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Need a Job? Move to India
WhoDaresWins writes "As U.S. jobs move abroad, more Americans are willing to work overseas like in India as per a CNN.com story. The story talks about many Americans and also Indians who are American citizens moving to India for work. This story should be an eye opener to people who feel Americans cannot work in India. With a booming economy there is a need for skilled professionals with years of experience in a western enconomy and industry. Best of all, job listings are available online." Thomas Friedman has a piece called The secret to India's success.
Its not that simple to get a visa to India
It works both ways. Its not simple to get a visa to get here too. A guy who sits next to me and has come here from China has a lot of interesting stories to tell about the hoops that you have to jump/go through to get the visa.
Without a visa you can't get hired.
You got it exactly the opposite way. You cannot get a visa if you are not hired. (Unless of course you want a visiting visa that would not allow you to work). For someone to start working in US, the first thing that they would need is for an employer to approve the hire part. You go about applying for the visa after you have the proof that you are eligible to work in the country.
Free XBox, PS2
I'd arrive in Bombay only to discover they've started outsourcing. To some real hellhole. Like Antarctica. Or Detroit.
Only if living in American climate, American culture, American political/legal system, near to your family and friends has no value to you. Materially you might be better off, yes. Perhaps you would prefer Indian climate and culture, yes. Maybe you don't even like your family and friends that much and wouldn't mind moving 10 timezones away. But for most people, this is a drastic step.
Constitutionally Correct
We don't edukate our kids.
I couldn't agree more!
Everyone in India is perfectly aware this Indian boom is good as long as it lasts, but it will end, and they prepare for this already. They claim their jobs will gradually move to Philippines and other countries where labour is even cheaper.
So, if you plan to go to India, remember to save for the return ticket...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The median home price in San Diego is > $400,000. If that same home was $50,000 in India then the $12*8 = $96 / Hour. Not too shabby.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Check it out, it's a good read.
Excerpt: "So I went on the web to see how easy it would be to emigrate to India. I found NOTHING. I called the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC and asked how I could emigrate to India. They didn't know what I was talking about. What the Indian Embassy was prepared to discuss was how my U.S. employer might transfer me to India for some period of time. I told them PBS had no such expansion plans to my knowledge, though they might make an exception just for me. They were also willing to discuss how I might go to India as an entrepreneur, bringing capital into the country and starting a new business there employing Indians. I told them I had no money to invest. And the idea that I'd just arrive at the Mumbai equivalent of Ellis Island looking for a job, well they found that rather amusing. You can't just move to India it turns out. Someone there has to want you -- no, they have to NEED you -- OR you have to be bringing with you a big suitcase of cash to start a business. Journeyman techies need not apply. It's interesting that Indian immigration policies are more restrictive than U.S. immigration policies. There is no true Indian equivalent, for example, of our H1-B work visas. There is no quid pro quo. But then there is also no wave of U.S. engineers clamoring to move to India."
I've lived in the US for almost 20 years and I can't get my visa straightened out or work legally. So I'm in graduate school but I can't take a teaching or research assistantship (even though I've been offered) since that's considered working, and though I'm qualified in terms of ability, I can't get fellowships because they're reserved for US residents and citizens. yeah, life's tough. But you still have a hell of a lot more options than I do.
You say it's not viable, but think of the MANY MILLIONS of Indians that try to come to the US. Only few make it. Of course, here, there seems to be many. But that dwarfs how many don't make it. Not to mention the countless other countries.
I'm not from India, but from Nepal. A country that's even more impoverished with political and other problems. And I've lived in this country so long and there was no Nepali community growing up that my Nepali is very poor. Yeah for me. It's always important to keep in mind that there are billions who have it worse. That's what I have to keep reminding myself.
As someone else said, I understand how fortunate I am, though I don't feel it. I think its important for people to at least understand it and realize how many ways they have it much better. It's always possible to see others who have it better in some ways or another. And obviously you want to better you standing. But that's not where happiness nor peace come from.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
I said it in jest over a year ago: to stay in IT, the American should become an Indian citizen in order to be qualified to work in IT in America again.
This is kind of a new paradigm for labor, using an old paradigm for other assets. If you run a corporation in America, you register it in Delaware. If you run a cargo ship, you register it in Liberia. Now, it seems that to work in IT, you have to register your body in India.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
While many will point out that even a reduced salary would go farther in India, the enormous plunge in quality of life just isn't worth it (to me at least).
