficulty is due to demand - i.e. H1B lottery, visa country caps, etc. Otherwise it's not that different than other countries.
I studied mathematics. It wasn't hard to get there at all. The only problem was there were seventeen applicants for every single one that got in, otherwise it wasn't more difficult than if I wanted to get admitted to geology.
I know a lot of poor immigrants in my home town in NJ (my family for example when we got here). I know there are countries in Europe/Asia that are much harder than the US to get into.
IMHO the US is more about making money than it is about where you come from or your ethnicity or your nationality. We just want to get paid. I know in the news you see a lot of parts of the US that makes it seem like they do not want immigrants, but I think the truth is that the US welcomes immigrants more than other countries.
I am a non immigrant. I just came here to study and want to return once I am done. But one thing I can say for sure, back in my home country I never worked as hard as I did in America. In America, I worked my ass off, I feel like its the robust education system that made me this person. I enjoy studying/working more than going outside and partying. I feel America helped me discover more about myself than I would have ever learned in another country. I thank America and its predecessors who created such a beautiful country.
Basically he says we have the luxury of time and leisure to be self-critical and we believe we can achieve a utopian ideal but we fall short in so many ways.
Some people do not like VDH because he's a conservative Trump supporter, but that doesn't make him a bad historian.
Americans are not the only ones being critical of America.
Quite the opposite: My perception is rather that Americans have very high tendency to assume they are the greatest country in the world. And because of mostly learning about their own country and history in school it is harder to hold themselves to higher standards and compare with other nations besides the size of your army or the worth of the biggest companies (e.g. when you get cancer and lose your job, you somehow must pay for that treatment that is just how it is, better have something saved up. Whereas in many other developed nations that goes much differently)
Also regarding to GP: “working more” != “being more productive”
I agree that working more does not necessarily result in being more productive, but is there anything more specific you can add? Sometimes working more does mean being more productive. Sometimes it results in less output per hour, and depending on that haircut, can net at more or less productivity. Sometimes the working more is a prerequisite to learning something that you can leverage later on.
What was your point in mentioning that to OP? It seems like a bit of an aphorism that doesn't add much to the conversation except to dull GP's point.
work - "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result"
Parent seems be trying to conflate/dull definitions in support of the efficiency decline curve related to fatigue or the inverse efficiency incline curve related to expertise. Most likely in an effort to negate the value of hard work or working more. Which is generally an argument for expert thought workers that want to think less in exchange for the hard work they already did in learning and keep the same compensation. ie elitism
Your comment would be stronger if it held back the psychological projection of an internet stranger. Ie it reveals more about you than about them or the topic.
For example in my country you go to work, eat lunch but you mostly work. In the US what I have experienced is a lot more “living” at the company and everyone stays long but people are not often actually getting work done. But staying late makes you look good. To me: if I go to work for 8h I might have 6 productive hours if even. If I would go to work for 10 hours I might not be much more productive. Problem solving sometimes involves time to come up with a solution from your subconscious (e.g. under the shower)
Well, my understanding as an outsider is the reason America believes it's the best is the capacity for self reflection, experimentation and change. It has huge problems and if they can solve them it reflects well on us as a species.
> My perception is rather that Americans have very high tendency to assume they are the greatest country in the world. And because of mostly learning about their own country and history in school it is harder to hold themselves to higher standards
Anecdotally, as an American, I meet many more Americans that are critical of America compared to Americans that regard America as the greatest country in the world.
But, hey, I’m just an ignorant American whose only lived here my whole life and was actually educated in the US so it’s not like I have any insight into what Americans learn/don’t learn and common attitudes of normal Americans.
Just to be clear, after a quick read: This paper applies to science and innovation only. Citation-weighted publications are used to compare.
There are countries where migrants are much more productive than the U.S. in non-STEM areas, but it is essentially accomplished by means of almost-forced-labor, and the working conditions are atrocious[1].
This paper examines only those who are extraordinarily able: Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medalists, and International Math Olympiad medalists.
It's interesting, but the current HN headline ("Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere") seems misleading. The paper is taking up < 0.01% of "migrants to the U.S."
Thats true. I would like to know if the demographics of those high performing migrants are representative of the US’s entire migrant population. If not, then it’s critically more accurate to say that some specific migrant groups are 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere.
The submitted title broke the HN guidelines against editorializing titles. Cherry-picking a detail from an article and making that the title is a form of editorializing—the most common form, in fact.
I've replaced it with the first sentence of the abstract, which does a slightly more accurate and neutral job of expressing what the article is about than the primary title does.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Also, the 'six times more productive' stat turns out to mean Math Olympiad medallists who migrate to the US are six times more likely to get a speaking slot at the International Congress of Mathematicians than people who stay at home; an impressive accomplishment but hardly what most people would call 'productivity'. On the slightly less arcane measure of weighted academic citations, migrants to the US have twice as many as migrants to other countries, or four times as many as those who stay at home.
Or put another way: moving to country with best funded and most prestigious research institutions turns out to be useful if you want a high-profile academic career
> migrants to the US have twice as many [citation-weighted papers] as migrants to other countries, or four times as many as those who stay at home
Nitpicky, but... this is also only for IMO medalists (from 1980 to 2000) publishing papers in mathematics (up until 2017). It's pretty darned specific, even as it pertains to academics. Even as it pertains to mathematicians, it's a single snapshot of somewhat recent history.
One of those groups is not like the other :) Thanks anyway, but IMO medals (even Gold) does not make migrating to the US easier.
As for the paper, why doesn't it compare US citizen performance? The Team Selection Test is pretty competitive, and I guess there are at least 20 US citizens each year who are of similar skill.
I beat 1/6 members of the US team at my IMO showing, but I'm pretty sure every single USA TST participant has a brighter future ahead than most of the general cohort of "IMO medallists", including me.
