Desi Talk

www.desitalk.com – that’s all you need to know 10 IMMIGRATION May 1, 2026 This Degree Changed My Life. And It’s Essential To A Changing America I am the daughter of immigrants who fled civil war in Sri Lanka and came to the United States with very lit- tle. They wanted one thing for me: economic security. They did not care what I studied, as long as it opened doors never available to them. As a first-generation college student, I did not plan to major in anthropology. It was a course I took because it fit my schedule, not because I had any sense of where it might lead. It changed everything. It led to a career I could not have otherwise built: re- search positions at nonprofit think tanks and Ivy League universities; work as a health care consultant; graduate training in public health and then a PhD in anthropology; positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Preven- tion, the U.S. State Department - where I helped coor- dinate the refugee response for Sudan and South Sudan - and, finally, a faculty chair at a research university. None of these roles had “anthropologist” in the title. All of them required exactly what anthropology taught me to do. I tell this story not to celebrate myself but because I am watching something troubling unfold in American higher education - and I want to be precise about what is at stake. Every spring, the same headlines reappear. This year, citing a Federal Reserve Bank of NewYork study, many news outlets reported that anthropology majors have the highest unemployment rate among recent college gradu- ates - 7.9 percent - with more than half working in jobs that don’t typically require a college degree. The conclu- sion drawn is familiar: Anthropology is a poor invest- ment, a degree that naive students pursue at their finan- cial peril - and that universities can afford to eliminate. This argument, however, rests on a fundamental mis- understanding of what the numbers mean - and it arrives at precisely the wrong moment. Start with the unemployment rate. Computer en- gineering, routinely held up as the gold standard of employable majors, has a recent graduate unemployment rate of 7.8 percent - statistically indistinguishable from anthropology’s rate. No one is calling for the elimination of computer engineering programs. The 55 percent underemployment figure for anthro- pology graduates is more sobering. But liberal arts majors are at nearly 55 percent underemployment as well. Busi- ness management: 53 percent. Sociology: 52 percent. History: 50 percent. Underemployment is not an anthro- pology problem. It is a structural problem in an economy that concentrates well-compensated opportunity in a narrowing band of sectors while demanding credentials for nearly everything else. More fundamentally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts only 8,800 people nationally holding the job title “anthropologist or archaeologist.” This is not a measure of where anthropology-trained graduates work. It is a measure of how rarely employers use that title. The public health researcher at the CDC, the user experience (UX) designer at a technology firm, the policy analyst at an international development organization - none of these appear in the count of anthropologists, though many hold anthropology degrees. I know this not only frommy own path but from watching what happens at American University. Fifty-one percent of AU students who graduated with an anthro- pology degree since 2018 originally intended to major in something else. They found anthropology the way I did: through a general education course that ignited some- thing inside them. They came in as prospective interna- tional relations students or journalismmajors and left as anthropologists - and then went on to become federal policy analysts, World Bank social development special- ists, researchers at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, community organizers, educators, advocates and founders of organizations addressing homelessness and displacement. These outcomes were not produced by luck. They were produced by a discipline that teaches students to do something remarkably difficult and remarkably rare: to move between close attention to individual lives and systemic analysis of the structures that shape them; to ask whose voices are absent from any account of reality; to hold complexity in mind without flattening it into a data point. We are living in what is called the age of big data. Algorithms make consequential decisions about who gets a job interview, who is flagged by a predictive policing system, who receives a loan, whose medical symptoms are taken seriously. And yet the hardest problems facing institutions, governments and companies right now are not technical ones. They are human ones. Why do health interventions that succeed in clinical trials fail in communities?Why do artificial intelligence systems trained on historical data reproduce and amplify the inequities embedded in that history?Why did a global pandemic reveal, in real time, that our data systems had almost no capacity to capture the lived experience of the people most at risk? These are anthropological questions. They require the ability to ask not only what the data shows but whose data it is, what it was designed to measure, who was never counted and what power relations shaped what got recorded and what got erased. In a world of algorithmic governance, institutions that lack people trained to ask these questions are flying with instruments they cannot read. Intel, Google and Microsoft have employed anthro- pologists in central research roles for decades because ethnographic methods produce insights that surveys and optimization models cannot. UX research - now a signifi- cant and growing employment sector - draws directly on participant observation, qualitative interviewing and the interpretive frameworks anthropology has refined over more than a century. When the University of Akron eliminates its anthropol- ogy department, or the University of North Carolina at Greensboro closes one that trained generations of stu- dents, they are dismantling the institutional space where students learn to interrogate the very systems - enroll- ment metrics, labor market data, return-on-investment calculations - being used to justify eliminating them. My parents wanted economic security for me, and an- thropology delivered it. It taught me how to think, how to listen, how to translate the complexity of human experi- ence into knowledge that institutions could act on. That is an essential skill in the age of big data. The students discovering anthropology in college today deserve the same chance I got. Every department that closes is a door that never opens for a student who, without it, may never find the tools to make sense of the world they’ve inherited. Thurka Sangaramoorthy is chair of the Department of Anthro- pology at American University. -Special to TheWashington Post By Thurka Sangaramoorthy New State Department Rules Would Deny Visas To Those Who Fear Returning Home T he Trump administration on Tuesday issued new rules for visa applications that could limit asy- lum claims in the United States, ordering diplomatic missions to ask applicants for nonimmigrant visas if they fear returning home to their country - and to refuse U.S. travel documents for those who say yes, according to a cable reviewed by TheWashington Post. The directive comes after a federal appeals court ruled late last week that President Donald Trump’s declaration of an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border to restrict entry from asylum seekers was illegal, effectively clearing the way to reopen the country to migrants fleeing persecution in their own countries. It was not clear when asylum pro- cessing would resume, and the Trump administration has indicated its intent to challenge the decision on appeal. The diplomatic cable, outlined in a message from the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said that effective im- mediately, all consular officers “should re- quest that a nonimmigrant visa applicant affirm that he or she does not fear harm or mistreatment in returning to his or her country of nationality or former habitual residence, and document the response in case notes.” U.S. officials will be required to ask two questions of applicants: “Have you experienced harm or mistreatment in your country of nationality or last habitual residence?” and “Do you fear harm or mis- treatment in returning to your country of nationality or permanent residence?” “Visa applicants must respond ver- bally with a ‘no’ to both questions for the consular officer to continue with visa issu- ance,” the cable states. The new rules are the latest effort by the administration to sharply limit the number of foreign nationals who receive asylum in the United States. “They’re trying to systematically de- molish any means by which a persecuted person could seek protection and safety in the United States,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International. Under federal law, foreign nationals can seek asylum once in the country if they face “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” back home. Foreign nationals can be resettled as a refugee in the United States under a separate process that takes place outside of the country. The Trump administration has sought to sharply limit both processes, barring almost all refugees other thanWhite South Africans, citing alleged fraud and risks to U.S. citizens. The number of monthly asylum seekers at the southwest border of the U.S. plummeted by almost 40,000 in December 2024 to just 26 in February 2025, the month after Trump took office, according to an analysis this month by David Bier, director of immigration stud- ies at the libertarian Cato Institute. All told, the administration has made deep cuts to legal immigration, including By Adam Taylor - Continued On Page 12