4 ms·
Caveat: If you are not American, a natural citizen, or even a second generation immigrant; please refrain from suppressing dissenting opinion I am expressing be
by wahsd 11y ago
Caveat: If you are not American, a natural citizen, or even a second generation immigrant; please refrain from suppressing dissenting opinion I am expressing below, which you will surely not like. Also, man, this got long in short order. But it's an important topic.
Now if they could just learn to properly speak English. I know that sounds like something an asshole says, but it's really an issue that should not be overlooked just because someone has been trained to be politically correct and for some reason accept poor language skills by one group of people, yet not from another. Would you be ok with a black person that speaks "ebonics" but is otherwise equally competent?
In reality it is a significant issue because you frequently simply cannot understand those of Indian descent unless they have been in the USA for at least a generation. It's not really limited to Indians, it also and ever more frequently applies to Chinese, but they are not the subject of this article. There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them. There is even explicit discrimination going on in those kinds of companies that prevents someone like a "real American", a person who speaks English to a satisfactory and comprehensible degree from being hired. Are you going to work with a whole department of Indians that speak a foreign language to each other and actively ostracize you? Are you even going to get an interview as a Duane, Chad, Becky, Omar, Mercedes, Juliana, Marcos, etc.?
This rise of the "burgeoning new elite" is just another symptom of the corporate and elite sell out of America. Indians were allowed to immigrate to the USA through various visa programs in order to quickly bolster corporate tech capacity on the cheap due to the ramifications of incompetent investments in education and insufficient support for engaging our poor and under-educated people. Essentially, America's corporate overlords took the easy route and sold out Americans by kicking the can down the road. What they did was the equivalent of taking out car title and pay day loans in order to fund their lavish lifestyles of exploitation.
What should become more and more apparent to people, although I don't see any real signs of it happening or grabbing hold, is that America is nothing but a big feeding frenzy by the wealthy and powerful. There really is no sense of culture and society worth mentioning. As upsetting as that notion is, what we consider American and defining of our culture is really just all expression corporate interests and exploitation.
What people don't quite get about America, even the 99%ers of Americans, is that although the economy is of course not a zero sum game, it is a limited game that can be represented by the ever popular pie, but where the pie represents a ratio of wealth and income. Or, another way of putting it, you can think of it as an ever replenishing pie. Do you have your mental model and visualization in place? Ok, let me explain.
The thing about America is that there is a defined barrier, a gated community, if you will, between the 1% and 99% and that barrier has been erected in such a manner that 99% of the ever replenishing parts of the pie go to the 1%, or simply that the 1% get 99% of the pie and the rest of the 99% have to share a single sliver of 100 pieces that the pie is cut into. The problem with immigration, whether illegal laborers or H1B, is that they are all dumped into the same pool of 99% that have to share that one single tiny sliver of pie of the 100 pieces that the pie has been cut into, which makes getting ahead or increasing income next to impossible.
Sure there are outliers and exceptions, and I am sure that the "success" of these "burgeoning new elite" would be cited as counter arguments, but the rule simply is that under normal circumstances it is next to impossible to make headway when immigrants keep getting dumped into the labor pool, whether it be construction, manufacturing, agriculture, service, or even all the tech jobs. That is the real reason why not only poor people in America can't make any headway and also why students are being buried under student loan debt while the prospective wages they can earn with the degree they hold has been driving down by cheap H1B tech labor and outsourcing.
These are real consequences of immigration. I know that we all have been indoctrinated to love the shit out of some immigration because it has always been critical to the American elite to further their agenda of exploitation and domination, but reality is that what you have been led to believe is counter-productive to your own self-interest. And to think there are some people who don't believe that people will act against their own self interest.
- denzil_correa 11y ago> Now if they could just learn to properly speak English. You mean British English? > There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them. Every country has an accent - US, Australia, Germany or France - each one of them have their own accent.
- kamaal 11y agoI think the point was that most Indians speak in their local languages at work. Which is actually true. It can be very annoying to Indians themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if its any different for other people.
- denzil_correa 11y agoThat is indeed a valid and a different point. But, the original comment also comes hard down on accent which is too harsh IMO.
- gumby 11y agoOne of the fun and excellent things about America is that there is no official language (/ religion / whatever). My housekeeper, a US citizen born in Mexico (her father was American), speaks English marginally at best (she had a high school education in Mexico). But she has put two kids through the Palo Alto schools (with another graduating next year); the oldest has a graduate degree and works overseas. She lives in Palo Alto and owns another house in the foothills. She votes, and politicians who want her vote speak to her (via TV) in Spanish. Companies who want to sell her things advertise in Spanish. Isn't that capitalism at its best? Now I think she's made a poor choice, because I think it's self-disenfranchising to not speak English. But that's her choice to make and it's hard to argue with her success. Plus she's a citizen and it appears quite reasonable to me that my taxes pay for the government to accommodate the linguistic wishes of large blocks of citizens.