This is not difficult, looking at the kind of migration e.g. Germany has in the millions. When taking averages and means of migrant KPI over the migrant population at large, any good will be cancelled out by the negative aspects of 3rd world pauper migration. Because the subpopulations are vastly differently sized.
Any 1st world country with more tightly controlled migration should do better.
More productive in "knowledge production" according to "novel survey data" and "hand-curated life-histories of International Math Olympiad (IMO) medalists."
The headline makes this sound like a broad finding, but in fact it’s very narrow.
I'm from Canada, and it is not surprising, especially when it comes to STEM fields. The thing most people do not get about immigrating to Canada is that it is VERY hard. Good luck getting here with no marketable skills or without being a refugee.
As a White person who grew up in a White rural area, my peers simply didn't realize the value of education compared to what I've seen from immigrants and children of immigrants. This is also true in bigger cities now that I live those now. "I'll just get into a trade" was a common saying, fortunately I saw the lack of wisdom in that and studied CS.
As always people on here bitching about the US. As an outsider one thing I find to be really good in the US is inclusion. Americans really don't know how backwards the rest of the world is.
For example, I currently live in Germany. Germany is currently importing boatloads of Latino and South East Asian STEM workers. Now if you look at the structure of German companies two things stand out:
1. there is a huge disparity between management and workers and this is reflected also in the salaries
2. all management are German (99.9% ethnic with maybe one 3rd generation ethnic Slav/Turk)
This situation is very likely true for most of Europe, except for maybe the UK.
So of course migrants in the US are more productive. In most countries immigrants are imported to fill a niche and the glass ceiling is held firmly just above that niche. And let's not even talk about entrepreneurial opportunities for immigrants.
Yes, I am always shocked to hear how "non-racist" Germany is when I have friends who failed to climb the corporate ladder their because of their Greek last name, as they were explicitly told by their coworkers. In America, they are doing well now as an executive at a F500.
Having lived in Germany for a few years, I was pretty surprised by the level of casual racism. The level of casual anti-semitism in Poland was even more surprising.
Interesting. I've checked [1] and it seems that number of antisemitic incidents in Poland is rather low (for instance is smaller than in Sweden, which has much smaller population), not to mention France, where number of incidents was 5 times bigger than in Poland.
I am curious what is source of you information about Polish antisemitism.
I am really curious how a report like this can capture casual racism or antisemitism. When I was working in Switzerland a long time ago, one of the comments I heard frequently is that I am not like other Indians - I dress well, speak well and I am tall. I would consider it as a "racist" comment, but not something that would get reported. One of my other friends from India felt similar, if he is not dressed in a suit, he would be treated differently. I doubt he would report it either. You are different and will be treated differently. Jariel made a similar point above - you are constantly aware that it is not your country. I do not feel the same in US.
> When I was working in Switzerland a long time ago, one of the comments I heard frequently is that I am not like other Indians - I dress well, speak well and I am tall. I would consider it as a "racist" comment, but not something that would get reported.
> "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."
I've never gotten a comment like that as a South Asian (Bangladesh) in the United States.
My own ex-boss (Bangladeshi immigrant from Dhaka) told me (Pakistani-American born here) when I asked him for a proper W2 in order to lease my car as opposed to a handwritten one that "suspicion runs in your veins like everyone else from the subcontinent" (I managed to extract it from the HR person)
Yeah. The dude was in the Senate during the Nixon administration. He's (we hope) recovering from a seriously poisonous culture, particularly with respect to race and gender equality. But he's also the guy that forced Obama's hand on marriage equality. I'm inclined to watchfully wait and see how he handles things from here. In the meantime: he's said some stupid shit. What'd you expect?
That’s because the US is one of the most harmonious multicultural societies in the world. It just doesn’t seem that way if you read the news because it’s the rest of the worlds political punching bag.
I’ve lived and worked all over Southeast Asia, and just openly being racist is perfectly normal there. Employers will openly tell you that they don’t want to hire foreigners, because they don’t trust them. Local ethnic minorities are consistently discriminated against, especially if there’s a local ethnic Chinese population (who in Indonesia for instance are often referred to as babi which means pig, or mata sipit which means slanted eyes). Contempt for people from neighbouring countries is very common. Working in KL it was very common to hear my colleagues talking about how much they don’t like Thai people. India takes things to a whole different level with their caste system and extreme distaste for dark skin.
Ive never got particularly wound up about it, because I see myself as a guest whenever I go and work in a foreign country, so I’ve just got to play by their rules. But try applying that logic the US and see how long it takes for an outrage mob to come after you.
Personal experience. I was talking to some absolutely lovely Polish friends of mine one evening, and somehow we were discussing Christmas growing up. Somehow it came up that many of my childhood friends celebrated Hanukah instead, and the response was a puzzled "You like Jews? Really?" After some mentions of typical stereotypes as to why that would be strange, I said that that wasn't my experience and changed the subject.
From talking to other Polish people, my impression is that this is a fairly typical attitude. I think that the reason this doesn't show up as incidents in the news is simply that there are hardly any Jews in Poland because they were virtually completely wiped out in the Holocaust.
I'm not German but I live in German. I didn't notice racism. Maybe some don't like immigrants (especially from eastern Europe, same in UK). And what the hell is causal racism? Give me examples please.
It is because Germany also takes in a lot of lower class/uneducated migrants in who have almost no prospects of getting a good job. Whereas America doesn't really do that as much (at least right now, I'm not talking about the past). Germany also doesn't have a lot of black people, which in my opinion if they had would make the racism more visible.
An American in Germany would probably knee-jerk to 'racism' for a few reasons, and although there are different kinds of unfairness, I'm not sure if that's quite the right word.
America is an open place, Germany, not so much. America has tons of really high-level aptitude migrants, Germany doesn't quite have that.
With respect to 'glass ceilings' - it's more complicated.
