Crossing the Cultural Divide

pic from J Crew

Now I’ve had the baby, set up home and found my feet (just about in that order too), my ever-active mind is turning to full-time work.

I’ve managed to shift the dreadful H4 visa onto a less archaic 01 visa so am all good to head out into the Big City and find some permanent work.

Working in NYC – in a shiny office, not just from home – would complete my experience here. I was a career girl in Sydney and London before the H1B whisked me off to foreign climes, so taking so much time out to set up a home and have a baby has been, at times, very frustrating.

As much as we share the H1Bs earnings, I do have to run major purchases by him and it makes the independent woman in me feel like I’m asking permission.

Plus, I won’t lie, I relish the working wardrobe that comes with earning your own cash. Browsing J Crew and ShopBop isn’t a pleasant experience for me. Materialistic, me? Well if it’s good enough for Madonna….

Anyways, I found this great article by Moda Operandi CEO Áslaug Magnúsdóttir on crossing the cultural divide in the NYC workplace.

(Note: don’t invite colleagues to the pub after work – a concept that is thoroughly alien to any working Brit.)

“While every day I learn a little more about how to conduct business in America as an American would, I still find myself smacking into situations where my foreign-ness is the culprit…” READ THE REST OF IT HERE…..

Homesickness – a thoroughly modern (old) condition

Interesting article in the New York Times about the increase in globalised work practises (ie: you are more likely to be transferred from London to Hong Kong, than Manchester – or, as with my Aussie friend I met for lunch yesterday, who has upped sticks from Sydney to Vancouver with just as many emotional repercussions/logistical difficulties if she’d moved to Brisbane). But how Skype, cheap flights (cheapish – Jeez, the cost of air travel is getting pricey), and the ‘international foods’ section in Key Foods (Worcester Sauce, McVities Dark Chocolate Digestives, Ambrosia custard), do little to prevent the ancient malady of homesickness, or nostalgia as they called it in ancient times.

It’s by Susan J. Matt who is a clever prof of history at Weber State University and the author of ‘Homesickness: An American History‘.

I’ve blatantly reproduced it but you can read the real version and the full comments here:

ACCORDING to a recent Gallup World Poll, 1.1 billion people, or one-quarter of the earth’s adults, want to move temporarily to another country in the hope of finding more profitable work. An additional 630 million people would like to move abroad permanently.

The global desire to leave home arises from poverty and necessity, but it also grows out of a conviction that such mobility is possible. People who embrace this cosmopolitan outlook assume that individuals can and should be at home anywhere in the world, that they need not be tied to any particular place. This outlook was once a strange and threatening product of the Enlightenment but is now accepted as central to a globalized economy.

It leads to opportunity and profits, but it also has high psychological costs. In nearly a decade’s research into the emotions and experiences of immigrants and migrants, I’ve discovered that many people who leave home in search of better prospects end up feeling displaced and depressed. Few speak openly of the substantial pain of leaving home.

This emotional style became common among mobile Americans in the 20th century, but represented a departure from the past. In the 19th century, Americans of all stripes — pioneers, prospectors, soldiers and the millions of immigrants who streamed into the nation — admitted that mobility was emotionally taxing. Medical journals explored the condition, often referring to it by its clinical name: nostalgia.

Stories of the devastating effects of homesickness were common. In 1887, an article in the Evening Bulletin of San Francisco had the headline, “Victim of Nostalgia: A Priest Dies Craving for a Sight of his Motherland” and reported that the Rev. J. M. McHale, a native of Ireland, had fallen ill with nostalgia after arriving in Brooklyn. Shortly before he died, he declared: “I am homesick. My dear country, I will never set a foot on your green shores again. Oh, my mother, how I long to see you.”

Today, explicit discussions of homesickness are rare, for the emotion is typically regarded as an embarrassing impediment to individual progress and prosperity. This silence makes mobility appear deceptively easy.

Technology also seduces us into thinking that migration is painless. Ads from Skype suggest that “free video calling makes it easy to be together, even when you’re not.” The comforting illusion of connection offered by technology makes moving seem less consequential, since one is always just a mouse click or a phone call away.

If they could truly vanquish homesickness and make us citizens of the world, Skype, Facebook, cellphones and e-mail would have cured a pain that has been around since “The Odyssey.”

More than a century ago, the technology of the day was seen as the solution to the problem. In 1898, American commentators claimed that serious cases of homesickness had “grown less common in these days of quick communication, of rapid transmission of news and of a widespread knowledge of geography.”

But such pronouncements were overly optimistic, for homesickness continued to plague many who migrated.

