My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer

No, don't swap "suicide" for "risk." It's no secret among pilots. And it's enshrined in the law. America loves the Wright Brothers, two states fought over the right to claim them on their state currency (Ohio and North Carolina). History loves the Wright Brothers. The world loves the Wright Brothers. They were the most famous people on earth (together with their sister) in 1911. And that's why you don't get put in a psych ward for flying, because America loves aviation, no other reason.

And they practically never flew together. Then, at most one of them would die at a time, and the other could live to continue defying death. They were the first great aviators to fly and not die. They crashed sometimes and it was brutal, identical to falling out of a building. There were endless deaths in early aviation, all the time, all the time. In the early 30's the Army was charged with paper mail by airplane, and the weather was terrible, and everyone equated aviation with suicide. Young soldiers dying most days of the week. I think even Roosevelt said it was suicidal, that what these pilots were tasked with meant leading them to slaughter.

Like heroism, which I carry out all the time, also intrinsically suicidal, for instance all the times I've fought alone, outnumbered. Everyone says that's suicidal. So it turns out it's not actually that dangerous, any more than aviation, you just need to act perfectly, meaning no mistakes.

Yes! That’s what it’s for! Looking forward to talking! :)

> When you mention Germans below are you talking about the Chinese origin Germans?

I gave several examples of people who could point to a part of the country and say that their ancestors built those communities and those places reflect the unique culture that’s been handed down to them from their ancestors. Some of those examples were “white” and others were not: Mexicans in the southwest or Black people all over the south.

I lived in Atlanta for many years, a city that’s distinctly shaped by the culture of southern Blacks, and which continues to attract Black people for that reason: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/opinion/georgia-black-pol....

What Charles Blow talks about in the article above is an especially poignant example of a universal impulse: the desire to live among and be governed by people from one’s own cultural community. Nobody suffers more for not having a “country of their own” than Black and indigenous people in America, but the underlying impulse to want that is universal.

> You're conflating legal immigration and demographic shifts to open-borders. Those are not the same.

I’m not talking about “open borders.” I’m talking about having to share political power over your own community with people from a different cultural background. With the example of Bangladesh and Pakistan, there was no immigration involved. My parent’s generation fought a war against Pakistan because we didn’t want to be in the same body politic as Pakistanis.

> I don't know what impulse you're referring to. Please expand on that.

The impulse for people from distinct cultural groups to govern themselves. Bengalis didn’t want Pakistanis to have control over the laws that applied to them. They wanted their own country that they could run the way they wanted.

Notions of governance are deeply intertwined with culture, and having people from distinct cultures try to govern each other leads to tremendous animosity. One concrete example: my family comes from a part of the world that’s had government and civilization for thousands of years. We’re farmers going back to before anyone can remember. My wife’s family, by contrast, settled the frontier of the United States, living off the land, and not being able to count on established governments to help them (because there were not any).

This leads to extremely divergent world views between my dad and my wife. My dad said the other day that he doesn’t see why anyone needs a gun because “nobody hunts for food.” This is true to him—nobody has hunted for food in Bangladesh as long as anyone can remember. Meanwhile my wife grew up hearing people refer to “store bought meat” because it was the exception until her parent’s generation. She grew up eating meat that her grandfather had hunted. It’s a completely different acquired understanding of not only the role and purpose of guns, but more generally the relationship between and among people, the land, and authority.

I look at those interactions and think: if someone from rural Oregon is mad at people like my dad coming to America from Bangladesh, who thinks “nobody hunts for food,” and voting to take away his guns, why isn’t that justified? Why can’t he be mad that people who aren’t acculturated into the cultural underpinnings of his community have so much power in deciding how that community should now be governed? Why would I begrudge him that sentiment when my uncle fought in a war over the same exact impulse?

Disclaimer: I didn't downvote you.

I guess you can say that it really took me 6 years to get a green card via employer sponsorship (although those 6 years were anxiety-filled to say the least). However, if the startup (my first employer out of college) sponsored me work visa and then green card, I would not have gone for the PhD either. I hope it makes sense.

You should know, you practice it every day.