As a resident of Germany for some time, as an outsider ... I would have expected to be promoted well enough if I was materially 'that much better', but frankly, not otherwise.
I actually accepted the fact that 'this is a German company, it's going to be run by Germans'.
I was in France I felt the same way.
I don't believe in the notion that a random person from country XYZ has the 'right' to be an executive for example at a local company.
Definitely treated with respect and not face racism, definitely promoted rank and file based mostly on performance, definitely the same material, legal rights - but beyond that ... I always felt 'it was their country, not really mine'.
Also, there are quite a number of these countries run by foreign nationals anyhow, it's just not quite as common as in the US.
The "dreamer BS" isn't in any way comparable. I seriously doubt you're offering citizenship in 5 years to anyone who shows up and sneaks across the border. I do think we should offer citizenship to the dreamers but it'd involve passing actual laws so...
> Well, if they work, pay taxes, can have a driver licence... Yes they will get citizenship after 5 years of residency.
As far as I can tell, it is eight years of legal residency. You also must not be dependent on welfare, which implies that you're either already wealthy, dependent on someone, or you have permission to work. Very similar to the US.
So effectively you have to apply for a work visa just like in the US, you can't just walk in and expect to be tolerated - unless you're a refugee.
To be fair, the dreamers stuff is about people who came here / were brought here illegally by their parents.
We definitely have work to do on our immigration system but I would imagine if I immigrated to Germany illegally they wouldn't make the process very easy on me either.
>Compared to most european countries, US is very xenophobic.
As an european who have worked for european and for american companies[1]... no, very much it's the reverse: european companies pay a lot of attention to university, nationality (home culture, really), and social class for matters of promotion; american companies are more results-oriented and much more cosmopolitan.
You might be judging it by what's being broadcasted in popular media - the european "we're enlightened all the way through" versus the american "we still have ways to go".
>All european countries have equal opportunity laws.
Only really useful for bilking the big multinational companies for moderately stingy fines. Nobody gets ahead because of a lawsuit.
There is no "European" in the same way there is "American".
Europe country cultures are massively more different and diverse than US states.
There's only been free pan-EU movement since the Lisbon Treaty in December 2009. 11 years is not enough time to achieve the homogeneity that US citizens have from being single(dual at most) language, single currency & no borders for hundreds of years. Not to mention the similar pan US TV they all shared for decades.
To be fair, this applies even more directly to the parent of the comment you replied to (GP), which asserted that you get a passport after 5 years. That's true in a few European countries but explicitly false in many others.
Of course, but the law is a joke in practice (which btw is something I found typical of German law).
It is very hard to prove discrimination and no immigrant would have the money, time and energy to pick such a battle.
What most of them do instead, (which is smarter than trying to fight a German employer in a German court) is they use Germany as a stepping stone. They come here, get a couple years of experience and move to a more welcoming country afterwards.
And German bureaucrats and employers wonder why retention is so low.
In America, the lack of a middle class creates racism and classism.
I struggled my entire life to get an education that ultimately was just indentured servitude and barely now can survive. People who didn't go to college seem to be the ones who are not struggling and can afford to buy a home.
I went on EBT during the pandemic and received quadruple the money I have ever had for food. When a country cares more about failures over people who try hard, you should expect pain, racism, classism, and just general hate. This is not a meritocracy and never has been
> There are 179 people on the management or executive boards of Germany’s 29 Fortune Global 500 companies. Just two of them are not white—both hailing from South Asia—and none is black.
Germany doesn't have many black people because Germany didn't import them as slaves and never really colonized Africa.
This whole statistic is worthless without context. Like how Germany's first immigrants after WW2 were low skilled Turkish workers and only recently Germany became more attractive for high-skilled immigrants because the US effectively shut down its visa program for the majority of people.
I'm not saying Germany is perfect but just whipping out some numbers without context doesn't cut it.
Also, it's pretty bold for Americans to lecture other countries on racism while their police is gunning down people simply for the color of their skin and is separating children of refugees from their parents to put them in cages. Meanwhile Germany is providing healthcare and shelter for all refugees but apparently doesn't currently promote a few dozen high-skilled workers that very likely could've made it anywhere to be CEO.
> Germany doesn't have many black people because Germany didn't import them as slaves and never really colonized Africa.
Germany did colonize Africa and committed its fair share of attrocities in Namibia, but the colonies were taken away after WWII - way before the African independence movement took hold (which was immediately followed by an uptick of citizens in those former colonies migrating to colonial powers)
Germany is no stranger to slave labor and didn’t abolish it until much later than the US did (1945). And not by choice either. The US has never had genocide on the industrial scale of what Germany has done in the 20th century. Slave labor today doesn’t seem to be an issue for Merkel either, as evidenced by recent trade deals.
Germans playing the moral superiority card is humorous to me.
You missed my point entirely. I never compared past atrocities as it is unfair to the current generation. What I compare is the current state of affairs.
Germany today is giving shelter and free healthcare to refugees but apparently not CEO positions.
The US is gunning down blacks and forcefully taking children of refugees away from their parents but some immigrants became CEO of large companies which apparently makes the US more immigration-friendly and less racist than Germany.
> Germany doesn't have many black people because Germany didn't import them as slaves and never really colonized Africa.
Yes, that was a weird point to make in the article because it's not as if there are many Black people in Germany. But you have to admit that having just two non-white people out of 179 (1.1%) on corporate boards is pretty odd. Germany is white, but not 98.9% white. Turks make up over 5% of the population.
Definitely true. Germany made a huge mistake not integrating 1st and 2nd generation Turks better and the 3rd generation is now feeling especially lost as Turkey isn't home and Germany doesn't feel like home either.
If the makeup of management doesn't reflect the underlying population, especially if non-management does, then yes of course that's a problem.
I as an ethnic German can echo the GP's point. Non-management can be quite diverse, but management is very much old, white, ethnic Germans as far as the eye can see.