Today’s technologies have also failed to defeat homesickness even though studies by the Carnegie Corporation of New York show that immigrants are in closer touch with their families than before. In 2002, only 28 percent of immigrants called home at least once a week; in 2009, 66 percent did. Yet this level of contact is not enough to conquer the melancholy that frequently accompanies migration. A 2011 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that Mexican immigrants in the United States had rates of depression and anxiety 40 percent higher than nonmigrant relatives remaining in Mexico. A wealth of studies have documented that other newcomers to America also suffer from high rates of depression and “acculturative stress.”

Ricardo Valencia, an immigrant from Guadalajara, puts a face to such statistics. In 2005, he traveled to Nevada to work so he could pay off a mortgage on his house. The day after he arrived in Nevada, he thought, I want to leave! As he explained to me: “I’ve always been really close with my family. … I had to stand it, we had to stand it … but returning was always in mind.” He used e-mail and phone cards to keep in touch with his wife, calling her several times a week. But even this regular communication could not assuage his tremendous homesickness. He finally returned to his family in 2009.

Like Mr. Valencia, 20 to 40 percent of all immigrants to the United States ultimately return to their native lands. They know that Skype is no substitute for actually being there.

It is possible that these new technologies actually heighten feelings of displacement. María Elena Rivera, a psychologist in Tepic, Mexico, believes technology may magnify homesickness. Her sister, Carmen, had been living in San Diego for 25 years. With the rise of inexpensive long-distance calling, Carmen was able to phone home with greater frequency. Every Sunday she called Mexico and talked with her family, who routinely gathered for a large meal. Carmen always asked what the family was eating, who was there. Technology increased her contact with her family but also brought a regular reminder that she was not there with them.

The immediacy that phone calls and the Internet provide means that those away from home can know exactly what they are missing and when it is happening. They give the illusion that one can be in two places at once but also highlight the impossibility of that proposition.

The persistence of homesickness points to the limitations of the cosmopolitan philosophy that undergirds so much of our market and society. The idea that we can and should feel at home anyplace on the globe is based on a worldview that celebrates the solitary, mobile individual and envisions men and women as easily separated from family, from home and from the past. But this vision doesn’t square with our emotions, for our ties to home, although often underestimated, are strong and enduring.

A BBC Special Report: At Home Abroad

“Couples usually come home very married or extremely divorced…”

The BBC is doing a special investigation into the effects of living overseas on families; particularly in regard to wives (OK, spouses – but let’s face it, it’s normally women stuck in the H4 scenario).

How serendipitous.

It’s for the business section of the website, which just goes to show how important a consideration this is for industry.

After all, there’s a huge percentage of overseas placements that fail (something like 70%), because the family of the person with the working visa is unhappy. Even if the person with the working visa is successful and making oodles of money for the company he/she works for.

So it makes sense for organisations to dedicate some time to thinking about how the relocation of their employee is going to effect his personal life.

I’m continually maddened by how ignorant the H1Bs company have been over the difficulties of us living here.

When the H1B recently called his line manager to bring his attention to the fact that our health insurance premiums were going up, his response was: “HOW much? That’s outrageous”.

Funny, that’s what I was thinking too.

I also was thinking that we shouldn’t be paying for any health insurance in the first place (the verbal agreement that agreed our health insurance would be covered by the company seems to have been forgotten and, despite our polite reminders, any resolution is continually delayed).

I don’t think this is malicious – just neglectful. It’s not surprising that a manager doesn’t fully grasp the intricacies (or basic issues) but why there isn’t someone in HR who deals with international relocation in a multi-billion dollar company is beyond me.

Or perhaps there is – and no one has told us. That wouldn’t surprise me either.

Here’s an extract from the piece:

Moving an employee abroad is staggeringly expensive. The living expenses, relocation allowance and benefits can cost three to four times the employee’s normal compensation, according to most estimates.

Given such high stakes, companies from Shell to Dupont are looking at the factors that can lead to successful stints abroad for their employees. A happy spouse has long been, and continues to be, the best predictor of a successful move.

“The number one reason for assignment failure is the family’s inability to acclimatise and adjust to the new location,” says Andrew Walker, the director of global mobility at WorleyParsons, which oversees more than 3,000 employees who move abroad.

> Read the full report

Health Insurance for Dummies

The H1B and I spent an evening this week trying to make sense of our new health insurance package. We have to reassess what we require because of the increases caused by Obamacare (aka, the Affordable Health Care Act).

In over-simplified terms because insurance companies now have to offer cover to everyone, with subsidised rates for those who couldn’t previously afford it, the same companies are recouping costs elsewhere.

