I’m from Spain.
I went to graduate school in the US. The job market in Spain was bleak at the time: 24% official unemployment rate, not counting people who’d graduated college less than 2 years before.
After two years of graduate work, things started going downhill, but I just held on. My second article was about to be printed and, once it was, all I’d be missing was a “research proposal”, my thesis, and to defend both. Piece of cake.
Then the article got printed - without my name. 60% of it was my work (I could prove it, btw, since it had been my “oral exam”), yet my name didn’t appear anywhere. When I went to my boss and asked him about it, he laughed in my face and told me that I was the best researcher he’d ever met and that he was darned if he was going to let me go in less than 11 years - which is the time he’d calculated he could have me for free, between my own government’s grants and university jobs.
I went to the graduate advisor, who was from Spain like myself but who also was the other professor whose name appeared in the article and who had been in my oral. His response was “ah, what will you do, like he said you’re a foreigner, you can’t do anything”. Aaaay, poor baby was having a depression.
Forget about talking with the department manager: the fucker had tried to flunk me out of the school because he was pissed I hadn’t asked to work with him. He’d taught a subject about which he didn’t know a thing, given As to his students, Cs to everybody else, a D to me. So, he’d put “on probation” every student who wasn’t interested in working for him. I knew his response would be “so come work for me”.
I found out that I had enough credits to take a Master’s without Thesis, went and talked with my advisor again. He said the same as before. I left him chuckling to himself.
I went to another professor, a Puerto Rican I respected very much (very no-nonsense kind of guy), explained the situation to him and asked him to speak with the other two and convince them that I was serious when I said I’d leave if things didn’t improve. He did. He was very angry, they didn’t take him seriously either.
Going to the dean of graduate studies crossed my mind, but at this point I was quite fed up. So now I have an MS, and my ex-advisor is now working in the University of Santa Patata instead of being in one of the best-funded schools in the world.
My next employer was also in the US. After I’d worked with them for a year, their legal department got in cahoots with my lawyer and decided it was “best for everybody involved” if I stayed in the country but without a work permit. This body involved didn’t agree and managed to convey to Human Resources the following announcement before leaving the country: “your lawyers are lying to you”. After some research, HR found out that over 1/3 of their employers didn’t hold work permits - I hear the scene was quite interesting and lacked only a few pints of blood to make Tarantino happy.
Spent the next two years holding short-term jobs while helping care for Dad while he died. Shortly after he did, I joined a local factory in an entry-level position. My boss was a bit of an ass, but the parts of his job that he didn’t like and foisted on me were things I like, so we were both happy. He was asked to take part in an international project but hates to travel, so I was offered it instead. After myself and another entry-level guy managed to turn a little factory in Spain into the locomotive for the project, I was offered a new job within the company (making more than the ex-boss, hihi!).
The company fired myself and the other 3 europeans who’d been in the international team at the end of the project. Their policies insisted that we had to go back to our old jobs or, if said jobs didn’t exist anymore (as was the case), to equivalent jobs in our country of origin. “A structural problem”, my current boss called it in my interview with him - I took note of the turn of phrase for the next time I’m doing the rounds.
Next job brought me to Costa Rica, for a specific project. At one point I was two months ahead of schedule, yet my boss insisted I had to stay there for 12 hours every day (excuse me you effing moron, that’s both illegal and stupid, you should reward your good workers, not punish them). I had medical problems: shakes, fever, allergies, vertigo… but, because it wasn’t anything he’d ever got, he refused to acknowledge them (otoh, being hungover was ok).
I had already decided to quit when I started getting calls from companies in Spain that had my resume on file (where were they last year, when I was unemployed for 6 months?), talked with them, got several offers, selected the project that was closest to home (the salary and complication level were similar).
That project had been terribly messed up by the previous people; “my part” had gotten a treatment that would amount to taking the carburator off a car and then wondering why it doesn’t work. Since the carburator had been replaced by a fancy schmatzy piece, I had to explain very slowly that this piece now had to be connected to everything else - or given up. My coworkers never said “no” to the client, but they also never followed up on the stuff they’d said “yes” to.
But because I was 2 hours from home, I couldn’t quit without divorcing the family. Then I got a job offer in my hometown 
and here I am, trying to learn a whole bunch of new names and making 5 times more than I was making just 5 years ago.