There are still a lot of conscious/unconscious ethnic biases in Germany, especially among the older population.
Management is usually made of middle aged experienced people with really good speaking skills who have lived in the country for a decade or two at least. I suppose that the migrants in germany meet none of these criteria.
If by native you mean citizen, then there are also non-white natives of Germany. Without data on the ethnic makeup of the population it's difficult to say how poorly they're represented
So, first of all, "white" and "black" are not good terms to use in Germany. Most of Germany's migrants are not from Africa and most are from the EU. Germany has a "black" population of about 2%, compared to the 10+% in the US.
Then, you get the fact that the minorities in the US are more qualified than the ones in Germany. Germany doesn't attract the most talented in the world, like the US and due to the lack of two oceans protecting it from the rest of the world, Germany doesn't get to be too picky about its migrants. The biggest attraction to foreigners is its welfare state. So I would hesitate to conclude to much from such a simple comparison.
> Just two of them are not white—both hailing from South Asia—and none is black.
"Whiteness" is a US concept, which doesn't make much sense in a German context. That sentence only tells me that some South Asians are neither white nor black.
I have no idea how they'd classify e.g. Turks. I think Greeks are considered white in the US, so maybe Turks too.
The other big immigrant group in Germany are Vietnamese, but they're kind of hamstrung by mostly having moved to East Germany. (East Germans in general are economically disadvantaged.)
I think statistics about ethnicity would be more useful if they were based on easily interpretable categories like own country of birth, country of birth of parents, grandparents, etc.
I'm pretty sure these racial categories are American abstractions, whose names have only reflected their composition in recent decades. The Irish, for instance, were long not considered 'white'; they were just 'Irish'.
I live in the US, but was born and raised in France and Greeks are considered white there. If the 1998 football team described as "black-blanc-beur" had included players of Greek descent (and maybe it did?), they would have been part of the "blancs", just like Youri Djorkaeff.
Take what you read with a grain of salt. I'm certainly very skeptical of the implied claim that Germans wouldn't consider Greeks as white.
Note that being considered white doesn't preclude Greeks from being discriminated against, just like some people discriminate against e.g. white Poles.
Greeks, like Armenians in USA are kind of a tossup case, see for example the YA novel "The Westing Game" where a black character compares themselves to a Greek with darker skin
The point is that Germans are not in the habit of classifying people by race unless they're racist, and even then they don't tend to think in terms of Whites vs Blacks. For Nazis, it's about Aryans vs Jews, where the "Aryan race" is considered to consist of tall, blond, blue-eyed people. Most Greeks would not be considered Aryan, as would most Germans, for that matter.
I find it quite telling that you are surprised Greeks might be considered anything but white, while not showing any surprise about Turks. I don't think there's any difference in skin color, so that confirms my suspicion that "whiteness" isn't just about looks.
> I find it quite telling that you are surprised Greeks might be considered anything but white, while not showing any surprise about Turks. I don't think there's any difference in skin color, so that confirms my suspicion that "whiteness" isn't just about looks.
There are many more people of Greek descent than of Turkish descent in the USA. It's very possible that the person you replied to is simply not familiar enough with people of Turkish descent to express surprise at your claim.
>"Whiteness" is a US concept, which doesn't make much sense in a German context.
This is true, unfortunately the supremacy of American culture over the last century means that all of these concepts that do not fit very well into other contexts have been exported, I often run into situations in Denmark that would be horrifyingly racist in the U.S (not to say that Denmark doesn't have it's own racist traditions, but the grafting on of the American viewpoint does not exactly fit).
Of course when the concept is exported it in some way becomes the thing over time, and then people try to import the solutions to the problem.
You also lose a lot of the cultural baggage when you go somewhere new, which when it's holding you back is a great thing to be rid of.
As a guy from northern England I have been held back in my career when working in the south because of my accent, which is not very strong anyway. For example not being allowed to give presentations, or meet clients, as there was someone who "Would give the right impression".
In the US I just have a weird accent. No cultural baggage, no jokes about being thick etc. If you can get past people trying to get you to say lines from Game of Thrones, you're accent doesn't mean anything.
Questions from someone that knows very little about Germany:
How much of this is the German culture to be educated to a master/PhD level in order to get into management roles? Perhaps that increases the barriers to entry into these levels for immigrants.
How much of this is a language barrier? Immigrants to English-speaking countries have often learned some English before they arrive (often from their schooling) which might put them in a more advantageous position relatively speaking.
To be honest, I do not want to speculate about the why and philosophize about the justifications, as the issue is very complicated and would needlessly deviate the discussion.
My comment was very matter of fact: because of the current lack of diversity in management, immigrants have virtually no opportunities to break into management, and because high compensation is almost entirely reserved for management, this means that immigrants cannot be deemed high-achievers in this business environment.
Yet the US is is the most racist country in the world with "systemic racism", so much so that even China asked the US in UN to reflect upon their systemic racism instead of attacking other country's human rights.
Seriously, the US is a really fair country. You want to assert that the US is a racist country, do please define what qualifies "systemic racism". Don't be like that URI professor who hates everyone who "asks for data".
It's defined as the racism inherent in the structure of the system, such as longer sentences for crack cocaine (preferred and used mostly by low income black people) versus powder cocaine (preferred and used mostly by well off white people).
Sometimes people use it to describe racism between people, but it's actually supposed to mean the structural racism which exists in a societal system. It doesn't mean that someone designed it that way, but it could have been or it could be an accidental thing.
Discounting a concept because it's used improperly by some of the "other side" is common today but not helpful.
It's hilarious how a thread about US immigration studies turned into discussion on German corporate ladder. And, various european attitudes about ethnicities.
Germany is not US. Europe is not US. How they deal with societal situations will be different from how US deals with societal situations.
