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The US's Reverse Brain Drain
We may have to rethink the assumption that Silicon Valley is the hotbed of innovation in which all the world's best and brightest want to work and live. TechCrunch has a piece by an invited expert on the reverse brain drain already evident and growing in the US as Indian, Chinese, and European students and workers in the US plan to return home, or already have. From an extensive interview with Chinese and Indian workers who had already left: "We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. ... What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a 'better quality of life' than what they had in the US. ... A return ticket home also put their career on steroids. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the US. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the US to 36% in China."
More jobs for the rest of us.
Why is this a surprise? Isn't that exactly why they came here in the first place?
the reverse brain drain already evident and growing in the US as Indian, Chinese, and European students and workers in the US plan to return home, or already have.
Between Homeland Security and treating H1-B's like slave labor, who can blame them? They can go home and enjoy a better lifestyle than they have here and not get treated like a potential terrorist.
Funny is how many of the teabirthers walking around thinking this is the best place in the world to live and everyone wants to come here.
Not anymore.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Have you ever tried applying for a green card in America? You get stuck in a queue and have to wait years before you might finally get permission to stay here. It's no way to plan a secure future for yourself. It's also worse for migrants from certain countries. I have Indian friends who have basically been told that the process may take so long that they'd be better finding other means to change their status (e.g. marriage).
The US makes it quite difficult for talented people who follows the law to stay in the country. It does not surprise me in the least that Indians are returning home.
...the U.S. had the greatest rise in its living standards. Scientists, engineers, and other professionals from all over the world migrated here in seach of a better life, the opportunity to live pretty much in peace and quiet, or simply to survive. It was seen as the most desireable place to live in the world, and that seemed to become a self-fulfilling prophecy as 'the best and the brightest' came here to do their best.
I wonder, are more folks returning to their home countries' simply because of money and career advancement? Or do they feel less welcome in the culture? Or perhaps their own home cultures are changing to where they feel they can shape them for the better?
This seems more like an anecdote than a study; but there is something wrong when science and engineering and other technical fields are seen as undesirable by most Americans, and the immigrants who come here to learn them decide that they'll have better opportunites back home to use them.
Here in Quebec, Canada, universities charge a certain rate for Quebec residents, a higher one for students from other provinces and an even higher one for students from outside of Canada (France is an exception). The price ratio is about 1:2 for Quebec:out-of-province and about 1:5 for Quebec:non-Canadian. As a result, we have more "local" graduates who aren't tempted to return to their country after receiving a good education. This doesn't mean that the graduating population is predominantly white, male and heterosexual - it just means that we lose less graduates to their countries of origin.
The moral of the story: education is still too cheap for foreigners in the United States. If you want more US citizens to obtain degrees in these fields, charge much more to people from other countries - this will decrease demand from foreigners and open spots to US citizens.
The reasons for this exodus are straight out of an economics textbook. This is SUPPOSED to happen in a free world with free trade. Overall, this move is ADVANCING human civilization and making things just a bit better for the rest of humanity. Right now, the high tech industry in California is one of the most amazing industries the world has ever known. Among other things, those highly educated people who are returning to China and India are bringing knowledge and skills that will allow them to replicate some of the wonders of California in India and China. How is that a bad thing?
Sure, those Chinese and Indian companies will compete with the U.S. firms...but competition is a good thing for humanity as a whole.
I'm guessing that by better quality they mean materialistically. Being a US citizen I would prefer to live in a place where human rights are championed, personal liberty is maximized and freedom of speech and freedom from government oppression is paramount.
Unless someone is afraid of being randomly assaulted or imprisoned, then no one cares. It's human nature. Bread and circuses you know? I've been to China. It's not Mao's China, not at all.
So, I guess I'm saying where should I move to?
Canada?
Two comments. First, "age of prime" is 30-33? Is IT really that anti-fogey? Second, degrees above bachelor are generally held in higher regard outside of the US. US companies value what they see as "actual productivity" and will usually trade a more productive BS for a lack-luster MS[1]. In most countries, especially Asia, advanced degrees are simply given more esteem compared to the US. More money AND more chicks.
