<p>Ken is right - we turned down a project in Texas this past month (even though my husband is registered there), because it involved designing a complicated slab on expansive clays. We don’t have to deal with that type of soil in Maine, and we didn’t feel that we knew enough to do a good job on it.</p>
<p>I’ll let you know if I see any immigrant engineers doing work in Maine. Hasn’t happened yet.</p>
<p>Civil engineering is an ever green field and will never die.</p>
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<p>You don’t count (being from Texas)?</p>
<p>I think it’s different being from another part of the country and being from a different part of the world. From what I’ve seen living in NYC, immigrant groups tend to stick together; entire neighborhoods are formed around a common culture. I know certain neighborhoods are dominated by Chinese immigrants, another by Russian immigrants, Polish people, Greeks, etc. It’s no accident that this happened. We’re not a “melting pot” as some people say we are, but rather we’re more like a tossed salad.</p>
<p>Tying this back to the topic at hand, I don’t see immigrants wanting to move to a part of the country that has few people of the same culture. Unless there’s an ethnic enclave in Maine that I don’t know about, why would they want to go there? There’s no incentive.</p>
<p>From personal experience, I can tell you that immigrants stick together usually until better job prospects call. It’s just much more helpful when you can trust your fellow immigrants to look out for you until you know how things work. But there’s a point at which it’s no longer a good idea to stay in a jobless expensive New York/California when better prospects are elsewhere in the country. That’s when people start to disperse.</p>
<p>There’s actually quite a large Somali population in Maine now. The mayor of Lewiston sparked quite a protest a few years back when he asked the Somalis to tell their relatives to stop coming to the area, because they were using too many public assistance resources! There are also quite a few Somalis in Portland. The Munjoy Hill area used to be one of the largest low-income white neighborhoods in the country, but now it’s dominated by immigrants from other countries. I know only a couple of engineers in Maine from other countries (Poland and the former USSR), though, and they have been here a long time (as have I, for almost 26 years now).</p>
<p>If “experts” could reliably predict economic trends, they’d all be billionaires.</p>
<p>It’s cyclical, it’s regional, it’s unpredictable. </p>
<p>It’s not safe to say when civil engineering jobs will pick up, but it is safe to say that they probably will. Heck, all of the students avoiding it in the past few years might result in a major shortage of civil engineers when the economy finally starts to gain some momentum.</p>