Are there lots of German/Europe HN users? I am US centric so I tend to think HN is US thing, specifically tech cities, mainly, San Francisco.
The US has many of the most prestigious universities in the world. Relatively few citizens want to get into academia because our brightest minds would rather pursue more lucrative careers. As a result, our elite instructions end up recruiting the brightest minds from around the globe instead.
Title is using the wrong word. The paper is about "US Immigration Restrictions" and it's about knowledge workers, that is normal legal immigrants with visas (e.g. H1B, etc...).
The term "migrant" is generally used to refer to unskilled workers entering the country to follow jobs in temporary or seasonal industries. Very often this therefore becomes a euphemism for "illegal immigrant". That's not what this paper is studying.
And in the US, they push you through a system that doesn't matter. You can get great grades and have goals and aspirations, but when skills don't matter, it is pointless to try. All that exists is nepotism and family, the latter which most people rely on.
But most people don't even have that. America should read, "Don't bother trying unless you have family that will help and a dick to suck."
198 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadWorld per capita GDP ~= $10000
US/World ~= 6
So, yeah, labor performed in the US is 6x world labor.
I don't agree with the notion that we must "close off" the country in order to preserve said success.
I would argue our success would significantly decline. A majority of Americans believe they’re entitled to the lifestyle and resources they have. A lot of immigrants from poorer areas understand that’s false.
It’s why you see hard working immigrants being successful and their kids riding their coattails.
True but I do think America has a “dumbing down” privilege effect on the population. A lot of Americans are racist, angry, and think they’re entitled to their way of life.
They don’t realize they need to do well in school because the high paying jobs they’re competing for everyone in the world is also competing for.
If you’re against immigration you’re limiting your competitive edge and someone else in the world will put you of business (probably in China).
Advantages like cleaner air don’t care about how smart someone is, their useful across the bord.
But I think the counter-argument is something like this. Countries with an unlimited pool of low-skill labor have a lot of bad features. One of these is a class gap, between haves and have-nots, who feel they don't share common interests. Another is that the incentive to invent ways to reduce labor input is reduced, why bother if it's cheap? And inventing ways to do more per person is precisely what economic growth is.
But also, the rewards for working harder in the US and having the right bit of luck are much higher than other countries. If you're an immigrant and you're looking to move somewhere for a YOLO shot at a good life, the U.S. is still the best game in town.
Before you make money, you need to pay tax?
In countries with corrupt and/or incompetent tax authorities, they try to introduce a fixed tax amount / pay in advance scheme for ... reasons ... where they can.
Usually they squeeze freelancers first. Or random liberal occupations. In Romania freelancers and landlords have to prepay taxes based on last years' income, for example. With the exception of some kinds of freelancers that they just gave up on and make them pay a fixed amount per year. Freelancers prepay taxes in Greece too, as far as i know.
For example, if you lost student renters due to Covid and remote learning.
For the high tech case...in Spain, an employer can’t provide stock options to employees. The Silicon Valley case where the first few dozen employees become millionaires is not an option in Spain.
For low-level employees, many are employed in the black market and enjoy no privileges. Because of this they get no credit, phone lines and numerous other benefits that extend to being legal. They can’t make the jump.
These problems extend to Dominican Republic where they exist but are even worse.
US / UK is better for hard working, and smart people be they employees or employed people. Anecdotally, I know so many stories of Dominicans who move to USA and begin to work so hard because they finally get compensated and rewarded for previously unacknowledged work. You hear this everywhere. Dominicans become hard workers in USA.
And it's not hard to miss, it's quite easy actually.
Plus, despite all the propaganda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve#/media/File...
The US has much lower intergenerational social mobility than other developed countries. So it's much more likely that if you're born poor, you'll stay poor for the rest of your life.
These people might be under-paid, relative to silicon valley, but "slave wages" is pushing it. And while they are not a group known for being really on top of their paperwork, few of them cross borders illegally. Unless you mean the ones who escaped the USSR without permission.
Edit: Sorry for being sarcastic and flexing here. I’m friends with many IMO and IOI medalists (per the paper) who are studying/working in the US and I think it’s an amazing opportunity for them. Where I grew up in Singapore, tech salaries are way lower, and as a new grad I think I easily 3xed what I could’ve made back there. I’m not representative of all immigrants but I believe I can represent a class of highly skilled immigrants who appreciate the opportunity. It’s extremely insulting to call people like me exploited, because the next line is - I’m bringing down your wages.
The vast vast vast majority of migrants to the US are random agricultural workers and the vast vast vast minority of them are IMO gold medalists from Singapore.
There's significantly more money in the USA than in a lot of other countries.
Even accounting for the ridiculously high taxes and the work-80hrs culture, the high salaries can be worth it for some people.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/us-highest-taxed-nation-world
Additional copays and out of pocket expenses are completely on the employee.
It's a much bigger story for people make closer to the median income.
Context: I am an expat myself.
The US is profoundly different. Very few developed countries have at-will employment.
It puts immigrants at risk of being fired and losing health insurance in any moment and with 0 warning.
This creates a very exploitative environment.
Not to mention how difficult it is to immigrate, or to get a green card or citizenship compared to many other countries.
Compared with which countries?
I think Canada’s express entry is a good example as well.
That's just possible for some markets. If you are talking about your own experience, that's because you are probably software developer.
Canada and Australia are definitely not easier, but more transparent.
It's still a good deal. Non-IT professionals can get a PR status in 4 years.
German education accreditation for Blue Card is rather fickle.
Germany maintains a rather short list of universities per-country which it recognises as institutes of higher learning.
You may have a rather ordinary uni degree in mainstream occupation, but if your uni is not on the list, you can't do anything.
If you passed a university program in a recognised university, but your program is missing from a dropdown list on their website, again, you can't do anything.
And if you have both, but your degree does not state in its title verbatim that it is a bachelor, or masters program regardless of years of study, again, you can't do anything about it.
