I grew up in an industrial city in the USA in what is called the “Rust Belt”, and had a coal mine less than a kilometer away from my elementary school. In the early 1980s the US steel industry collapsed, and over half of the population of my area was put out of work. Now the population of the city is less than half of what it was in those days, because most working class people wanted to work, so they changed where they lived and what they did. I was one of them. In the USA having a particular accent is not such a big deal, but I’m sure most of them would have changed that if they had to in order to secure employment elsewhere. The ones that stayed behind thinking that steel would come back did in fact go on the dole, and most of them drank or drugged themselves to death.

I might have been a little strident in my post and I apologize for that, but if you want to change your circumstances, you’re going to have to change too. Anyone who can learn to perform surgery or write a complicated legal brief can certainly learn to affect a different manner of speech and a different set of social skills. It might be wrong for the majority of people in a given field to expect that out of newcomers, but the reality is that they do since it is a human sort of thing. You can’t show up to play cricket with a baseball bat and glove. Maybe the education system should be consciously teaching students how to fit in, but then you run into this identity politics nonsense. If you want what other people have, or to do what they are doing, you have to change to become more like them. Not being willing to do that is an excuse.