Our health package will be going up from $155.40 every two weeks (most US companies pay bi-weekly rather monthly), to $250*.

$500 per month is quite a bite out of our budget – that’s a flight home or a weekend away, or our monthly food budget actually.

Admittedly, we have boosted some areas of our package. For example, we’ve upped our dental plan from basic to comprehensive, and opted for increases in the H1B’s life insurance payout and the evocative Accidental Death and Dismemberment clause.

With or without the hike in costs, the biggest decision to make is over deductibles, which are similar to the excess you might pay on your car insurance in the UK. That is, you dutifully pay your monthly premium but the insurance company will also make you pay the first £300 or so of the bill.

Thieves.

Likewise, if you go to the doc with a chronic chest infection in the USA, you have to pay a deductible before the insurance company cough up (pun intended) the cost of the examination and all the horse pills you’ll be over-prescribed.

So, the H1B and I had to decide whether to go for the Gold or Platinum package (it’s already starting to sound like Airmiles), with the latter being the superior package in terms of coverage and payout, plus it covers things like obstetrics and protection for dependents.

While the Platinum package costs us more in terms of cash every two weeks (about $39 more), our deductibles are much less.

EG: if the H1B needed a trip to the emergency department, like he did in the summer, and we guesstimate that the visit cost around $10,000, if we had the Gold package we’d have to pay $1200 in deductibles. If we went with the Platinum package, it would only be $250.

These figures don’t take include the mystery “co-pay” and “out-of-pocket maximum”, which you would also be charged.  (The H1B asked his insurance company why they exist and what they do, and the customer service rep couldn’t tell him.)

There are extra costs if you don’t want to go with the approved doctors  (car insurance works the same way in the UK – if you don’t use approved car mechanics or garages, your car insurance company is likely to charge you more – unless you go with an independent non-fault accident claims company, such as Vamco**).

And legal services cover. If you are a smoker, you pay more too.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the ordinary worker in this country. I don’t understand how a family with, say, a nurse and teacher as the breadwinners can actually afford health insurance. Most liberal thinkers agree, I’m sure, which is why Obamacare ever got anywhere near the House of Representatives (or was it the Senate – still working that one out).

In Britain, most take the NHS for granted – the wait times, the moody nurses, the unsympathetic GPs with their eight minute appointments – but really, we don’t know we’re born.

When was the last time you saw a cleft lip in the UK, or a club foot? Never, right? These are fairly common sights on the New York subway – people just can’t afford to get them fixed. Imagine the ordeal of someone in your family getting cancer and then having do deal with a bill for several thousands of dollars landing on your doormat.

Brits (me included, a few times, I’m sure) gripe about surgery visits for tonsilitis or a bad cold, but when something really bad happens – like the big C, or you’ve mangled your leg in machinery, or you’ve been run over by the proverbial bus – the NHS foots the bill and you’ll get the best care in the country from private doctors who have to work for the NHS too. We don’t have to think about it.

Obama is a visionary and a brave man for approaching the issue of a free health care system but when health insurance premiums are soaring for the majority of people living in the USA, it’s a bitter pill to swallow (if you can afford the deductible on the pill, of course).

PS: If you’d like to read a better analysis of Obamacare, and the health insurance in general, here are some recommended places to start (I tried to find non-partisan sources – not that easy when it comes to this political stink bomb):

• Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War is a grittier Bill Bryson-style analysis of the “dirt poor” town (Winchester, Virginia), he was born and raised in before he went off to be a highfalutin writer. The chapter on health care is eye-opening and easy to read.
• Q&A on the US health care reform on the Guardian website.
• College website Santa Rosen has a good go at explaining Obamacare in simple terms.
• Slate.com on breast pumps, contraception and other headline-grabbing benefits.
• The New York Times has this natty graph, published last year, about how the new health care laws will effect different people (love an interactive infographic).

*There is, of course, the issue of why we are even having to worry about paying for health care at all – it seems to be a basic part of the relocation package for most companies. We’ve had to wave several large, colourful flags in the faces of our employers to get them to think seriously about health care, pensions (we stand to lose a big chunk of our pension when we move back to the UK because of taxes), and the H1B is also missing out on some other bonuses (such as grade allowances for a company car), which he would have in the UK.

The most frustrating aspect is that I don’t believe these oversights aren’t down to lack of duty of care, just failure of process – the managers didn’t know the issues involved, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone in HR who actually grasps the implications of moving to a city like New York.

It would be interesting to hear your stories if you’ve been in a similar situation (if your experience, however, is a relocation package that includes a no-limit expense account at Crate & Barrel, free flights back home and a fully paid-up off-shore pension, you can keep that to yourself).