[1] Those with advanced degrees claim their extra knowledge helps in areas that are less visible to management but still very important. But, that's another story.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe my brain has been drained, too, but, if all the educated people are leaving the US, wouldn't that be a good old regular brain drain and not a reverse brain drain?
"I am Dr. Freud, but you may call me.siggy."
From the article: "Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right—it’s not just about green cards." It does seem to have everything to do with the economy: "Only 7% of Chinese students, 9% of European students, and 25% of Indian students believe that the best days of the U.S. economy lie ahead. Conversely, 74% of Chinese students and 86% of Indian students believe that the best days for their home country’s economy lie ahead."
Given that the United States has taken the lion's share of blame for the "global economic crisis", this attitude is not surprising. Plus, we're long removed from the heyday of the Silicon Valley, an era in which innovation and idea poaching ruled instead of racing to patent anything remotely obvious. Twenty, even ten years ago, there was little talk of India or China becoming the next economic superpower. So the idea of being both financially secure and being close to your family is really appealing to these folks.
It's not all doom and gloom though - it still speaks volumes that these workers come to the United States to cut their teeth and gain the technical/management experience that they bring back home.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Somalia. The government is too weak to oppress anyone. Of course, that only works if you don't mind giving up a lot of your personal safety, but hey, you win some you lose some.
You really ought to define what you mean by government oppression. Would you include taxation in that category? Because you aren't going to find many governments that don't tax.....
Qxe4
I work in a place where the majority of my colleagues are Indian including both developers and management. I can attest to the trends. I'm the exception by not holding a masters and by being born here. I'm responding because of a false assumption you made. You guessed that the better quality of life is a materialistic quality. For the majority of my friends who moved back to India it was not about that. While that played a role, their wives and families were residing there. It was difficult to deal with the paper work. The cricket matches weren't shown live at 3am. It's a plethora of smaller items which all add up. They aren't from the US and do not necessarily share the same values as you. Think more holistically for a second and you'll understand. It's about living where you are comfortable and are content. That's why my Indian friends are moving back to India and I completely understand.
That's a pretty bold claim you're making. Let's have a look at some actual numbers, shall we?
This chart indicates that not only are we keeping up with Moore's law, for the past 2-3 years we've actually moved ahead of where we'd expect to be. And the graph doesn't even include AMD's R800 graphics chips, which have even higher transistor densities than RV770/GT200.
That's kind of misleading...
They pay non-resident tuition at public state schools, just like any US student who attends a college in a state they don't reside in. And for most private schools, there is no difference at all.
Sure, they don't get the federal grants, but those are so piss poor these days that probably barely matters (plus they may very well get grants or loans from their home country to attend a US school).
I am in this position right now. I am an H1-B holder. I have a Masters in Computer Science. While most of my coworkers worked 40-45 hours a week I was doing 80 and quickly gained higher positions and expertise (hard work pays off in the land of opportunity). I love the US. Its a great place to live and I've lived here since I came to do my Bachelors (Computer Science also). I paid out of state tuition for all 7 years, out of my own pocket (which totaled > 60K).
I recently applied for an extension on my H1-B after my 3 years of working at a company and it was rejected by the government. The initial reason given was that we couldn't prove that my job required a degree so they came back and asked us for more info (called an RFI - request for information). (I am involved in long term projects from architecture, design, development and process analysis). The day I found out that my visa was rejected, my company, a small business of about 30 people also found out that a dept of the state had chosen me to work for them on a project for which they interviewed 30 people from around the US. My company lost that deal because the US rejected my visa and lost out on > 500,000 dollars of revenue over the contract. The company also lost 3 other contracts with clients I was currently with which would have probably panned out to 50k-100k each per year.
The revenue from that contract would have keep me and 2 other co-workers employed for at least 3 years and now my former company is going to probably fire 2 US citizens. This was the height of irony! The government royally screwed my company.
The immigration dept has really cracked down on H1-B visa holders and is rejecting them by asking them to prove stupid claims. Here are a few questions from my RFI.
1. Why does a Senior Software Engineer position require a Computer Science degree!
2. Provide all earning statements for the last 3 years and for all states you had income from.
3. Provide all client contracts that you had in the last 3 years for the full company.
4. Provide a detailed job description along with future contracts (for all 3 years) along with locations, contacts of client companies and images of work areas.
