You would think Sri Lanka has been decolonized, but the sad reality is you just can't decolonize a country without giving the majority of people human rights or financial safety. Maybe that's why Sri Lanka is yet to plug its brain drain. Especially the software engineers who have left the country in record numbers leaving a humiliating gap in talent in the middle.
It's as if software engineers graduate from our government campuses and the top tier private institutes, gain three or four years of experience and disappear to developed countries. Those who stay around either need to be lucky enough to find themselves in the right company working on the right project so that their salaries may be adjusted to compensate for what they perceive they lose out by looking at what their peers who migrated to developed countries have gained. Or they need to shamelessly pack up their accolades and wealth they earned through what passes as “distributive justice” in our country and migrate in their 40s. Then there are those who get opportunities like the US H1B employer sponsored visa and get to go work abroad and eventually settle down. This post is about this category of migrants.
Engineers who get employer sponsored visas are more often than not are older and come from lower class or lower middle class backgrounds and in most cases don't have another way of providing a better life for themselves and their families. Unlike skilled migration pathways a lot depends on the people of the local companies that they work for in getting them the visa. And as absurd as it may sound to the clueless, at times entire countries play a part in evaluating the worthiness and readiness of potential migrantants. Sadly this is all done through human rights violations, abuse and injustice. I was someone who was evaluated this way and though I am yet to receive an opportunity to migrate, or compensation for damages I am to this day abused and my human rights are violated.
The true purpose of such country wide evaluation of a potential employer sponsored migrant is outside the boundaries of this post. But the rationale that is sold to the public is, since such opportunities lead to great riches and comfort (by lower class and lower middle class Sri Lankan standards) they get to decide. And since the potential migrants will be released into the west, where the world works according to Christianity and western philosophy of which the closest they can get to understanding a Sri Lankan is through a philosophy like absurdism, which is not a day to day reality the average Sri Lanka software engineer can handle. So the country gets convinced the potential migrants needs to be tested under similar absurdist conditions to see if they can handle it, and some of the more vindictive purist lower class Buddhist (and upper class elitists, if you're really lucky like me) feel the migrants have suffered enough for their past sins and that they have have become better people. Finally there are also those who need some assurance from the potential migrants that they can hold over them in case they hit it big in the west.
I am of the opinion that the Sri Lankan society can be understood by taking Plato's republic as an analogy and that each class is in place because of palpable stresses like financial burdens and stresses that are not so easily seen by the eye “the requirement given supernatural sanctions”. These sanctions make sense to each class and a select few from each class and enforcers that operate across the classes uphold a part of this supernatural sanction. Most potential migrants become aware of this really (to varying degrees) only once they become the subject to these enforcers and the select few from each class.
I have been the subject of such country wide testing, scrutiny and human right abuse that has crossed the boundary from mental harm to physical harm (a decade and counting) I've seen demographic shifts in the assessors and the stereotype of the ideal migrant change.
I get provoked and tested on a daily basis, at work, at the supermarket and the train station on the payment and on the bus. Each instance of abuse justified with the claim of greater good to society and the promise of future opportunities for me (again, a decade and counting). When I walk on the road, people 15 years younger than me hear my narrative and try to speak over me as if I am not my own person. They comment about my day which they hear from assessors who are not qualified to assess work and work is not like a garment factory worker's work that can be quantified and assessed. When I go to the supermarket then young man at the cashier says “Thawa tikkak powala thamai muwa yawan onne” because I had a glass of wine after a few months because his classes' supernatural sanctions teach him those who drink are inferior. Over the past two years the elites have made the situation so uncomfortable for everyone involved except themselves that the lower class and the lower middle class who need to dance to their whims so that they can hold on to their illusion that I have started to hear people who're too many to be bought over openly question their sanity for dragging this for as long as it has.
Like in fable the Emperor’s New Clothes, I walk naked each day for the whole world to see, but unlike the popular idea about the emperor, I was not fooled, I pitied you and you were fooled over and over by my act of ignorance so that you may have dignity in your belief that is just a shadow on a cave wall to me.
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