**Vamco is my dad’s business, which I help him out with from time to time; which is how I can I write about car insurance for any length of time without curling up my legs with boredom and falling on my back like a Raid-sprayed cockroach.

Social Security Numbers

In the USA you need a social security number to open a bank account, get a credit card or drivers licence, buy a car and apply for health insurance. And of course you need it to for employment purposes and for filing tax returns.

It is the main source of ID in this country and if you are an H4 you can’t have one. No, really, no, no, no. Not even the third category of SSN, the “non-work card”.

Your H1 spouse can have one and the idea is that you benefit from his or her privileges by default. Or via osmosis or something because you ain’t going to get anything more official than that in the near future.

Useful links:

• Department of Social Security (just in case you want to look into the osmosis thing)
• ImmiHelp.com’s SSN page (this isn’t an official site but includes lots of good info about many immigration issues)

Should the US issue dependant visa holders work authorization?

I found this article on immigrationvoice.org. It covers important topics, such as protection for victims of violence, and some readers have left interesting comments.

The last sentence is worth flagging as I find the discrepencies between an L2 being able to work, but not an H4, confusing:

“Allowing the L2 and E2 category to work didn’t create any marked increase in the unemployment rate among US Citizens.”

What do you think? As H4 visa holders have we traded our right to gainful employment for the experience of living in America with our spouses? Or are we really victims of abuse?

“All these years the United States of America denied work-permits to
dependant visa holders with one simple explanation “You are in USA
because Your Spouse is allowed to work here”. But numerous surveys by
different social organizations has thrown light on the darker sides of
the life of dependant visa holders.

The dependant visa holder has to forgo his/her career growth in-order
to stay with the spouse. This causes  a big gap in the career and
finding a suitable job in the home country becomes difficult when the
principal visa holder has to leave USA and return to the home country.

If the dependant visa holder’s field of study or work is, one in which
getting a sponsorship from an employer is difficult, getting a
work-visa is almost impossible. He/she even loses his/her hard-earned
skills in the respective fields due to the large gap in career. Even
though volunteering is possible, most of the volunteer jobs might not
utilize the persons skills.

Studying in the USA is good option but, being a single income family,
it will affect the financial status of the family if other members of
the family (children) are studying.

90 percent of dependant visa holders are women. Women being, more
susceptible to domestic violence by the partner, becomes even more
prone to violence due to her complete dependence on the Spouse. They
become prisoners in USA due to the spousal abuse and immigration
policies that give their husbands complete control over their lives.

The immigrant Women get protection under VAWA but non-immigrants are
not covered. Even if a law to let the non-immigrant battered women to
obtain work permit is introduced, It might not protect women whose
cases dismissed as non-critical. The abuser can further exert his
control over the victim and convince her that he has changed so that
the victim might not press charges against him. Thus the abuser gets
encouraged to continue violence.

Divorce is not an option because most non-immigrants come from third
world countries where a divorced women has to bear the social stigma of
divorce and will not be protected in her own home country.

Because of the long queues for Labor certification application and
retrogression of visa numbers, getting an EAD and Green Card takes
longer.

Most European countries issue work permits to the spouses. Also the
time taken for permanent residency is lesser. In USA L2 and E2 visa
holders can have work permit, but the other categories are ignored.

Fear of flooding the labor market is not a valid reason to deny the
dependant visa holders work permit. Allowing the L2 and E2 category to
work didn’t create any marked increase in the unemployment rate among
US Citizens.”

Read the US Citizenship and Immigration Services definition of the Violence Against Women Act

Read the original article and comments from immigrationvoice.org

PBS/Suspended Hearts Video on H4 Visa Holders in the USA

If you are an H4 visa holder in the USA, it’s worth googling around the net to see what other folk are saying about their own situation. I’ve read mutterings about “infringement of human rights” a few times but found this programme by PBS the most considered. It’s well worth a watch, although I find some of the thoughts of the panelists frustrating. They argue that just because the US Government deems a spouse worthy of employment, that doesn’t mean that his wife (or her husband) should automatically get a job.

True, but we are not asking for an instant or automatic job, only the right to be employed if an employer sees us as a potential candidate – based on our merit and experience. Is that too much to ask when we pay taxes and contribute to the economy and wider society on every other level?

The piece centers around a documentary made by former trailing spouse Megha Damani who says: “A sense of self-worth and meaning of life comes from what we do. I felt like that person was just cut off from me when I landed in this country.”

