Expert: Daniel Mazur - 5/13/2009

Question
Hi daniel,
Another thing i was recently wondering was that now since, there is so much of anti asian stuff going on in the U.S., in the sense that the administration wants to stop outsourcing jobs to foreigners ( majority of which are basically asians), will it be more difficult to get admissions to universities or assistantships in the future, say by the time i complete my masters, i.e. 6-7 years?
Because i think that the west is now too much filled with indians, and chineese and japaneese people that it's probably soon going to reach it's saturation point.
or am i wrong?

Thanks,
Shikhin


Answer
Hi Shikhin,

I hope you don't consider me an expert on this subject, this is a political, sociological and geographical matter. What follows is only my opinion and may have little do with reality - I don't claim I know people as well as I know physics...

Firstly, stuff in the USA nowadays doesn't seem anti-asian to me. It is rather anti-islamic, if you please, but still not more than muslims of different sorts are vengeful to each other (sunnites vs. shiites) or not more than muslims and non-muslims do to each other in countries like Pakistan or India. Extremes are under much closer scrutiny in the USA, so that's why we know about them all.

In the USA there can be no such thing as saturation with one ethnicity or another, I think. USA have been built on immigration and this trend continues. There are certainly some people with extreme opinions, but I would hazard a guess that percentage-wise, there are fewer than there are (for example) in Europe. Internally, USA are more divided between cities and countryside than united against newcomers of any colour. Remember that even Asians have been coming to America for generations and their children and grangchildren are Americans as well as Asians. One specific of North America (USA and Canada) is that majority of the citizens are aware and proud of their different heritage. They say: I am Italian American, Indian American, Korean American etc. In the USA anybody is welcome, who is happy to live by rules of democracy. That's all. Everything else is just rambling of extremists, who are very much in minority.

The difficulty with assistantships in fact exists NOW, when the financial crisis is cutting budgets. Many Americans, who'd been laid off or who have just graduated a Master's program and cannot find a job, simply go back to school and stay until the market's better and until they have a degree that will give them an edge over competition.

I think 6 years are enough for times to get better. I am no Washington nor Napoleon to perceive the true will of people, so I can only extrapolate what I see now, without allowing for a major disturbance.

Cheers,
Daniel