You're right, that happened to me in 2014. My then-employer had to drive to some government office and ask them to give a go-ahead for my degree. But I've never heard anything like that since that time.
At-will employment has pros and cons. It’s not like citizens have permanent employment contracts and immigrants have at-will arrangements. Employers are more willing to hire if firing someone who doesn’t work out isn’t ruinous for the employer. It’s true that someone who emigrates from a country where they have a permanent employment arrangement is giving something up to come to the US. Presumably, they think it’s worth it.
And no other country than the US has 0 paid vacation days and 0 paid public holydays!
The other day I was checking number of paid vacations per country, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b..., the US is the only country ns the world with 0 total paid leave.
The vast majority of US states do not even guarantee any paid sick leave.
https://www.patriotsoftware.com/blog/payroll/state-mandated-...
All together this has the effect of increasing employers' leverage over employees, especially in industries with limited jobs and lots of competition for them.
I believe part of the argument is that this is precisely why it’s exploitative. Employers are taking advantage of something the employee has zero control over. I.e., they are essentially being punished for where they were born.
I’m torn on this topic. On one hand, it does seem exploitative. On the other, I don’t know that stopping the exploitation makes the employee better off to if it essentially limits their job prospects. I assume there’s middle ground but I don’t know what it is
Exploit me harder daddy.
There are no "slave wages" because slaves did not get wages. I know it's a bit of rhetoric now, but it's IMO important to remember the distinction between being underpaid, and being literal property.
What is not discussed
1. The fact that it happens a to be USA is a minor turn in the history in favor of this particular country
2. Post COVID world could be significantly different
Or just the fact that everything in the US is overpriced?
Or, related to H1-B, their managers feel the need to overstate their contribution so they'll be allowed to import more serfs in the future?
Will disagree, US is all over the place, but it is faaaar from the most expensive countries around.
When you loose employment you’re also allowed to collect unemployment.
My visa class (basically the equivalent of an H1B) also allowed me to work as a contractor in my field.
Finally, getting the visa transferred to another employer just requires you to show up at the immigration office with an employment contract. Your employer doesn’t have to do anything.
There is also an assumption here that you’re a guest who is trying to do the right thing rather than someone who is trying to game the system or steal a job from Germans.
So, the reality is that it’s hugely different from the experience I’ve heard of people having with the American immigration system.
The systems feel very much like you are being treated as a guest. Yes, there are rules but the rules are fair.
You lost your job? Well, you’ve been paying taxes, so you’re entitled to all the benefits that any other tax payer gets.
You lost your job? Well, you can take contract work in your field until you get a job? You want to change your visa type? You can do that without leaving the country?
You want to visit you family back in the USA for three months? Sure, family is important. So are vacations.
So yeah, it’s really different.
Migrating to US is much higher effort than migrating practically anywhere else in the world. You don't expend that effort if you don't plan on making the best of it.
Also US makes it very hard or impossible to migrate if you are not already high earner in your country of origin. Being high earner would normally correlate with being productive, at least when it comes to jobs requiring high level of expertise, ie. practically the only ones that US lets in.
This is a surprising statement to me. Maybe it's true. But my understanding (which might be wrong) is that it's considerably more difficult to receive legal status in most other OECD nations.
Do you mean settled status? Regardless, that is easier as well (see for instance the guy posting about the Blue Card a few comments up).
IMHO the US is more about making money than it is about where you come from or your ethnicity or your nationality. We just want to get paid. I know in the news you see a lot of parts of the US that makes it seem like they do not want immigrants, but I think the truth is that the US welcomes immigrants more than other countries.
"Critics of the West: From Tacitus to Michael Moore"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bao_YeH14RM
Basically he says we have the luxury of time and leisure to be self-critical and we believe we can achieve a utopian ideal but we fall short in so many ways.
Some people do not like VDH because he's a conservative Trump supporter, but that doesn't make him a bad historian.
Also regarding to GP: “working more” != “being more productive”
What was your point in mentioning that to OP? It seems like a bit of an aphorism that doesn't add much to the conversation except to dull GP's point.
Parent seems be trying to conflate/dull definitions in support of the efficiency decline curve related to fatigue or the inverse efficiency incline curve related to expertise. Most likely in an effort to negate the value of hard work or working more. Which is generally an argument for expert thought workers that want to think less in exchange for the hard work they already did in learning and keep the same compensation. ie elitism
Anecdotally, as an American, I meet many more Americans that are critical of America compared to Americans that regard America as the greatest country in the world.
But, hey, I’m just an ignorant American whose only lived here my whole life and was actually educated in the US so it’s not like I have any insight into what Americans learn/don’t learn and common attitudes of normal Americans.
If not, why not? What is depressing the salary levels at 6x productivity gains? Who are benefiting from gains in productivity and depressed salary?
There are countries where migrants are much more productive than the U.S. in non-STEM areas, but it is essentially accomplished by means of almost-forced-labor, and the working conditions are atrocious[1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969442
Edit: Original title of this submission was "Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere", until dang edited it.
It's interesting, but the current HN headline ("Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere") seems misleading. The paper is taking up < 0.01% of "migrants to the U.S."
I've replaced it with the first sentence of the abstract, which does a slightly more accurate and neutral job of expressing what the article is about than the primary title does.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Or put another way: moving to country with best funded and most prestigious research institutions turns out to be useful if you want a high-profile academic career
Nitpicky, but... this is also only for IMO medalists (from 1980 to 2000) publishing papers in mathematics (up until 2017). It's pretty darned specific, even as it pertains to academics. Even as it pertains to mathematicians, it's a single snapshot of somewhat recent history.
As for the paper, why doesn't it compare US citizen performance? The Team Selection Test is pretty competitive, and I guess there are at least 20 US citizens each year who are of similar skill.
