I keep getting requested on LinkedIn by Indian students from my alma mater (UK). The Chinese international MAs gave up after COVID so now unis are recruiting loads and loads from India instead - they are universally annoying to be around. I was originally sympathetic and gave career advice when asked, but was totally put off by what seemed like Brahmin entitlement to certain highly prestigious jobs. Nobody says anything on this but our situation is similar to Canada's, with fast food in some towns being taken over almost entirely by Indian students, to the detriment of UK uni students and teenagers. Being ghosted/rejected by McDonalds is sadly very common now.
One Indian who requested me has got an 11-month diversity internship in communications at Transport for London. Diversity internships are absolutely insane to me as a concept already, but surely if you come from a third-world country and still earn enough in your depreciated currency to put down £25k for a humanities MA plus extra living costs (so basically the Indian 1%), you should automatically be eliminated from the process? There are tens of thousands of young people in London who have less buying power than that girl and could probably have used the opportunity. I've noticed other Indian students give themselves work experience with weird titles ('Social Media Consultant,' etc) and when you look up the companies - the management teams are solely comprised of Indian students, and all of the online reviews are by people with Indian names and use very similar phrasing
The post-2020 drive for DEI in the publishing industry seems to have led to an uptick in Indian lib women in assistant roles at the UK outposts of Big Three publishing houses and prestigious literary agents. Which kind of scares me because I've seen their written English and I know how calcified their politics are towards mangled Floyd-era racial grievance (could this be why we're publishing so many books about the terrors of the British Empire, when the general public don't really seem to care?).
Journalism seems safe because all the prestige outlets are controlled by a highly nepotistic band of ex-public school elites who are getting more and more dissatisfied with the idpol status quo, and this is largely transferring from millennial commissioning editors to new Gen Z writers - but who knows what will happen in future. I know several Indian students who are paying for journalism degrees in the UK with shit English and the full expectation that they'll be able to work in the British press afterwards.
The background: like almost every country with this issue, we are also graduating thousands of domestic students from expensive humanities degrees and giving them the expectation that they will be able to move into any non-STEM career. But it's currently almost impossible to find any graduate job, let alone the ones in 'dream' female PMC industries (publishing, magazines, PR, marketing, third sector). I know recent UK graduates who basically do everything 'right' (volunteering, part-time work, excellent grades) and are still left hanging 6+ months after graduation, except now it's also very hard to find minimum wage work as a stopgap. Most British Gen Zs will be able to name at least three friends who have been in this situation. Some fully capable young people have been out of work for literal years.
If Labour don't do anything this is going to cause absolutely insane levels of resentment among young people for the next decade. We will probably see it breach the Brexit-era North-South divide, and if Reform manage to feminise their language/marketing they're likely to gain loads of votes in unexpected places. It's quite similar to the H1B situation - they're taking jobs young women (specifically) actually want to do, with no evidence that they are any better at those jobs. The diversity scheme stuff will probably start a panic among naturalised minorities as well. We know a huge amount of 'Boriswave' immigrants from 2019 onwards are Indian - basically aligned with Canada - but the press are obviously not reporting on any of this
A news story - very privileged Indian student gets her family to sell a piece of land and uses three years of savings (£40k in total) so she can go to a London uni with a very high acceptance rate to do an MA in Gender and Law. She admits she could have used this money to buy an apartment in her city. Writes guilt-tripping article about how she can barely afford anything in London and has 'South Asian elder daughter trauma.' Of course she did eventually spend six months in a 'Strategic Communications Manager' role at a UK NGO...