While spending 10 days in Mumbai and Chennai auditing Citigroup's new offshore partners, I was courted by the senior staff of one of them. "Come work for us, and you can live like a rajah! Your wife's a doctor? Forget it, she won't have to work, and she'll have servants!"
Even treated like a prince, put up in 4 star hotels, eating in the best restaurants, invited to private clubs most of the population can't get inside, my trip to India was a visit to hell.
Monstrous traffic, unbelievable overcrowding, incredible numbers of beggars, and Mumbai smelled like burning garbage... everywhere.
No thanks.
Harken back to the recent past, where workplace regulations were a dream, businesses routinely exposed their workers to deadly risk to save pitiful amounts of money, everyone worked weekends, and the minimum wage was zero dollars and zero cents.
Fighting an epic, intensely violent and brutal struggle against their aristocrats (adverseries so used to victory they had become surprisingly complacent), the proletariat of America carved out a victory, and they did it without abandoning capitalism or resorting to the dangers of political revolution - though we certainly came close on a number of occasions.
We now live in shocking wealth and splendor - a victory for the "common man" made possible through a lively democratic process and a series of reforms that dragged business owners, wailing, kicking and screaming, into the modern age - where the entire standards of what was acceptable in terms of working conditions, wages, and workplace safety changed. Yes, it cost more money. And... what a surprise - with a newly propsperous middle-class, it was also intensely profitable.
Free Trade was thus inevitable. It's the prisoner's dillemma of the modern business.
The issue has proved a bit too subtle for most people to grasp thus far, even as it impoverished America and eviscerated the progress of the middle and lower classes, handing victory after victory to regressive enterprises.
The question free trade raises is simple. Is it cheaper to produce goods and services in a society where the underclass is abused?
Why be surprised?
The American South used to produce cotton so cheap, you'd think it was picked by slaves.
The sad irony is that (with only a little help), we're doing it to ourselves. All I have to do is hold up cheap jeans, and the underclass will skewer itself on its own greed, happily selling themselves out to save money at the cash register, never wondering about the hidden costs of trade without policy, never quite realizing that they had just bought back into laissez faire capitalism.
And yes, when you admit that national boundaries can contain arbitrary laws but not trade, that is exactly what you just returned to. The fleet, famously, travels as fast as its slowest ship.
In America, when we legislated ourselves a decent life, we made it impossible to compete with those who lived indecent ones.
Of course, we shouldn't have to compete with them.
The logical extension is to ask a farm worker to find a job in a field full of slaves. His value is reduced to nothing.
"But Slavery is Illegal!" the farmworker shouts. "Not in Namibia," the slaves reply.
Free Trade is a code word. It stands for the elimination of the 1st world's gains for its ordinary people - by forcing them to compete with what they are bound to lose against: the economies of worker abuse.
Its proponents depend on the American population's ignorance of the issues. You can talk around it in circles with most people, while all the time they have carefully insulated themselves from the basic issue at hand:
Is it OK if I break the law, as long as I do it out of your sight? To people you don't care about? Maybe people in another country?
Free Trade is supposed to reduce the importance of nations and bring about the ascendance of a global community. And it has! The American Working Class is no longer in America. They are in India, China, and Indonesia! Mexico, and Costa Rica, and Guatemala! They are in Afghanistan, growing our opium, and in Iraq, pumping our oil.
So I welcome you all, prosperous last descendants of the old 1st world dream, back into the world you created.
Welcome to India. I hope they really do let you go. Just don't be surprised when you realize it's a one-way trip.
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And an elephant! Don't forget the elephant!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think you mean "Middle ${western_country} thinks free trade is fair when ${western_country}'s gaining from it, but as soon as ${western_country}'s deal isn't so sweet, fair trade is something to be condemned."
The US is not the only country in the world practising protectionism while preaching free trade. Trade unions in the UK are also complaining about jobs going to India. And farmers all over Europe are heavily subsisided while Africans are finding it hard to sell their crops.
Are you telling me people with Masters degrees in CS and EE need to be trained?
Do you mean to tell me that the workers who have had to train their replacements in order to receive severance pay were not skilled?
No one who is in high tech thinks that they are "entitled" to their job. We know that a requirement of the job is keeping up with new software, hardware, protocols, etc.
It is immoral to bring foreigner in any country to replace native workers. I find it disturbing that the companies then turn around and blame education, and basically ask for subsidies to do something with all the workers that they have displaced.
