Harbingers of Global Change

Harbingers of Global Change enriches a revealing case study of a little-understood group of immigrants with the contemplation of broader social dynamics, including assimilation, acculturation, and the persistence of racial and ethnic prejudice. Author Roli Varma reveals how familiar obstacles to social equitysuch as the silicon ceilingare complicated by the unique constellation of social pressures confronting a group of scientists and engineers whose talent it highly valued, and yet whose presence as culturally unfamiliar human beings is received with unease and ambivalence. The analysis combines United States political and social history as it bears on immigration policy with a sensitive and balanced treatment of how India's techno immigrants negotiate career, family, and loyalty to social-cultural traditions.Harbingers of Global Change is not merely a much needed addition to the emergent literature on the plight of international immigration-professionals; it is a visionary look at where global society is headed in the twenty-first century, an epoch in which all human beings may become foreigners in the virtual techno-marketplace.

Roli Varma’s book, Harbingers of Global Change, offers a penetrating analysis of how India’s highly educated techno-immigrants hit a “Silicon Ceiling” that keeps them out of management, whether they work in U.S. universities, government, and industry. Varma’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Asian Diasporia of scientists of engineers, how scientific identity is negotiated across different cultures, and how we, as a members of a knowledge society, can begin to (re) model a 'model minority.'

Roli Varma is currently Regents Lecturer and associate professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.