My visa was finally rejected because they feared that I would work in California (where my company doesn't have any clients or a branch). The process is really ridiculous right now and I have started looking at canada, singapore and india. I would prefer to stay and finish my 3 years and get a path to citizenship but if I have to leave, so be it.
The icing on the cake is that since they reject my appeal, I have 10 days to leave the country. So pack your bags, sell your car and belongings (or throw them away) and get the fuck out in 10 days.
Thanks for all the fish O Land of Opportunity!
I will say this to all you US citizen and green card holders. DO NOT SQUANDER YOUR OPPORTUNITIES! The US is the greatest place on earth and if you work hard, you can really live a great life. Peace.
we educate foreign students at the cost of displacing domestic students
I would like to see some evidence to back that claim because that does not match my experience. In my CS department, US citizens are almost automatically accepted into the graduate program, while foreign students have to compete with each other to get in. (My professor is on the admissions committee.) The reason is that there are so few US citizens that apply that they have to take as many as they can get. The only people being turned away are foreigners who got beat out by more qualified foreigners.
The fact is that the US has half of the world's colleges and universities. It is the large number of foreign students that allows us to have so many universities and that gives domestic students a wide range of choices.
Your tax dollars aren't. Look at how much more you pay if you are a foreign student in your school. And look up how much of your school is funded by your tax dollars. There is a good chance that foreign students are actually FUNDING your education.
completely untrue. At least in canada. Roughly every 6 or 7 foreign students subsidizes a professor (well maybe 10 or 11 depends on how you count the flow of money and if you include grad students etc). They pay about 20k in tuition and the average prof gets probably a bit less than 100k. Lots of courses are taught by people making a lot less than that too. On top of that they bring into this country about 15k/year in living expenses which is spent, unsurprisingly, on local things like rent, food etc. Though one should see the irony of a student from china spending extra money in canada on goods made in china with much lower point of sale costs there.
There is not a limit on the number of students we can teach - there is a limit on how fast we can grow, but not how big we can get. In fact quite the contrary - the more students we have the more we can teach, because the more graduate students we can fund, and thus the processes is a positive feedback system. Engineering, medicine and the like; programs which control enrollment do so artificially to keep the value of their degrees up, if demand gets too high (we cannot attract enough engineers/doctors) politicians either force rule changes or the price goes up and more of the smartest people from other countries stay here, and don't go home.
Don't kid yourself for a moment - we aren't 'passing over' domestic students for foreign ones. We get the best and brightest from those countries; you don't move 10 time zones across and ocean to a place where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language because you're mediocre. They make our 'average' students look bad sure, but we have lots of room for domestic students, for good or bad we can train far more domestic students than want to apply to our programs. And we still, including here on /. bemoan the falling quality of computer science graduates because we're dumbing down the programs. I'll let you in on a secret: we're not dumbing the program down for the guys from india china or the middle east.
Right now I'm in a PhD programme in comp sci. We could probably double our undergraduate enrollment (2nd 3rd and 4th year courses probably have 400 ish students combined now) with all domestic students right now, and not skip a beat.
Imagine I was at a business. Lets call it the computer science corporation of London ontario. (Fake). And we do 70% of our business with india the middle east and china. Our real dollar business with the local market (canada) has basically grown with inflation for 10 years, but we've more than doubled in size by exporting our product to those markets and we see continued expansion in those areas. Is that really bad, shareholders would be thrilled? Car companies have basically reached one car per person in north america, the market is pretty obviously saturated at that point, so to grow your business you go elsewhere. Education has the same problem. Frankly we have more PhD's than the private market really wants, and more people who would rather the ~25% pay cut but academic freedom and the ability to teach rather than work for the man (IBM, MS, Google). Think of foreign students as sales to a foreign country - and lets face it, we're running out of other things the chinese are willing to pay money for that we have.
