By “skilled immigrants” I mean people with advance degrees (PhD, MD, …) holding all types of highly technical and managerial positions.

Asking this because skilled immigrants, at least in theory:

  1. knows, and has first-hand experience of how much bullshit one has to go through to immigrate,
  2. has enough bargaining power to move to another immigration-friendly country,
  3. let’s just say that the upcoming US policies don’t seem to be friendly to any immigrants at all…

But then US tech and research are supported largely by the same skilled immigrants. So I’m curious how that is supposed to play out…

Sorry this is a bit of a strange question.

P.S.: I’m… not asking for a friend. I’ve been constantly worried for the past two weeks; I try not to rush to conclusions, so the fact that I’m still worried concerns me. Double quotation marks because in the US it’s literally the same government agency that manages all immigrants no matter how they got in the country (highly skilled worker, family of citizen, asylum, literally just crossed the border, …)

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    17 hours ago

    Well, yes and no.

    Wherever the first humans existed are fully native, if the people there descend from the first humans in a relatively straight line. Which, we all come from them, but anyone that moved away and their descendants came back, it would be hard guy else descendants in particular to claim to be natives there.

    Anyone and everyone else had ancestors that colonized somewhere. Like, the mayans were descendants of colonists, just not European colonists. Same for Cherokee, Cree, Inca, Hopi, whoever. Their ancestors got here first for sure, and they colonized these continents. So, they’re native, but not pre-colonization because nobody was here until they came here from somewhere else.

    So, yeah, in one context, if you only refer to the people that came after whoever got there first as colonists and pretend that that’s the only meaning of colonization, then that definition fits. But it isn’t the only definition, and it’s not the one under discussion here.

    To give a different view on it, what would we call the first humans to go to Mars and stay there? Colonists, right? We’d have a colony on mars.

    You can use the word native to mean the people born on mars, and that’s what you were saying, that the people born in a place are native to that place, and any further waves are called something that. But with other definitions of native, it’s impossible for there to ever be human natives on mars at all, because nobody evolved on mars that we know of.

    And that’s what I’m getting at. Here in the U.S. in specific, and across the Americas in general, everyone came from somewhere else originally, regardless of how long ago that was.

    Which is why I personally prefer the way Canada refers to the people that were here first, as First Nations. They conquered and colonized this side of the planet first. The rest of us need to respect that, but we also need to recognize and respect that being an immigrant isn’t a bad thing at all because everyone here is either an immigrant or the descendants of immigrants. We’re connected in that way, and should treat each other more as neighbors and family than insiders and outsiders.