Help Pablo Keep Educating the Next Generation of Engineers

Hoping to bring more attention to a topic that silently affects many:

I guess systematic, institutionalized inequality can take many forms.

As a foreigner in the US, it soon became very clear that I would need higher levels of skill and experience than those of locals for companies to be able to justify the costs and inconvenience of visa sponsorship. Even then, opportunities would be limited to the few companies willing to sponsor foreigners, and to the specific fields that do not involve defense funding and/or security clearances.

After 12 years of education and research experience in top 3, renowned engineering universities like Purdue and MIT, I was finally competitive enough to qualify for my dream job: to become a professor. I felt like I had made it, only to realize that the hurdles for being a foreigner were just about to get taller, and costs, steeper.

I have been in the US for ~6.5 years, I have held ~6 different visas: amounting to 6x$200 for processing fees, plus the 6x$1000 flight tickets to go back home to renew the visa, I hold a Ph.D., and I was selected for my position after a competitive, global selection process; yet, (some) employers keep putting the financial pressure to resolve any immigration issues on the employee.

Besides the (well-assumed) ~0.5x salary levels in academia compared to industry positions, and the ~$300k investment from the University to fund the initial stages of my research, they keep putting $10–20k financial hurdles, besides the mental and time strain, on the employee's plate: “To prepare for these costs, consider starting to save now and researching immigration attorneys,” they said, “faculty have always had to pay out of pocket,” they said. If not, I simply lose my job.

You would think the proud “Country of Opportunity” and meritocracy, angry at illegal immigration, would care to retain highly-educated and uniquely-qualified talent, but the reality is that it does not, nor does care the State financing the public universities that educate the next generation of local talent, nor does the University that would quite literally lose hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in identifying the right candidate and funding their early career.

The same way that crowdfunding to pay medical bills makes it to national news because of a broken health care system (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/health-care-costs-crowdfunding-medical-bills/), or an 8th-grader has to raise money to pay off his district's school lunch debt because of a broken economy (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/05/24/school-lunch-debt), I am now fundraising to cover the never-ending, institutionally-ignored costs to resolve my situation because of a broken immigration system.

Raised funds will go directly to cover immigration attorney fees for green card application. Any surplus, if any, will be donated to California wildfires.

Thank you,

Pablo