You want to pick on someone pick on programmes that aren't the aforementioned "management, technology and science". Want to know why we're managing such poor enrollment? Because students have been given the woefully misguided impression that 80K later any degree will be just as good as spending 80k on one in management, technology or science, and that working hard and learning to do math is bad. Admittedly I'm in Canada, and we have oil, and oil makes you as a society stupid because any high profit margin product that can be mass produced reduces demand for education or efficiency gains through education. It's not that I object to psychology, or history or anything else, but if the market wants 100 grads and you
A US citizen who is a senior engineer or manager makes somewhere between $120K-$200K, depending upon the company and value of stock options. In the bay area or elsewhere in coastal california, the quality of life that buys you is very much middle class - nothing special house, 2 cars, struggling to put the kids in private school, etc. This is especially true if single or the spouse isn't working, which is more likely to be true for a foreigner. A western educated engineering manager in India can probably afford a nice home, several servants, nice holidays (with vacation time to match), etc. It is hardly surprising that, without the likely return of dotcom millions in the stock option lottery, the lure of their home country has a lot more appeal. Or maybe it is just that all of the engineers who came over in their early to mid twenties during the dotcom boom have now reached maturity, both professionally and personally, and are looking to start a family back at home or take their family home before the kids get too old. If the average age of returning tech workers is into the 30s, that seems somewhat likely. A 36 year old was 22 at the start of the internet boom years, 24 when things really started to take off.
Foreign students are considered a cash cow by schools, because their fees are much higher, and they are usually funded by sources from their home countries, not from the US. They are subsidizing the education of domestic-born students, not the other way around.
This is something that makes no sense to me.
If a company is really serious about a project, they'll hire the most qualified people available. Those available people may or may not have the exact qualifications they are looking for.
If they can afford to sit on their hands and wait for everything they want in a candidate, either the project isn't that important to the company or they already have the number of people they really need to get it done.
I'm convinced that some companies deliberately post jobs that they have no intention to fill just so they can say they can't find qualified candidates in the US.
I am a faculty at a US university, advising several such foreign students and postdocs. Many of them choose to leave the US after their PhD or postdoc simply because there are often better opportunities elsewhere, especially for those interested in an academic career. Many countries are ramping up their investment in education and research, while the trend in the US is negative. In the 70's and 80's, US universities were the top. Now, researchers are often offered much better support, infrastructure, ability to grow a research group, and even salary, in other countries. So they leave. Three of the people who worked with me are now professors; none of them is in the US. What this says for the future pre-eminence of US science... wait, which pre-eminence?
I was born in Madrid, Spain. As i was 10 my parents changed me to a german high school and after that i went to Germany to study engineering. While I was studying Mechanical Engineering in Aachen I went one year abroad to Montreal. That's when i started realizin.g than maybe North America wasn't as advanced as i thought, But hey, Canada is not the USA. So when I finished and got the opportunity to made my Phd at Berkeley, I took it. Coming from Germany, I've always looked at Berkeley and MIT as "the future". I thought they were light years from us, another dimension, robots walking through the campus... I thought it was going to be like the jump from Spain to Germany...
When I arrived, it didnt took me long to realize how wrong I was. After two years I remember talking with my parents, and saying that at the moment the only thing I wanted was to finish as fast as possible. I just wanted to be able to put Berkeley in my resumee and leave, because I really thought I was waisting my time. I was trying as hard as possible to be productive. But it was not only that my tutor was not good enough, or that my department didn't had the money I needed, the worst part is that we were overall behind what my department in Germany was doing. I felt so frustrated spending 90% of the time reinventing the wheel and putting the USA stamp, feeling that I was leaving in the past, and trying but not finding the way to do something about it that i really wanted to leave and do something useful with my life. It was even worst when I talked with a good friend of mine who was also doing his Phd at the same department in Munich. He got almost unlimited finantiation, lots of students doing their master thesis for him, and was really learning a lot, not only about the subject, but about managing a big reserarch team and lots of long time experiments, we just didn't had the same means...
When I finished it was really easy to find interesting jobs in the states, I even doubted because of one really interesting offer at Lockheed. But the real fact was, that the offers from Germany where at a whole different level. I had been in Berkeley! For them that was... Godlike. As I came back I started working for a private company for almost three years, and after that I took a part-time management position at that company and been working there partime since. At the same time I started also working part-time in my second Phd at the university. Im not only doing what i really like, at the moment Im getting a lot of support from very good people, students included, and from the university, state, privates companies... I really feel that im working with the best people in the world.
