&gt; But please, do tell me my ride is easier than getting free money and being hired because you&#x27;re not white.<p>The point I wanted to make was supposed to be more along the lines &quot;If you, in your current situation make yourself non-white your ride will be harder then if you make yourself white&quot; and wanted to bring it up because I tried that on a few occasions. And the experience was really weird because the change was my scarf and slight adjustment of my facial hair :) Fortunately it doesn&#x27;t happen too often because I live in fairly cosmopolitan city.<p>&gt; If I would like to work abroad I have to keep in mind that people think very little of us and that the only thing we&#x27;ve got going for us is that we either take the jobs no one else wants or that we can be paid less than the native citizens.<p>On one hand I would want to dispute this, because at least where I work (and I hope other large EU offices of multi-national corporations would be similar), we hire non-eu colleagues all the time. I have already worked with people from Russia, Armenia and Ukraine in my office and from what we have talked, they haven&#x27;t been less compensated than the rest of us.<p>On the other hand, there was the experience of one of my Russian colleagues that couldn&#x27;t find a sub-let, because landlords were afraid to have him because of his nationality.<p>But speaking of the the situation you are describing sounds similar to one I have been 3y ago? Living with my gf and 3 other random people to share the rent, working for ~8000$ a year as a junior QE (actually half of that, part-time-ing, while trying to finish school). Morgage ~20 years sounds about right as well. Now that I am the &#x27;programmer with experience&#x27; I earn around 25k$&#x2F;y.<p>To return to the point of &quot;sending the elevator down&quot;, the assumption was that the assumed defaults of our industry that still more or less are &#x27;caucasian-look&#x27;, &#x27;male&#x27; make your life easier, and if you happen to flip any of them you make it harder. If you want to add &#x27;american&#x27; or &#x27;westerner&#x27; to the mix to account for your  brand of harder difficulty, that is fair.