Immigration attorney Shivah Shah points out that there are some serious issues over women who are in abusive relationships being much more vulnerable when they have to depend on their husbands for every cent, every credit card payment. I think this is a different issue though, as terrible as it is, because it takes the attention away from the basic issue – which is, if you have someone in the country paying taxes (albeit through their husbands), contributing to the economy etc etc, and they are particularly well qualified, they should be allowed to work.

Shah also points out that in some states women on an H4 visa can’t get a driving licence.

Fireworks & Emergency Rooms

My first blog was going to be about Independence Day, and about our spectacular night of watching the Macy’s fireworks from a rooftop of the ultra-cool Gansevoort Hotel in the Meatpacking District. Instead, our first July 4th was spent at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center on 68th Street East.

The H1B had been experiencing some stomach pains for about a week, since we hit the East Village $5 cuba libre drinks with a friend from the UK the previous Sunday afternoon. Given the current heat and humidity of NYC and the general stress and excitement of moving countries and living together for the first time – plus a few business trips to South America – we didn’t pay much attention to the odd gut grumble.

Yesterday we decided to spend the day in Central Park – an oasis of cool in a big, dry, hot city (more on that later) – and by the time we got home, the grumble turned into a complaint, which turned into an outrage, which left the H1B doubled over in pain. Completely unprepared and panicking now that my normally unflappable man was helpless, I manage to Google ’emergency rooms’ and find one that was only two streets away.

Since H1B couldn’t do more than stagger, gripping onto walls and rails (dressed in shorts and no top, and sweating buckets, he looked like your average British drunk on a national holiday) we jumped into a cab and shouted ‘hospital!’, ‘ER!”, where the cabbie, who from memory looked like an extra from Shaft, rather pedantically asked, “Maaan, are you alright?” to H1B who now was turning from white to yellow, had the mad eyes of a wild animal and was perspiring rivers of sweat all over the wipe-clean seats.

If you’ve never experienced hyperventilation bought on by extreme pain, let me tell you it ain’t no comedy sketch involving a brown paper bag. The pain meant that H1B couldn’t breathe – and the overload of CO2 in his body started to paralyse his face and hands, contorting and twisting his mouth and fingers in a very Edvard Munch manner. Scary.

Fast forward 12 hours of tests, X-rays, morphine, blood tests and many visits by student doctors, who wrote furiously – and I believe a little too gleefully – on their clipboards, and the diagnosis was ‘unexplained abdominal pain’, probably a bacterial infection. A bit of anti-climax all-in-all. The pain hasn’t really returned apart from the yells as H1B pulled off the electrode stickers in the shower.

Much is made about the difference between the NHS and the American all-pay system but emergency rooms in my experience are pretty much the same the whole developed world over. The same interminable hours of waiting between visits from different doctors (once H1B was downgraded from a potential ruptured appendix or other abdominal explosions, and a few gunshots victims had arrived, the attending physicians interest quickly went elsewhere), the bright lights, the endless inexplicable pinging of machines that sound like the warnings that tell you to put on your seat belt during turbulence, the abrupt night nurses who’s smile muscles atrophied years ago.

Despite rumours spread by fervent NHS supporters, H1B wasn’t asked to choose between a thumb or a finger before he signed his insurance papers. In fact, it took about two hours for the staff to notice we hadn’t filled out the insurance element of the forms (both myself and H1B have comprehensive health insurance via his company).

NB: You don’t need to take your insurance papers to hospital. The hospital will either send you the bill (which  you can pass onto your employer or insurance company) or send the insurance company the bill direct, if you have the details.

Plus, I was provided with a full cooked dinner and as much jello (or ‘Smart Gel’ as it’s called) and juice as I could consume, which I helpfully ate in front of H1B who was nil-by-mouth. Not that he cared, he was on a steady drip of morphine and was rambling happily.

For all you Trailing Spouses (and H1Bs) out there who might find themselves in a similar, unprepared situation, here are a list of the main emergency rooms in New York City:

Bellevue Hospital Centre
462 1st Avenue, New York
Nearest cross street Ist & E 26th St
(212) 562-4141

Beth Israel Medical Center
286 1st Ave, New York
Nearest cross street 1st & E 17th
(212) 420-4010

Lenox Hill Hospital
100 East 77th Street, New York
Lexington & 77th

(212) 434-2000

New York Presbitarian Hospital
525 68th Street, New York
Nearest cross street 1st Ave & E 68th
(212) 746-5454

New York Downtown Hospital
170 William Street, New York
Near Fulton Street in the Financial District
(212) 312-5000

St Lukes Roosevelt
1000 10th Avenue, New York
10th Ave between 58th and 59th
(212) 523-4000