And till now i've just mentioned the academic side! The rest of my life can be summarized in: I'm payed better in Europe than in the States and at the same time living here is cheaper! And if you add a better public transport system, higher security feeling, way better health care... it's not hard to understand way researches are not staying there. I know a lot of indian people here, and they have already moved their families in and have no plans to retourn to India in the distant future...
So yeah, people go to the states to study because of the fame. When they arrive, they realize things back home werent so bad as they thought. And when they finish things even get better at home, because due to their studies in the states, they are seen as gods... If you add that the quality of life in the states isn't even in the top10 of the world, and that the loan/expenses ratio is better in lots of other countries, you have your answer.
Keep in mind what you're doing without ever forgetting how you are doing it.
Actually that's misleading too. I'm a foreign undergrad student (soon to be graduate, hopefully *fingers crossed*), and the sheer number of NSF-funded summer internships and other opportunities that are closed to me since I'm not a citizen is mind-boggling. Don't get me wrong, I'm not whining or anything - it's only fair for a gov't to take special care of its own citizens, and to expect anything else would be absurd - I'm just pointing out that american citizens still have it a lot better than int'l students.
weinersmith
The truth is that for the average, say, Bengali, those things don't really matter that much. Sure, your government is horribly corrupt, and so are the police, healthcare system, etc. But if you've got enough money to get a nice apartment/home, and support your family's future, you're going to have a pretty happy life, filled with parties and religious/traditional festivals and holidays spent with your [extended] family. As opposed to here in the US, where being upper middle class means working 60 hours a week, seeing your kids 20 minutes a day, and having about a week of vacation time a year...
weinersmith
I am an Indian and never wanted to visit the US for the mighty dollar. Never visited the US. Here is another shocker. Most of the students came purely for economic reasons. My worry is, this reverse brain-drain is also likely to bring filth in India...aka MBA shit and Wall Street greed.
Absolutely agree with this. As a European I would never work in the US for all of the reasons listed. I don't care what money I could earn. "At will" employment scares me especially since you can be fired without any good reason. Working hours are ludicrous which seems to stem from the "at will" factor - people are too scared not to work those extra hours for fear of being fired. In the EU it is illegal to work more than 48 hours a week without special dispensation. And the final straw is that you don't even get decent vacation time for all those hours, I get 5 weeks here and I know plenty of people who get more.
Listen to my latest album here
I worked in the US for a few years. So why did I leave?
Of course, everyone says the grass is greener in the US, but compared to home, really it's not - it's just different. But there were enough downsides to being in the USA which made me eventually leave. In order:
1. Family. I would prefer being close to them, 4800 miles isn't close enough. (I now live 10 minutes walk from my Dad).
2. The INS Dehumanization programme - the Kafkaesque manner in which visas and green cards are processed. I just wasn't willing to go through that any more. I hear it's even worse for people from places like India and China, I guess I'm lucky coming from Europe.
3. Healthcare - I like living somewhere where I never need to ever worry about getting healthcare, even if I fall upon bad times.
4. Bigotry and illiberalism - I lived in Texas. Too many religious people, and when I left, also Bush was President.
Don't get me wrong, I think overall the United States is a good country, and one of the best in the world - despite its faults. Any country has faults. But I just wasn't prepared to go through the unpredictable, abitrary and dehumanizing immigration processes to live somewhere that's just as faulty as my home country, but is also 4800 miles from my family.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You know that PhD and (to a lesser extent) masters students are basically the dogs-bodies of academia, right? I.e. they're usually the ones doing the heavy-lifting investigative work to support the research interests of their supervisor. If you seriously constrain the pool of available PhD students, then you're making it harder for your professors and Universities to get their research done.
The sheer ignorance on display in some parts of this discussion are amazing. Doubly amazing when you consider /.'s readership is biased towards being significantly more educated than the average American. If this represents mainstream thinking in the USA, then one must worry the USA is doomed to a dark period of shoot-in-the-foot policies driven by xenophobism.
(I say this as someone who believes the health of the USA's economy is vitally important to that of the globe's, and has a mostly-positive opinion of it. NB: the country I live in also is experiencing some measure of xenophobist-pandering policy setting).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Working hours are ludicrous which seems to stem from the "at will" factor - people are too scared not to work those extra hours for fear of being fired.