I beat 1/6 members of the US team at my IMO showing, but I'm pretty sure every single USA TST participant has a brighter future ahead than most of the general cohort of "IMO medallists", including me.
Any 1st world country with more tightly controlled migration should do better.
More productive in "knowledge production" according to "novel survey data" and "hand-curated life-histories of International Math Olympiad (IMO) medalists."
The headline makes this sound like a broad finding, but in fact it’s very narrow.
As a White person who grew up in a White rural area, my peers simply didn't realize the value of education compared to what I've seen from immigrants and children of immigrants. This is also true in bigger cities now that I live those now. "I'll just get into a trade" was a common saying, fortunately I saw the lack of wisdom in that and studied CS.
For example, I currently live in Germany. Germany is currently importing boatloads of Latino and South East Asian STEM workers. Now if you look at the structure of German companies two things stand out:
1. there is a huge disparity between management and workers and this is reflected also in the salaries 2. all management are German (99.9% ethnic with maybe one 3rd generation ethnic Slav/Turk)
This situation is very likely true for most of Europe, except for maybe the UK.
So of course migrants in the US are more productive. In most countries immigrants are imported to fill a niche and the glass ceiling is held firmly just above that niche. And let's not even talk about entrepreneurial opportunities for immigrants.
I am curious what is source of you information about Polish antisemitism.
[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2020/antisemitism-overv...
Yikes. Very Joe Biden: https://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/
> "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."
I've never gotten a comment like that as a South Asian (Bangladesh) in the United States.
I’ve lived and worked all over Southeast Asia, and just openly being racist is perfectly normal there. Employers will openly tell you that they don’t want to hire foreigners, because they don’t trust them. Local ethnic minorities are consistently discriminated against, especially if there’s a local ethnic Chinese population (who in Indonesia for instance are often referred to as babi which means pig, or mata sipit which means slanted eyes). Contempt for people from neighbouring countries is very common. Working in KL it was very common to hear my colleagues talking about how much they don’t like Thai people. India takes things to a whole different level with their caste system and extreme distaste for dark skin.
Ive never got particularly wound up about it, because I see myself as a guest whenever I go and work in a foreign country, so I’ve just got to play by their rules. But try applying that logic the US and see how long it takes for an outrage mob to come after you.
From talking to other Polish people, my impression is that this is a fairly typical attitude. I think that the reason this doesn't show up as incidents in the news is simply that there are hardly any Jews in Poland because they were virtually completely wiped out in the Holocaust.
An American in Germany would probably knee-jerk to 'racism' for a few reasons, and although there are different kinds of unfairness, I'm not sure if that's quite the right word.
America is an open place, Germany, not so much. America has tons of really high-level aptitude migrants, Germany doesn't quite have that.
With respect to 'glass ceilings' - it's more complicated.
As a resident of Germany for some time, as an outsider ... I would have expected to be promoted well enough if I was materially 'that much better', but frankly, not otherwise.
I actually accepted the fact that 'this is a German company, it's going to be run by Germans'.
I was in France I felt the same way.
I don't believe in the notion that a random person from country XYZ has the 'right' to be an executive for example at a local company.
Definitely treated with respect and not face racism, definitely promoted rank and file based mostly on performance, definitely the same material, legal rights - but beyond that ... I always felt 'it was their country, not really mine'.
Also, there are quite a number of these countries run by foreign nationals anyhow, it's just not quite as common as in the US.
This is taken as further evidence of American racism!
Compared to most european countries, US is very xenophobic. We offer clear path to citizenships, after 5 years you get passport. Not this dreamer BS.
I just hate this smug american BS. "We love XYZ", but will exploit it, and change rules every 4 years.
As far as I can tell, it is eight years of legal residency. You also must not be dependent on welfare, which implies that you're either already wealthy, dependent on someone, or you have permission to work. Very similar to the US.
So effectively you have to apply for a work visa just like in the US, you can't just walk in and expect to be tolerated - unless you're a refugee.
This is literally false in many European countries. I live in one where it is false. Please verify details before posting with specific numbers.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/becoming-a-citizen/29288376
To be fair, the dreamers stuff is about people who came here / were brought here illegally by their parents.
We definitely have work to do on our immigration system but I would imagine if I immigrated to Germany illegally they wouldn't make the process very easy on me either.
As an european who have worked for european and for american companies[1]... no, very much it's the reverse: european companies pay a lot of attention to university, nationality (home culture, really), and social class for matters of promotion; american companies are more results-oriented and much more cosmopolitan.
You might be judging it by what's being broadcasted in popular media - the european "we're enlightened all the way through" versus the american "we still have ways to go".
>All european countries have equal opportunity laws.
Only really useful for bilking the big multinational companies for moderately stingy fines. Nobody gets ahead because of a lawsuit.
--
[1] selection bias caveat applies, obviously
Europe country cultures are massively more different and diverse than US states.
There's only been free pan-EU movement since the Lisbon Treaty in December 2009. 11 years is not enough time to achieve the homogeneity that US citizens have from being single(dual at most) language, single currency & no borders for hundreds of years. Not to mention the similar pan US TV they all shared for decades.
What most of them do instead, (which is smarter than trying to fight a German employer in a German court) is they use Germany as a stepping stone. They come here, get a couple years of experience and move to a more welcoming country afterwards. And German bureaucrats and employers wonder why retention is so low.
I struggled my entire life to get an education that ultimately was just indentured servitude and barely now can survive. People who didn't go to college seem to be the ones who are not struggling and can afford to buy a home.
I went on EBT during the pandemic and received quadruple the money I have ever had for food. When a country cares more about failures over people who try hard, you should expect pain, racism, classism, and just general hate. This is not a meritocracy and never has been
> There are 179 people on the management or executive boards of Germany’s 29 Fortune Global 500 companies. Just two of them are not white—both hailing from South Asia—and none is black.
