Never mind that he ran on a platform of throwing a significant portion of the company out of the country. Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.
I'm well aware this isn't how H1Bs are supposed to work, and that many H1Bs (particularly in the Valley) are properly used, but there's definitely some other shoes you can step into on the H1B issue.
Yes, and given Trump's demonstrated understanding of nuanced issues, nobody was expecting him to magically come up with a solution that deals with the abuse, without collateral damage.
That is exactly the time when you want your boss to say that yes, they will have your back.
Step into the shoes of the person who was demanding a fair market wage until the company used an H1B visa to bring in someone who accepts far worse conditions because the threat of deportation is always present.
You might say that it is overly emotional, or too reactionary, or that the tone isn't appropriate, but think - really think! - what it would be like to wake up one morning to the unexpected shock that a President has been elected on the very possible platform of kicking you out of the country and ruining the life you built for yourself.
"No politics" is a fine ideal to aim for, but you can't expect anyone to leave stress like that at the door when they turn up to work.
I mean, shit, if they took that advice, he never would have been elected.
"Nothing has changed" is such an absurdly wrong way of looking at the issue. Say you're stood in the street alone. That's normal. Now there's a man stood in front of you with a knife, and he's looking at you threateningly. But he hasn't stabbed you! Nothing has changed. Your body is still unpunctured, so why are you worrying?
Throughout his campaign, Trump made overt threats to immigrants and the lives they live in the US. The fact that your entire future becomes incredibly uncertain within the space of 24 hours is absolutely something to get emotional about. To pretend otherwise is silly.
As is the idea that turning up to the office without being overtly emotional would somehow mean you're absolutely fine. That stress is going to come out one way or another, personally I think that expressing it (yes, including crying!) is a lot better than the alternatives.
You missed the "::cough:: illegal ::cough::"
Otherwise, please cite a video/audio source of him actually saying he wants to kick out all the legal immigrants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12...
Trump's threats were far from contained to illegal immigrants.
I am no Trump fan, but you have failed to do this. Temporarily (or indefinitely) curbing a specific subset of legal immigration is not equivalent to deporting people already in the country.
> Temporarily (or indefinitely) curbing a specific subset of legal immigration is not equivalent to deporting people already in the country.
Is it really that different? If a legally immigrated muslim left the country they would not be allowed back in again. Call me old fashioned, but I feel like a legal immigrant should be allowed to travel.
I empathize with those on DACA or other immigrant situations; however on average I would argue reporting of the issues, the emotions, and reactions are over the top.
The news cycle every two weeks is - "immigrants getting kicked out, DACA is over" - three days later "president goes back on his word w/ EO" or "congress not in sync with president; won't change legislation." (not literally, but you get the point).
Except is has, and continues to change. These changes are affect real people, people in my family, in profoundly negative ways. That you choose to ignore others doesn't mean nothing has changed. Only that you are ignorant of what is happening.
Immigration is a political issue that hasn't been properly addressed in decades. H1B visas are good in theory, but companies exploit the system to import cheap foreign labor, hurting American wages and job prospects in the process. Illegal immigrants concentrate to pockets of the country, displacing American workers and lowering wages for those who have been hurt the most by globalization.
Should these political issues be ignored just to avoid hurt feelings? I don't think they should.
Of course you wouldn't! It's silly to expect or demand that of a person. Especially in the 24 hours since their life was turned upside down.
If you can't be professional in the workplace, take a damn day off. If you can't be professional in front of a crowd, then don't take the stage.
Crying is for funerals. And national politics is for soapboxes, not for corporate presentations.
If you feel like crying, but hold back, does that feeling just immediately disappear and you get on with your day? Of course not. You just bury the stress, and sooner or later it bubbles back up again in weird and unpredictable ways. Is crying at work more or less professional than having a panic attack at work and ending up hospitalised?
Crying is just an expression of stress. If your actual statement is that people shouldn't be stressed about non-work issues at work, then good luck, that's not how human beings are engineered.
Anything else is likely to be disruptive to your coworkers.
I have a lot of empathy for people experiencing emotional distress, whatever the reason. I would never complain about them and would do my best to offer sympathy when appropriate. But I really shouldn't be put in that position at work, and if I was emotionally disturbed I would not come into work so as to avoid putting my coworkers in that position.
I think this is all doubly true if we're talking about the results of an election. Some of your coworkers may be happy for the same reason you're upset.
/s
Moreover, if you were a legal immigrant on an H1-B, and you happened to have dual nationality with one of the "bad" countries on Trump's list, you quickly found out that you could no longer risk travel outside the country. A large number of Canadian-Iranian/British-Iranian immigrants found they were suddenly capable of being banned.
Acting like the election campaign was no cause for concern is completely ignoring the obvious warning signs, like "We need a TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF MUSLIMS ENTERING THE COUNTRY".
If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?
So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one of their relatives is.
>If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?
If Jewish immigrants had been engaging in the amount of terrorism we've seen in Europe recently...yes, I would be just as flippant.
Do you think that white people in America engage in too much mass shooting, and consequently should have additional regulations applied to them regarding gun ownership?
>So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one of their relatives is.
We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.
These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.
Immigration and terrorism are not the largest issues facing this country, yet they completely dominated the election.
It's a tiny risk because it's a small fraction of an already tiny proportion of the population. Increasing that proportion of the population will lead to a higher level of risk. We've already seen what that looks like in Europe, and that all began to accelerate rather quickly in the last few years. It's very rational to not want that to happen here as well.
> We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.
While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.
>These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.
For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.
You can't compare Europe's problems with assimilating immigrants to ours. But if you keep alienating immigrants, you will make them feel like outsiders, and then you will face more of the kinds of problems Europe has.
>While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.
When the Chinese came to America, they worked jobs people here didn't want, including taking over cotton picking in the South after slavery was banned, and running stores that catered to African Americans under Jim Crow. They did dangerous work on the railroads that white Americans didn't want to do.
You're running a slippery slope argument that justifies a harsh stance now when none is justified. "They could start raping our women if we let a lot more in" We've seen this played out time and time again.
At the same time conservative politics plays the dog whistle game with immigration, claiming immigrants are putting them out of work, they're also opposing efforts to make native born Americans more competitive, like expanded educational opportunity, access to daycare, and other investments in human capital.
Why was "chained immigration" no problem when it was Western Europeans, but all of a sudden, it's a problem if you have yellow or brown skin? And given the immense amount of value that generations of immigrants have brought to this country, why should I fear "chained immigration"?
>For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.
Well, it's bad to be against it when you have fallacious reasons, by ballooning up the dangers of it and buying into nationalist fervor. There's a reason why the middle class got stagnated over the last 40 years, and it has nothing to do with immigration. The same thing happened in Japan which has some of the most protectionist immigration policies you can think of.
People got used to the low hanging fruit of easy GDP growth that can from a rapid switchover from agricultural to industrial society, and now with growth tapering off to ~2% GDP all over the developed world, everyone is looking for something to blame, and dark political forces all over are trying to blame immigrants. Here it's the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Asians. In Britain, it was the Polish. In Germany, it was the Jews (and not the harsh penalties imposed by WWI on Germany).
Find someone to blame, usually a foreigner.
In the meantime, we aren't making the investments we need in infrastructure, in education, in health, in early childhood -- because those require sacrifice.
Instead, take the easy route: sacrifice these other people.