While that certainly does occur, my experience is that it is rare - at least at the professional level, maybe less so at the burger-flipping level. That most people work overtime because they want either the extra money or to get ahead in their career (presumably to get more money). Making it illegal to work more than 48 hours seems crazy from my perspective its like that saying "the nail that stands out gets hammered down."
And the final straw is that you don't even get decent vacation time for all those hours, I get 5 weeks here and I know plenty of people who get more.
Maybe we take our vacation in a different form. Consider the american pre-occupation with big houses, nice cars, giant televisions, etc. These are all little mini-vacations that we experience everyday. Is that better than taking a month off at the end of summer and traveling to the other side of the continent? Maybe, maybe not. But I think that ignoring it is to miss a fundamental difference in the societies.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Before you mod me down, hear me out and try to think, OK? I'm not directing this semi-rant at anyone in particular, even if YOU think I am.
/.'er spouts off about, all corporations ARE NOT 'evil'. You know, there are companies that value their people, that treat them with respect, that don't overwork their people, etc etc. If you're too lazy to find a decent job, that's your prerogative, but don't whine that it's the fault of American capitalism, or EVIL USA, or whatever your lame group-think of the day is. You're in your own position because that's what YOU CHOSE. PERIOD. Try being accountable for once, and quit expecting something for nothing. You own your destiny.
There is so much BS and misinformation that floats around these threads that it is absolutely ridiculous. It's just so fashionable to be anti-US, and so many uninformed viewpoints are formed by people such as the GP and parent that it's laughable, bordering on pathetic, really. If you want to spout off and sound like a fool because you want to be "in" and be a hater, then that's fine, but you just sound like an uninformed person with a chip on your shoulder.
You want to know who works these 60 hour weeks? People who work for crappy managers at bottom of the line companies that are poorly managed. People who have no spine to stand up for themselves. If you're in this position, it's your OWN FAULT for working for a company that uses you like the tool you apparently are. You're too lazy to get a job at a good company. Don't give me this economy BS either; good talent is always in demand, and regardless of what the average liberal
Listen, there are crappy companies out there, but it is YOUR CHOICE whether you work for them or not.
1 week vacations? Please, get a clue; just get real already. In our industry (you know, I.T.) I have NEVER seen anything under 2 weeks plus holidays, plus more after 3 to 5 years. Again , if you work for a company that uses you in a disrespectful manner, it's YOUR PROBLEM, and YOUR CHOICE to be there. PERIOD. Do something about your situation; you will not be given everything on a silver platter, life takes effort.
You may not like the USA, for whatever reasons, and that's fine. But you know what? We're just people like YOU, like YOUR families, no different at all. We're just born here, just like you were born somewhere else. Because you don't like our political "leaders'" policies, we all suck? NO, that's not fair at all. WE don't make political policy, WE don't directly elect our officials, no matter what you want to believe. WAKE UP.
You're so civilized, you're so superior in your country compared to us, right? WRONG. We're all the same. We're human beings who are at the mercy of our politicians and their sometimes terrible policies. But in your enlightened knowledge, you condemn all of ~300 million of us because of your dislike of a few of our politicians? Yeah, that's very enlightened of you. (That is sarcasm in cased you missed it.)
Everything is a trade-off. Many European countries have 4, 5, 6 week vacation policies. And you have other things we may not have which I'll not get into here. But you also PAY for those perks in terms of *vastly* higher taxation rates. Not an opinion, this is a *fact*. I'm not judging here, I'm just pointing out there's no free ride, only that there's a cost to everything. Yes, you get perks by paying for them, so quit trying to sound superior by implying that these perks are because of your superior society. They are not. They are paid for by YOU, DIRECTLY. Enough of that topic.
