Trying to keep this factual, and out of Great Debates:
It seems that all the doctors in my area (N. California – SF Bay Area) are of South Asian (India/Pakistan) origin. Today, my wife went in for a routine outpatient surgical procedure, and noticed that all the nurses were Filipino. She has also noticed that all the manicurists she knows are Vietnamese.
So what’s going on? (This recalls I, Claudius where all the soldiers were German and the doctors were Greek.) I don’t have any issues with this, I’m just curious.
a) Is our sample size too small – is this an overly broad generalization based on insufficient data?
b) Is this just a Bay Area phenomenon (which does have a large population of S. Asians), or is it happening elsewhere in the US?
According to the NRI (non-resident Indian) Association of Florida’s Space Coast, 40 per cent of all us MDs are of Indian origin. Pakistani docs make up an additional 7 per cent.
So no, it isn’t a Bay Area phenomenon.
England is pretty similar- while South Asian populations in major cities are huge, elsewhere they’re tough to find. However, virtually every hospital in the country has at least one Indian doctor.
78% of Grant Medical School (my mother’s alma mater and Bombay’s largest med school) graduates since 1960 are practicing in the US or UK.
I have noticed that the majority of aspiring medical students I have met are of Asian or South Asian descent. One would think that such a profession is prized in these cultures, so many endeavor to attain it.
The nurse/manicurist bit seems to me to be too much of a generalization, though there are salons etc run and staffed by Asian women only. I’ve seen a lot of diversity in nurses, however.
This is known as a “lie”. According to the American Medical Association, the USA breakdown is like this:
[PRE]
Race/Ethnicity Number Percentage
White 435,236 52.00
Black 20,738 2.50
Hispanic 28,626 3.40
Asian 73,849 8.90
First Nation 504 0.06
Other 20,208 2.40
Unknown 256,995 31.00
[/PRE]
The ONLY way that the NRI could be telling the truth is if ALL unknown, Other, and Asian physicians were from India. But then what continent would Pakistan be on?
Sounds like the NRI was just pulling numbers out of its backside to make itself look all important-like.
Well, becoming a manicurist doesn’t require much capital or fluent English, so it would be an attractive profession for recent immigrants – probably even more so if they have friends or relatives who are already manicurists and can teach them the business. I can see how one ethnicity could easily gain a monopoly.
No clue about nursing, but perhaps people from some cultures hold nurses in high esteem and are more likely to encourage their children to go into the profession.
I think that many Asian immigrants become doctors or nurses because it requires the least proficiency of the English language among “prominent” jobs. It would be too hard for many immigrants to be a lawyer, journalist, etc. I’ve also noticed that many immigrants become Engineers for the same reason. They can “speak” math, but they aren’t nearly as good at English. I have a Pakistani friend who moved to the U.S. a few years ago. On his SATs he got in the 700’s in math and 400’s verbal. Obviously he won’t become a novelist or English professor.
As for Vietnamese being manicurists, or others being dry cleaners, I don’t know. Again, it doesn’t involve alot of English, but maybe it is a cultural thing?
I’m pretty sure there are programs to “import” nurses from the Phillipines due to the lack of nurses in the US who are willing to work under the harsh conditions for little pay. There are also programs with China and perhaps other SE Asian nations.
While these programs definately do exist, the ‘harsh conditions’ part, I don’t think is true. My mother works as a nurse manager here (in Connecticut), and they import nurses from Asia all the time. The even tried to force my mother into going to the Phillipines. For some reason, women here just don’t like to nurse…
I think what Fretful Porpentine touched on operates a lot, and not just in occupation, but location as well. If you’re moving to a new country and your uncle’s already here, it might well make sense to move nearby and possibly let him help you find a job, or hire you. And when your buddy comes over later, he may well gravitate towards you.
Later immigrants may not actually know you, but might prefer to live near you as a little enclave of their culture grows.
Indians aren’t just aggregating in the medical profession, though. While I have no statistics, there are quite a few in the hotel/motel business.
Another thing that may be a factor with the hotels, manicurists and convenience store operators might be that those are not just jjobs, but businesses that can be started with modest investments, and can then provide jobs for sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, etc.
In my profession, geophysics, there are quite a few Indians and Chinese. I know those same two nationalities appear in engineering and other technical fields. That might have something to do with what educational backgrounds manage to emigrate.
a) English is the language of much Filipino higher education, and
b) I’ve been told that the nursing educational system there is much more similar to that in the U.S. than the educational system in many other countries, so Filipina nurses have an easier time passing the U.S. state nursing licensing exams (which you have to do before you can get a work visa as a nurse in the U.S.)
It’s just that they like to do other things, like asking for adequate payment for this hard job, and joining unions, etc., which annoy the big medical corporations now running many of our hospital systems.
So those corporations find it easier to import nurses from the Philipines, etc., who will work for less pay and tolerate more arbritrary treatment (because if they quit or are fired, they are shipped back home).
Not true. Nost nursing positions don’t qualify for nonimmigrant work visas such as the H-1B, because they don’t require the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. So nurses generally have to be brought in on permanent labor certifications (already with green cards); they are exempt from many of the normal recruiting requirements because the government has recognized the nursing shortage. However, employers are still required by law to pay the prevailing wage to foreign nurses or the same that they are paying their U.S. citizen nurses, whichever is higher.
So generally once nurses get here, they are already permanent residents and therefore cannot be sent home at the employer’s whim.