If you work in a tech field in the US - software/engineering/biotech what percent of the people you work with are not US citizens? For me it’s about 90% non citizens. I work in stat software in RTP area of NC. (I am a US citizen born here)
I guess this is the trend all over the US now. I’ve been working in this area almost 30 years and until recently this was not the trend.
I wonder is there really that much of a shortage of US citizens for these tech jobs?
When I was in grad school in the US (chemistry), there were two American citizens among the grad students; one of them always introduced himself as “Cuban” but I understand it was to prevent questions about his lastname (Castro). There were several foreign-born professors including the head of the department and the head of graduate studies, and every single person who was interviewed for professor positions while I was there was foreign-born. But some of those foreigners were people who’d been living in the US since childhood.
Later I was brought over as a sort of internal IT consultant, one of four Europeans and five Latin Americans in a team of about 200 people. The team started off with more externals than internals but by the time I joined it had more internals than externals. All the external programmers were from India (we had one internal programmer, English firstname and Polish lastname); half the external consultants were from India (but none of their managers).
Our crew interacts (with varying degrees of success) with groups from India, Singapore, Malaysia, Slovakia, Brazil and Israel. On top of that, many of them are contractors. They direct about 30% of our workload.
I’d say about 25% to 50% of my colleagues are not US citizens. That’s not including people who work outside of the US (we have a large development office in Canada). The reason for the large spread is because we have a lot of foreign born employees where I don’t actually know the citizen status. I’m not sure what your intentions are. I was born in South Africa and came to the US on a work visa for a prior employer. I am a US citizen now, and have been for the duration of my current employment. How would you count me?
IT department in a non-tech industry: out of 14, two are foreign-born; one is almost certainly a citizen; one is a green card holder; no H1B visas. So: 7% non-citizen.
Might be 10% or more of our US employees were not born US citizens. I can’t say how many have become citizens. In our overseas offices the percentage of US citizens is not even 10% but the there will be a high percentage of workers in each office not born in or a citizen of that country. The exception would be our somewhat independent office in Japan which may have all Japanese employees.
In my current job, probably 30-40% are foreign born although many are US citizens now. In most of my previous jobs the number was more like 10%. My current job has been heavily invested in our Indian organization and we bring many Indian employees here to work.
Notably the majority of the people in Morrisville with Indian ancestry are US citizens. Are you sure that 90% of your co-workers are non-citizens or just that they don’t have a European background?
For what it’s worth I work for a multinational biostat firm with HQ in RTP. We employ lots of non-US citizens, but none at our RTP office. They almost all work in their own countries although they occasionally visit the home office.
I worked in tech for about 35 years, and, well, almost no foreign born coworkers. Most of the time I was a government contractor, and most non-US citizens can’t be cleared.
We did work on very few occasions with allies overseas, but it was for short periods of time. But there were probably 25 of those 35 years that I wouldn’t have seen or spoken to a foreign born work associate.
I worked for five years in the power industry. Our office was probably around 1/4 to 1/3 immigrant, most of them Indian. And a fair amount of the citizens were from other parts of the country. I changed gears and now work as an electrical engineer for a civil/structural engineering firm. They are almost all white, US citizens, and local at that. About 10% women in both jobs.
I work as a contract employee for the US military. We all require a security clearance. For the most part we all need to be US citizens. We have one guy who is originally from Africa, but he gained his US citizenship a few years ago.