The recently announced major changes to the United States’ H-1B visa programme have prompted much conversation about emigration. The H-1B has long been the means by which US-based employers could petition for educated foreign professionals to work in the US. When most people think in the abstract about “migrants”, they probably think about workers without tertiary education – farm, retail and hospitality workers. We usually neglect to apply the term to architects, engineers and doctors, academics who take up research and teaching posts or people who work in lucrative tech jobs in Silicon Valley.
The option of living abroad is something that many middle-class, university-educated people have traditionally just assumed is a possibility for them if things become difficult at home. A rite of passage to which education entitles us. This is especially the case in Ireland, where the option of leaving home in search of more concrete opportunity has supported numerous generations of young people in periods of economic stress. Many have brought their expertise and experience back home with them, while others have assimilated abroad and stayed put.
Before this recently announced restriction, the H-1B visa was the means by which many of my US-based Irish and European friends got their foot in the door of a new life. It was a step en route to achieving permanent US residency for those who met the requirements. With companies now obliged to pay a $100,000 (€85,000) fee for each petition to apply for the visa, securing a job in the United States has been rendered functionally impossible for many non-Americans.
It will achieve its intended outcome – US companies prioritising American candidates – but at the cost of global talent, innovation and progress in the many cases where companies can’t pay the exorbitant fee merely to file the paperwork to apply. Leaving Ireland for a life in the US is suddenly less feasible for many.
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In some ways, these new restrictions are ironically egalitarian – even the most “privileged” migrants will now feel the squeeze. Educated and professional workers must confront what working-class migrants have long endured: the message that their admission is strictly conditional, their status temporary and their contribution considered dubious rather than welcome.
The message from the US is clear – foreign workers now have materially less value there, and not just those in low-skilled work. Different cultures have always valued migrants differently, but the American story of immigration now stands in dramatic contrast to its former conception as the nation of immigrants.
The process of trying to secure a visa is never straightforward or easy, as anyone who has moved to the traditional Irish emigration destinations of the US, Canada or Australia will know. Nobody emigrates to worsen their life. Despite growing claims in the West of slackening rules, securing a visa to live and work abroad remains a complex, expensive and slow process. Generations of Irish people have relied on emigration, yet we continue to frame migrants quite differently in our own imagination. We tend to think of the barista whose second or third language is English as a migrant, but not our own family member who went to the US, Canada or Australia to work in construction, healthcare or communications.
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Despite even our current trend of global migration, which sees the highest numbers emigrating to Australia since 2013, Irish people do not tend to self-identify as “immigrants”. This particularly holds for the middle classes. We will comfortably apply the label to others, though.
This is not a uniquely Irish dissonance – it’s mirrored across western countries where concerns around border security appear to be escalating. We can look to our British neighbours, whose imperial history and ongoing internal identity crisis have made meaningful assimilation of communities from many formerly colonised territories so unsuccessful that British politicians espouse “tolerance” as a key tenet of British identity. The word itself is a mark of failure. Nobody “tolerates” something they value.
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Tolerance is merely standing beside what you dislike – a very low bar, and hardly a principle around which to orient a coherent national identity.
The globalised flattening of our time makes all the dissonance around migration more acute. Western cultures are in some respect less distinct from one another than they once seemed – or at least more navigable, with more common features, values and ideas across social classes – a centre left- or centre right-wing politician in Germany will hold broadly similar views to their Irish counterpart, and the concerns of working-class voters in Spain will be in broad ideological alignment with those in Britain. As a result, emigration (at least within the West) feels less like crossing worlds than moving post codes. When borders feel culturally thinner but bureaucratically tougher, questions around who counts as an immigrant, who belongs and what it means to be “from” one place but live in another, become both more urgent and more difficult to answer.
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For the Irish abroad, migration hasn’t just been a rite of passage, but a crucial and enduring route to flourishing. Without it, our country would look nothing like it does today. Yet, the H-1B visa changes serve as a sobering reminder that our relatively privileged status in recent history does not exempt us from the migrant condition.
We have been tremendously lucky to be able to emigrate when necessity has pushed us to do so, but it isn’t an entitlement.
It’s clearly a fragile privilege.
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