Contrast the US: https://deloitte.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2019/03/12/women-...
> Total minority representation increased to 16.1 percent (912 board seats) from 12.8 percent in 2010, the first year Fortune 500 data were captured.
This whole statistic is worthless without context. Like how Germany's first immigrants after WW2 were low skilled Turkish workers and only recently Germany became more attractive for high-skilled immigrants because the US effectively shut down its visa program for the majority of people.
I'm not saying Germany is perfect but just whipping out some numbers without context doesn't cut it.
Also, it's pretty bold for Americans to lecture other countries on racism while their police is gunning down people simply for the color of their skin and is separating children of refugees from their parents to put them in cages. Meanwhile Germany is providing healthcare and shelter for all refugees but apparently doesn't currently promote a few dozen high-skilled workers that very likely could've made it anywhere to be CEO.
Germany did colonize Africa and committed its fair share of attrocities in Namibia, but the colonies were taken away after WWII - way before the African independence movement took hold (which was immediately followed by an uptick of citizens in those former colonies migrating to colonial powers)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonization_of_Africa
Germans playing the moral superiority card is humorous to me.
Germany today is giving shelter and free healthcare to refugees but apparently not CEO positions.
The US is gunning down blacks and forcefully taking children of refugees away from their parents but some immigrants became CEO of large companies which apparently makes the US more immigration-friendly and less racist than Germany.
Yes, that was a weird point to make in the article because it's not as if there are many Black people in Germany. But you have to admit that having just two non-white people out of 179 (1.1%) on corporate boards is pretty odd. Germany is white, but not 98.9% white. Turks make up over 5% of the population.
Native Germans managing German companies will be "toxic whiteness", and you not understanding/believing in the problem is just white fragility.
I as an ethnic German can echo the GP's point. Non-management can be quite diverse, but management is very much old, white, ethnic Germans as far as the eye can see.
There are still a lot of conscious/unconscious ethnic biases in Germany, especially among the older population.
I suspect that is the only criteria migrants don’t really check, and that is the point.
Yes, you are supposed to think that now for some reason.
Then, you get the fact that the minorities in the US are more qualified than the ones in Germany. Germany doesn't attract the most talented in the world, like the US and due to the lack of two oceans protecting it from the rest of the world, Germany doesn't get to be too picky about its migrants. The biggest attraction to foreigners is its welfare state. So I would hesitate to conclude to much from such a simple comparison.
"Whiteness" is a US concept, which doesn't make much sense in a German context. That sentence only tells me that some South Asians are neither white nor black.
I have no idea how they'd classify e.g. Turks. I think Greeks are considered white in the US, so maybe Turks too.
The other big immigrant group in Germany are Vietnamese, but they're kind of hamstrung by mostly having moved to East Germany. (East Germans in general are economically disadvantaged.)
I think statistics about ethnicity would be more useful if they were based on easily interpretable categories like own country of birth, country of birth of parents, grandparents, etc.
Take what you read with a grain of salt. I'm certainly very skeptical of the implied claim that Germans wouldn't consider Greeks as white.
Note that being considered white doesn't preclude Greeks from being discriminated against, just like some people discriminate against e.g. white Poles.
I find it quite telling that you are surprised Greeks might be considered anything but white, while not showing any surprise about Turks. I don't think there's any difference in skin color, so that confirms my suspicion that "whiteness" isn't just about looks.
There are many more people of Greek descent than of Turkish descent in the USA. It's very possible that the person you replied to is simply not familiar enough with people of Turkish descent to express surprise at your claim.
This is true, unfortunately the supremacy of American culture over the last century means that all of these concepts that do not fit very well into other contexts have been exported, I often run into situations in Denmark that would be horrifyingly racist in the U.S (not to say that Denmark doesn't have it's own racist traditions, but the grafting on of the American viewpoint does not exactly fit).
Of course when the concept is exported it in some way becomes the thing over time, and then people try to import the solutions to the problem.
As a guy from northern England I have been held back in my career when working in the south because of my accent, which is not very strong anyway. For example not being allowed to give presentations, or meet clients, as there was someone who "Would give the right impression".
In the US I just have a weird accent. No cultural baggage, no jokes about being thick etc. If you can get past people trying to get you to say lines from Game of Thrones, you're accent doesn't mean anything.
Questions from someone that knows very little about Germany:
How much of this is the German culture to be educated to a master/PhD level in order to get into management roles? Perhaps that increases the barriers to entry into these levels for immigrants.
How much of this is a language barrier? Immigrants to English-speaking countries have often learned some English before they arrive (often from their schooling) which might put them in a more advantageous position relatively speaking.
My comment was very matter of fact: because of the current lack of diversity in management, immigrants have virtually no opportunities to break into management, and because high compensation is almost entirely reserved for management, this means that immigrants cannot be deemed high-achievers in this business environment.
Seriously, the US is a really fair country. You want to assert that the US is a racist country, do please define what qualifies "systemic racism". Don't be like that URI professor who hates everyone who "asks for data".
It means whatever it needs to mean in a pinch.
Sometimes people use it to describe racism between people, but it's actually supposed to mean the structural racism which exists in a societal system. It doesn't mean that someone designed it that way, but it could have been or it could be an accidental thing.
Discounting a concept because it's used improperly by some of the "other side" is common today but not helpful.
Germany is not US. Europe is not US. How they deal with societal situations will be different from how US deals with societal situations.
Are there lots of German/Europe HN users? I am US centric so I tend to think HN is US thing, specifically tech cities, mainly, San Francisco.
The term "migrant" is generally used to refer to unskilled workers entering the country to follow jobs in temporary or seasonal industries. Very often this therefore becomes a euphemism for "illegal immigrant". That's not what this paper is studying.
But most people don't even have that. America should read, "Don't bother trying unless you have family that will help and a dick to suck."