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1. Asian Indian Engineers on H-1B Visa in the United States

   Varma, R. (March 2020, American Society for Engineering Education-Gulf-Southwest Section)

   null (Ed.)

   Under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, the H-1B visa allows technology companies to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. This paper presents a case study of Asian Indian engineers on H-1B visas working in technology companies in the United States. They enter the U.S. technology sector through one single H-1B visa program, yet they follow different sub-paths of H-1B visa. Depending on how they enter the U.S. technology sector, Asian Indian engineers differ significantly in their working conditions and socio-economic experiences. The paper is based on both primary data and secondary sources. Primary data comes from a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded study on return migration of Asian Indian engineers from the United States. 

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2. Asian Indian Engineers on H-1B Visas in the United States

   Varma, Roli (April 2020, Proceedings of American Society for Engineering Education Gulf-Southwest Annual Conference & Exposition.)

   Under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, the H-1B visa allows technology companies to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. This paper presents a case study of Asian Indian engineers on H-1B visas working in technology companies in the United States. They enter the U.S. technology sector through one single H-1B visa program, yet they follow different sub-paths of H-1B visa. Depending on how they enter the U.S. technology sector, Asian Indian engineers differ significantly in their working conditions and socio-economic experiences. The paper is based on both primary data and secondary sources. Primary data comes from a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded study on return migration of Asian Indian engineers from the United States. 

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3. Ethnic Organizations and Adaptation: A Case Study of Indian Immigrant Engineers in the US

   https://doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341598  

   Sabharwal, Meghna; Varma, Roli; Noor, Zeeshan (November 2021, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology)

   Abstract The United States has witnessed waves of immigration throughout its history, with the current immigration policies regulated by the reforms enacted under President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Immigrants now come from all over the world, with China and India supplying the largest numbers in science and engineering (S&E) fields. Although the US is seen as coping rather successfully with immigration from Europe, that is not the case with Asian immigration. Assimilation theorists have long argued that Asian immigrants face problems in adapting to the American culture and lifestyles; in contrast, multicultural theorists have hailed cultural diversity brought by Asian immigrants. Ethnic organizations can play an integral role in Asian immigrants’ adaptation and integration in the United States. Utilizing 40 in-depth interviews of Indian immigrant engineers working in the US technology companies, the present study examines if they belong to ethnic associations. If yes, why do they feel a need to belong to these associations? If no, why not? It further sheds light on their need to belong to such associations. The findings show that the need to belong to Indian associations varied with the stage of their lives, which can be depicted as a U-shaped curve. 

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4. Hispanic Americans in the Labor Market: Patterns over Time and across Generations

   https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.37.1.169  

   Antman, Francisca M.; Duncan, Brian; Trejo, Stephen J. (February 2023, Journal of Economic Perspectives)

   This article reviews evidence on the labor market performance of Hispanics in the United States, with a particular focus on the US-born segment of this population. After discussing critical issues that arise in the US data sources commonly used to study Hispanics, we document how Hispanics currently compare with other Americans in terms of education, earnings, and labor supply, and then we discuss long-term trends in these outcomes. Relative to non-Hispanic Whites, US-born Hispanics from most national origin groups possess sizeable deficits in earnings, which in large part reflect corresponding educational deficits. Over time, rates of high school completion by US-born Hispanics have almost converged to those of non-Hispanic Whites, but the large Hispanic deficits in college completion have instead widened. Finally, from the perspective of immigrant generations, Hispanics experience substantial improvements in education and earnings between first-generation immigrants and the second-generation consisting of the US-born children of immigrants. Continued progress beyond the second generation is obscured by measurement issues arising from high rates of Hispanic intermarriage and the fact that later-generation descendants of Hispanic immigrants often do not self-identify as Hispanic when they come from families with mixed ethnic origins. 

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5. The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248023000019  

   Dhillon, Hardeep (February 2023, Law and History Review)

   Abstract This article unravels an important historical conjuncture in the making of modern US citizenship and alienage by drawing on the state's regulation of naturalization as it relates to Asian immigration in the early twentieth century. My primary concern is to examine the socio-legal formations that constructed the thick distinctions between the modern US citizen and alien along the lines of racial difference and racial capital. Specifically, this article argues that Asian immigration to the United States remade the modern US citizen and alien in two significant and interconnected ways. First, it underscores how the adjudication of race in US courts and connected political campaigns re-mapped race in the United States and sharpened the racialization of Asia and Europe in profound ways that ultimately produced immigrants from southern, central, and eastern parts of Asia as the modern US alien. Second, the debate over Asian immigrants’ eligibility to naturalize refashioned legal status as a normative avenue to sustain a regime of racial capital. It cast citizenship as a legal avenue for White men and families to acquire and protect a proprietary interest in citizenship and recast some Asian immigrants as permanent aliens in a period when alienage came to signify disposable immigrant labor. The article concludes by distinguishing how the struggle for US citizenship by Asian immigrants frames the epistemological parameters and political vocabulary of immigration and naturalization reform. 

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