We are trained. We are experienced. We are tired of the excuses for "loosing" (talk about needing to be retrained!) our jobs to foreigners on our soil and in other countries. The problem is not lack of education or skills, the problem is that American high tech workers are not being allowed to compete for these jobs.
Let us compete. Force American companies to play by the rules when it comes to H-1B and L-1 visas. Level the playing field, and then less jobs will flow overseas. ginaminks.com/blog
Actually, you don't know how right you are. My father came to study (did Masters and PhD) with funding from international agencies and he came with a J visa status. That requires that he returns to his country of origin for two years (makes sense). Since I came some months after him, I was put under the same restrictions. If I had come illegally, I wouldn't have had those restrictions. Seriously, once you start studying in the US, when do you want to take a two year break from your education?
:D
Also, if you get a job (illegally), a house and other things, then you can show ties to this country and would have a better case for not being deported, whereas if you follow the law, you'd have less ties.
My case is an even more interesting one. My visa didn't support me when I turned 21 since parents can no longer sponsor their children 21 and older. That puts me in an interesting category. I'm not illegal but somewhat "out-of-status". However, if I decided to leave the country and INS found out, then I'd be barred from re-entering for 10 years. Funny how that works out isn't it
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Oh come on, it's easy.
I keep getting offer for getting a Visa just about every day. My parent's dog even got one recently.
Something people seem to miss in the CNN article is that almost all those foreigners trying to work in India are of Indian origin. Most Indian's I talked to laugh at the concept of a non-Indian working in their country. They are not arrogant so much as just traditional. Asia has always been xenophobic and they DO have laws that assist in enforcing this case. So the article was not a real eye opener to those of us who know the existance of the laws. Most of us are also smart enough to know of the "Indian Brain-Drain" issue where many of the highly skilled Indians left the country to work elsewhere. Now they are going home. No big surprise.
If American corporations don't exist in order to provide jobs for Americans and to benefit the American economy, then those corporations should not reap the benefits of American laws (and, by inference, American law enforcement), American infrastructure, the American military, etc.
You people who believe that businesses should be able to run in a vacuum are forgetting one very important thing: corporations exist to serve society, NOT VICE VERSA. This is why corporations are given charters by the government. It used to be that these corporations would have their charters yanked if they were shown to harm society, but that sadly has not been the case for a very long time.
Until people such as yourself figure out that the individual is a first class citizen and the corporation should not be, we will continue to see greater and greater abuses of the people by corporations.
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Now now.. lets not issue blanket statements shall we..
:) (Yes, that is a blanket statement).
:)
From those last two lines, you come off as someone who absolutely has no understanding nor knowledge of India, its culture and its people.
Sure, I agree that women are abused in various parts of this country, but women arent obviously hated!! Remember, we had a woman as our Prime Minister when the rest of the world was still letting their women run around in Bikinis and swinging to pop culture
The biggest problem in India is that there are still an immensely large population that has no education, has no healthcare, has no idea how to stand up for their rights. Corrupt politicians are not delegated to the Western world, we have them as well.
The Hindu Religion (Despite being a Christian myself, I have immense respect for Hinduism and for other religions as well), does not look down upon the women, the so called "holy" individuals who wanted to bend their religion to their needs and wishes, decreed that women were inferior. As a religion and among its scriptures and texts, Hinduism has utmost regard for Woman as a Mother, Wife, Sister, Friend and an Equal. And believe me, this religion and the indian culture has existed for thousand more years than the Western Civilization and Christianity (heck, Christianity came to India way before it reached the Western world, in 52B.C when St. Thomas reached the southern tip of India). So yes, this is a Land which is steeped in culture, which has treated women with utmost respect in all corners of it, and yet has been vandalized and abused by people in power, by religious nuts, who had their own agendas.
And when United States (formerly known as Land of the Free) shudders at the thought of letting immigrants who werent born here, having a shot at being President, India has no qualms in letting the Wife of a Former Prime Minister who was born and raised in Italy, get a swipe at becoming the nation's Prime Minister. Also, voting rights for Women, We didnt had to think twice about that either.
Oh one more thing when you are still trying to comprehend.. Gay Marriage is Legal in India (we just dont let them fornicate, now thats another story!)
So please crawl back to your trailer and show not your face and your intellect to the rest of us (That if you didnt know was surely a blanket statement, but meant solely for you)
Rapid Nirvana