The "at will employment" thing is another red herring. People don't get let go from their jobs randomly. Either there's no work long term and you get let go (or the company goes under), or you screw up royally (or are a royal screw-up) and you lose your job. PERIOD. If you think people work 50% more hours than they get paid for because of fear of a random dismissal from their jobs, you're fooling yourself and you sound foolish
That would have been the case had W done his part. Per the clinton agreement, in 2002, CHina was to allow their money to be freely traded AND they were to drop trade barriers. Right now, China still controls their money and has 25% tariffs on all goods. To make matters worse, they are purposely discouraging trade. For example, look at pollution control. This is technology that they DO NOT HAVE, but the west is loaded with. But they have 4 TRILLION dollars surplus. China says that they want the west to GIVE THEM THE TECH FOR FREE and will not buy ANY OF THE WESTERN CONTROLS. Lately, they have been stealing the plans for these. It is obvious that they will be selling pollution controls to other nations soon based on those stolen designs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The US is the greatest place on earth and if you work hard, you can really live a great life.
What life?! When I worked that much, I worked, barely got any exercise, gained 50 lbs, slept, got depressed, blood pressure went up, triglycerides too, and burned out. I had NO social life and I was incredibly lonely. While others were getting married and having kids - I was working.
Great life, indeed!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Per what I've heard, this is why young people can't get jobs in France anymore -- you can't be fired even if you don't bother to show up for work.
What you've heard is a crock of shit, most likely scare tactics by the US right wing. Probably the same people that said the UK's National Health Service was evil.
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It's not just Indians and Chinese 'sea turtles' going back overseas.... I have no background in China, born a Canadian of European background and spent the past 5 years in Beijing. Found thousands of Canadians and Yanks just like myself living in China. Who are these people? Most are highly ambitious entrepreneurs from good families that are searching for the new wild west, the land of opportunity. They could easily stay and work in the US but some of (maybe lots of) todays youth are not happy working in mega corporations who don't give a shit about their employees, long hours, little recognition/room for advancement, no loyalty, etc...
By many China is seen as the new wild west with new opportunities, challenges, and a sense of adventure that can't be found back home. One billion people where everyone needs new products and ideas. At least that's what the new expats believe. Easy road to riches... but that's not the case. I never met anyone over in Beijing that made a fortune off of China except the expats on big overseas packages. Most small foreign start ups are loosing or breaking even... and as a foreigner in China your chances of success are severely crippled because of your lack of Guanxi.
Benefits of living in China: Cheap cost of living, nice modern apartments with all the amenities (pools, gyms, squash, etc), extremely safe, maids, cooks, drivers, cheap taxis, new restaurants opening every day with fanatical service, rapidly expanding nightlife, modern architecture that puts most US cities to shame, cheap shopping, ability to grab weekend vacation flights around Asia for cheap, holidays like the Chinese new year with all the fireworks are amazing, etc. It is possible to live very well on $1-1500/month. Most foreigners just out of university get by on significantly less. Overall there is a great sense of adventure in daily life, nothing is routine.
Disadvantages: pollution! ...remember some days not being able to see 5 feet in front of my face, most days not being able to see a building 200 feet away... covered in smog. Hard to find quality western groceries. Chinese people are very friendly overall but it takes lots of time to build up connections and guanxi. You can't just go over there and expect to start up the next Google in a year because the locals will shut you out. In Beijing there is little life on the streets except for Wanfujing... central development has left most streets deserted because there's no shops or culture around lots of areas. Old Beijing and the hutongs are disappearing at an alarming rate to put up shiny new skyscrapers. Office culture is a nightmare in terms of productivity. Trying to get anything done that requires innovation is like building the great wall because nobody will stick their neck out and take a chance. Managing most local Chinese people is difficult and requires detailing every aspect of their job, productivity is slow. Government regulations require you to hire so many locals and it is becoming harder to fire non performing people. Office rents can be as high as in the US. Overall I found the overall cost of doing business in China was on par with costs in the US. Also government policies are highly unpredictable and can severely cripple your companies ability to do business. Long terms there are many risks and uncertainties.
Why did I leave China? Got fed up with the quality of life and lack of opportunities in China. Also there was some Chinese government visa changes. When I left about half of my friends were also planning on leaving. Lots of expats were planning on moving their business out of the country to places such as India or finding work in Dubai or elsewhere in Asia.
US is not the land of opportunity it once was. The bush era has left a bad taste in everyones mouth and it will take a long time to get over. Where are all the opportunities in the US if there's no commons (manufacturing, R&D, etc) in things like solar, electric cars, electronics, etc? The US needs to keep these hubs of innovation in the US or the talent will keep going overseas.
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