The writing in this article is incredible and I have nothing but admiration for the author and her family.
But, to me, this situation is what’s wrong with America. Why are people who are clearly so hard working struggling to get by?
But, to me, this situation is what’s wrong with America. Why are people who are clearly so hard working struggling to get by?
Not all hard work gets a reward.
Not everyone has a happy ending.
While statistically, you have a better chance of making a "high" salary in the USA, it really also depends on what you do and who you know.
Picking up cans also sounds like they could be undocumented, with no "legal" work papers.
Many times, it would/could be better for someone to stay in their "origin" country and live a regular life, but at the same time, you have to think - "would many people that have a network and a "career" leave everything they have, uproot their close family and go to another country, where even the language is different to pick up cans?
Is that sacrafrice? Is it worth it? Is it even legal? (lols)
As shown with "amiga" in the article - the authors parents also do not know English.
The same happens with many "normal" Americans as well. The ones that are illiterate, have a poor network of friends, uneducated, etc. While we don't hear about it as often, it's pitted away as more depressing/their own fault because "they were born in the USA anyway."
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Nothing against the author, but it reads as poverty porn. Great she accepts herself, and isn't ashamed, and while we may all think she should wear it as a badge of honor - in reality, the more socially distanced you appear to your peers, the more you are.
Pariah is pariah.
We're biased in tech because we see H1-B visa holders living a comfortable life, even with lower wages. However, this is an outlier in current, and certainly prior, immigrant stories. Immigrating to a new country is downright hard. Many times it's unskilled, but also, at least in the Western countries, it's an issue of unrecognized skills that makes things difficult. My father had an EE degree and certifications from his home country, but the US, where we immigrated, didn't recognize them. He had to work in lower skilled jobs in electronics for years because of this.
I remember going can scavenging with him to supplement household income. It was a decent way to put food on the table back in the early 80's.
I suspect Jessica's parents immigrated and have very little formal education. Possible causes: trade liberalization means low skill workers in the US are competing with similar workers across the entire world. Simultaneously: 10th, 25th, and even median wages have barely moved in well over 20 years. Many of the jobs previously open to unskilled people willing to work very hard are no longer done in the US. A large shift of economic growth to capital over labor (which is, btw, the result of deliberate policy choices).
Even the poor in the U.S. are still better off than most people in the rest of the world. The U.S. can certainly do better addressing income inequality, but there still needs to be some perspective as to the relative opportunity available to people in the U.S. compared to most other places.
My point was if there's a nicer system than the US, immigrants will be flocking there too.
Luckily we have numbers on the rates of which people immigrate to which countries, and the average wages of citizens of those countries.
> Indian-Americans are the richest ethnic minority in America because migrating from India pretty much requires being wealthy.
Plenty of lower class Indian immigrants pool their money for taxi medallions, convenient stores, hotels, trucks, etc. to get a business going.
They integrate well and know how to climb the system. They send their children in as doctors later in generations. They don't always start rich, they work for it.
> A lot of rich people come to America because America treats rich people so well, at the cost of treating poor people like dirt. See: tax rates.
You'll find tax rates are better in the US than most other countries for lower income families. For businesses the US has only recently been competitive.
Are there many "lower class Indian immigrants" who arrived in the past 30 years? The immigration system since the 90s has raised the barrier for Indians so high that the idea of 'lower class Indian immigrants' seems difficult to parse. I disagree with the assertion that Indians have to be very wealthy to immigrate - highly educated/qualified, yes. The era when an Indian taxi driver could immigrate ended many decades ago.
Uber driving, trucking, convenient stores, and many more.
And from this article, we can see Ecuadorians follow a similar path. The integrate well, and climb the system by sending their sons and daughters to college where they can build a better life for themselves than their parents had.
Most Indian immigrants come from middle class, not poor or rich backgrounds. They are privileged enough to have access to educational opportunities that give them the skills to emigrate, but privileged enough to not have a reason to emigrate.
The US has the resources to reward hard workers with financial stability. It also benefits from brain-draining other countries with this promise.
If the US continues to slide away from the "American Dream," the brains and prosperity will end up somewhere else.
Bottle-collecting is a poor example for the broader issue I was discussing. Those programs are intended for the (mostly homeless) poor to pick up trash they see instead of leaving it behind. It does what it's supposed to do.
Or it will become attractive for more collectors. In any case, it may not be so simple to raise their "wage" for collecting bottles.
Most hard workers in the U.S. are rewarded with financial stability. Not everyone, but enough that people still flock here from other countries where that's less true.
> It also benefits from brain-draining other countries with this promise.
Well gee, I guess the U.S. should stop being such a great place for immigrants, so talented people stop coming here and stay wherever they live now.
You think restaurant workers are lazy? Factory workers? Amazon fulfillment workers?
Why do people need two or three exhausting jobs to make a living?
> Well gee, I guess the U.S. should stop being such a great place for immigrants, so talented people stop coming here and stay wherever they live now.
I don't know what this means. Have the courage to say what you mean instead of using sarcasm.
Whatever you mean, the US needs young workers to resolve our massive labor shortage and we need educated workers to be our next generation of scientists, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
Most. Not all. The U.S. can still do better, but there needs to be some perspective on how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world. Better than most countries, not as good as some.
> Whatever you mean, the US needs young workers to resolve our massive labor shortage and we need educated workers to be our next generation of scientists, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
Brain drain sounded to me like the U.S. attracting those people is a bad thing, because those people should stay in their own countries. That's not what you meant to imply?
We do need educated workers to fill the jobs you describe, but at the same time we probably send too many young people to college, many of whom would do better with solid technical skills training leading directly to jobs with far less debt.
We don't need to ask how the US stacks up against the rest of the world -- only our economic peers. Compared to many Western European countries and Canada, we are not investing our excess resources as well into social safety.
I'm not a socialist and don't support UBS, but the floor of poverty in the US needs to be much higher (for all our sakes).
This happens to a lot of people in the US, as well.