I wanted to talk more about immigration and my experience working for Anagh Technologies, kind of continuing from my last entry. The whole thing about Anagh Technologies was they would sponsor immigrants, get them their green cards, then guarantee them a job. Since they work directly for Anagh, and Anagh just rents them out to anyone who wants their skills, they don’t need to worry about being deported when they lose their job. Anagh just keeps them on the salary and gets them another position.
The problem seems to be that Anagh, and many of the placement/recruitment companies that operate this way, don’t always play by the rules and are then able to hold these immigrants hostage and teach them all this shady behavior under the threat of deportation.
So Anagh legit came through on their promises to me when I worked for them. I should give them that. The same high-pressure tactics they used on me they used on my potential employers to get me jobs fast with little hassle on my part.
They brought me to Pittsburgh so they still have a special place in my heart. From my perspective they did exactly what they promised so I do feel bad about calling them out, but it’s the greater community that’s actually important and to whom I hold my true loyalty, so I did it anyway.
So a number of months after I quit Anagh and was working directly for BNY Mellon, we got a new guy from either Anagh or a company like Anagh. I recognized it pretty quick: he didn’t know what he was doing and had lied on his resume. He would produce nothing all week then come in on Monday with his task complete, but the code would be weird and we’d ask him about the code he’d written and he wouldn’t be able to explain anything. I think at one point I was just like “write me a for loop. Any kind of for loop. Just prove to me that you can write a for loop. Any old for loop.” And he couldn’t do it.
But my boss didn’t have any proof and I told him about my suspicions but he kept giving the guy more chances.
So then one day he invites me out to lunch, and says to me “okay, I can tell you’ve caught on that I’m not as skilled as I claimed to be.” And he asked me to teach him web development. He insisted he was a fast learner and thought if he could just learn fast enough maybe he wouldn’t get fired.
But I couldn’t do anything for him. I can’t teach someone web development in a couple weeks.
So he asks me to go out to dinner with him a few days later so I tell him to meet me at The Huddle in Beechview, right near my house at the time. The Huddle was a lovely little dive bar with surprisingly good food that unfortunately closed down a couple years after COVID.
So I felt like a steak, even though it wasn’t exactly the Texas Roadhouse.
Then he just told the waitress that he wanted what I was having. Then after she left, he asks, “What did I just order?”
“Steak,” I said. “A slab of beef.”
He shrugged, like that meant nothing to him.
“It’s a big slice of dead cow.”
“Oh!” he says, “Cow is sacred where I’m from. I’m not supposed to eat that!”
“Oh shit,” I say. “Sorry I forgot. Let’s flag her down before they start cooking.”
“No no. I’m in America now. I told myself I would try it at some point. Up until now I’ve been sampling all the different meats that America has to offer by systematically ordering every sandwich on the Subway menu. But until now I’ve skipped the beef.”
So then he tries again with me, asking if I can teach him web development and if there’s any way I can help him avoid being fired. He opens up, and is like “Look, they pressured me into this. I didn’t want to lie. They told me I had enough skills it would be no problem to land me a job, then once I get to this country I find out they expect me to lie to get those jobs.”
He explained he was actually an aeronautic engineer. He actually had a degree in building airplanes, but green card holders aren’t allowed to work on aeronautics in the US, so they told him he could just learn web development real quick. But of course it’s not that easy. His agency was giving him training and he was coming along, but not nearly to the degree that we expected at BNY Mellon.
At one point he was all like “You gotta believe me, they pressured me into this. This is not what I came to this country to do.” And I told him that yeah, I believed him because they’d pressured me into similar behavior.
So then his steak came and he absolutely fell in love with it. He ate all his steak then the last third of mine that I didn’t finish. “Next time I’m getting medium rare” he says.
I felt bad but I still had to tattle on him so the next day I messaged my boss and told him that he needed to fire the guy. I messaged him afterward and told him that I ratted him out and apologized and the guy was cool with it, said he’d probably have done the same thing in my shoes.
Sometimes some people are in a place in their lives where they have the luxury of safety and security, which allows them to be honest. People like me in those situations need to remember that when someone like my immigrant co-worker has to lie, it’s often out of desperation to maintain their life and their ability to contribute to society. We can’t just judge them as though they are in the same place as us.
But he said it would be okay. He talked with his recruiter who said it was understandable. It’s part of the churn. Just learn web dev as fast as possible and they would do it again. Push and scam the next employer into hiring him, do that a couple more times and hopefully by that point his skills would be high enough that he would be able to start holding on to those jobs.
And these people are forced into this by our immigration system.
And now I feel myself wanting to head into border and immigration politics despite being pretty uneducated in the area… but it’s like, I can’t understand how people would believe that the solution to these issues is to stop seeing these people as human beings and just kick them out.
Sometimes I wonder if sometimes people avoid looking at these companies and they are allowed to exist because they make immigrants look bad, like we could put energy into fixing the behavior of these kinds of companies, but instead, all the people who are really aware of these kinds of issues just use it to try to come down on immigrants themselves instead of the companies and policies that are actually causing the problem.
Being pro-freedom, I am very pro-immigration. We shouldn’t have dictatorships telling us where we can and cannot live. This planet belongs to all of us.
Also being very pro-economy and capitalism. Capitalism works best when people are allowed to move to where they are most useful.
I learned that from listening to all those economics and capitalism books on Audible, that there’s virtually no case in history where locking down the borders actually helped the economy. Immigration, historically, has always been good for the economy, so it’s interesting people keep saying “They’re taking our jobs.” And underneath that they’re trying to imply that immigrants are hurting our economy, but they can’t actually say that because we could then show all the facts and figures showing how immigration almost always helps economic growth. So they keep saying “they’re taking our jobs” to make it this emotional, interpersonal us-vs-them thing that can’t be argued against because no doubt in some cases they do take our jobs. They just ignore and hide from the fact that immigrants create more jobs than they take.
To be fair, every job you have ever had, you technically took from someone else who could have had it.