In November 2022, 1200 programmers at Twitter quit their jobs when Elon Musk took over the company and demanded an “extremely hardcore” work culture. Musk provocatively posted a happy “code review” picture with a full room of Twitter engineers. Looking at these faces, many retorted that those who stayed were forced to stay because they were H1B visa holders. In scholarship on tech workers, they are often analyzed as a new middle class because they are considered as one of the rare winners in the current economy who are still able to earn a decent living with their knowledge and labor. However, such an assumption overlooks the hierarchies among them. Zhuoru Deng’s dissertation focuses on the STEM pipeline of Chinese immigrant tech professionals in the US, who first arrive in the US as international students on F1 visas and then become tech workers on H1-B visas.
Immigration journeys are often imagined as smooth transitions from one place to another. However, mobility is facilitated and gated by a range of institutions across countries, including governments, higher education institutions, companies, intermediary companies such as educational consulting agencies, and career training companies. Deng examines how immigrants navigate a series of layered socio-technical valuation systems across different stages of the STEM pipeline, from university admission to job recruitment, to visa regulations. While these systems operate in distinct institutional contexts, they form an interconnected valuation regime that sorts immigrants and governs their mobility. Adopting a multi-method approach, Deng’s research examines: how do these systems function as gatekeeping mechanisms that define legitimacy and structure mobility? How are they sustained by transnational networks of institutions? How do they channel investment and talents toward the US, which contributes to the making of Silicon Valley capitalism? And finally, how are immigrant narratives of aspiration and meritocracy mediated in these transnational processes?