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Here is my attempt to conclude the h1b debate given the takes in on have been just bad.
The H1B debate seems to have died down in the same way every other debate dies down: things remain the same. Trump does what a liberal from the 90s does, and MAGA people claim victory over lip service. Academic Agent wrote a very succinct write-up on this issue, and my take on this is mixed.
I would not have wanted migrants in the millions to a country I was a native of, period. White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions. They may be stable sometimes on the right but they will eventually break away. Sriram, the trump appointee who started all of this was a Kamala donor up until a month before the election and was not a good programmer by his own admission, certainly not an AI guy like Ian Goodfellow either. The h1b meltdown took Elon down too as he ended up losing arguments, banning anyone named Groyper and then publicly admitting defeat somewhat to calm people down, though things are unlikely to change by a lot. Elons issue was covered by eternal Pariah and sometimes really insightful Chuck Johnson so do check it out, he also detailed Srirams issues in this post.
Vivek Ramaswamy too burned some of his social capital like former MLM peddler Patrick Bet David by asking the youth to follow cram school routines like I did and compete with the rest of the world in terms of labor and uni admissions despite the very obvious issues of them cheating and having excessive ethnic prejudices to begin with. I have first hand experience with cram schools which funnily enough neither of them does and that explains why they glorify it and those who went through it cant forget the ordeal fast enough.
I would never want such large-scale movement of any people into my own nation but otoh I will not call most Indian migrants scheming scamsters or ethno-nationalists either. I might try to move to the west in 2025 and likely temporarily to see what Rome of today is like but I am a self-respecting person and a nation choosing its own people and demographics over hard to prove claims about the benefits of 20 billion Americans is a very sane outcome. There are plenty of good Indians, them leaving is explicit iq shredding and people back home gloating about how tech firms have Indian CEOs is a massive sign of insecurity.
Political change and human endevaors work on ingroups and outgroups, coalitions, the tech bro aligning with that gets its memes from identitarians was not going to last that long and the results will not be that different from 2016. People choosing to move to the west, starting a family there and if they are really good at what they do is a massive plus as long as the number does not exceed thousands as demographic changes are nearly impossible to overturn. Many posters here are honest hardworking white collar employees who work on visas and I would not want them to be called names anytime they log in. There are no good answers here, including Trump's which is handwaving, inaction, minor lip service and then letting things happen as they already are.
Biocapital is very real, society here runs not just on caste but also on class and there is a keen awareness amongst people of both. Indian biocapital is bottom of the barrel and clustering helps eek out better performance than what it could have otherwise but topsoil erosion won't last forever, I reckon most of it has already been used up. Indians move because they do not like most Indians, they do not wish to associate with them but being in a liberal democratic world reduces your identity down to the lowest common denominator. If I ever move out permanently, it would be because political power back home is not a possibility and I would rather live as a nerd in the big leagues than in the little leagues. The future here is incredibly bleak btw and I know many posters here who have similar backgrounds and moved out. I think they did the right thing.
I wanted to conclude this post with some reasonable course of action but that is highly unlikely. People here have a hard time believing that upper castes bottled India so badly that the nearly extinct remnants of their elite genepool is gone like their ability to gain any power yet they just sat down and took it, and now you have an ever-worsening system that chugs along without ever collapsing.
A collapse may never come, it did not for the past 2 thousand years, the US too would still "survive" even if Yglesias's harebrained schemes of one billion Americans came true though surviving like India or worse Pakistan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan is humiliating. My interest in politics began because of affirmative action here and how people would allow explicit laws like the SC ST act, once I saw the rest of the world I realised that things are far more universal than I thought they would be. Anyways i dont think there is a lot more to the debate, there are plenty of good people living here, under normal circumstances, I would in fact prefer if they did not move out but if I dont have an ingroup back home soon enough, I do think they should do what the Zoroastrians did when they came here, in both cases, people should kick out and sue the living shit out of Indian IT sweatshops and be far harsher migration wise but then again nothing ever happens.
I feel a sense of deep unease writing this, I do not want to offend friends I have made here and fuck my career over, I do not want them to be called names either. I am semi-anonymous here because this forum is the only place I can be honest and muting myself here like I do irl is bad, lying is even worse. Lying to yourself is how you get takes like Bryan Caplans on India.
Maybe this is the right choice. I don't think this issue is very important in the long run.
I needed some time to clarify this in my mind, but here's a few more words... the entire debate is a distraction. It's a time-tested, well-worn, same-as-it-ever-was, hand-waving, smoke in mirrors attempt to get conservatives to take their eye off the ball.
One of, if not the biggest, issues that got Trump elected was the mass migration of humanity across the Mexico border that ballooned under Biden. Millions are estimated to have crossed in the past few years hoovering up all kinds of services and national goodwill. Conservatives point at gangs taking over apartment complexes and many (poor) liberal voters point at cities that take their resources and give them to migrants. The problem -- broadly understood -- is an open border and a flood of people.
The solution -- broadly understood -- is closing the border and sending all the people back. The reality is this can't be done, at least not in a meaningful way and not much more than is already happening. It's safe to assume that half or more of these people are already in the wind. The people who will be sent back first are the ones we can get our hands on. It is precisely the same argument I'd give libs/progressives about the gun debate: you cannot stuff that particular genie back in the bottle, but if you were going to try you'd go after all the guns you knew about first.
So, who's up first? How about some of those 85K Visa holders! We know where they all are and we already know they follow the rules and will do what we tell them. You want to show bigly action on sending back migrants but most are dispersed -- or worse, dangerous? Send the easy ones back first! DUH. Get those numbers up! We didn't need them anyway! They were just doing the garbage programming work that no one really cares about. Boring entry level stuff like, updating warehousing services for Wallgreens, or front-end development for Door Dash, or using PuTTy to monitor Python scripts and shell services on data farms --the crap jobs we should be giving to the 820k STEM college grads. It's an easy win.
But Musk says, "hang on, we kinda need these guys, there's more of those jobs than you realize!" Now the in-fighting begins. Keep your eye on the ball: the Indian guys aren't the problem anyone actually wants fixed. The H1-B visa people are not stealing American jobs or warping American culture. They slot in precisely where we want immigrants to our immigrant nation to slot in -- legally, usefully and competitively. America consumes these people like Popeye eats Spinach. This isn't Britain or Germany. This is still the world's strongest economy and it's ravenous.
Are H1-B visas a real problem? Maybe. Are they the actual problem we're trying to fix? Nope. It's a trompe l'oeil. A token gesture. A ruse. A Hail-Mary on the first play. It's the brazen hope that we don't notice that the people-flood isn't actually receding and a million illegal immigrants aren't getting forcibly repatriated. It's not what people actually voted for. It's a distraction. And if I had to choose a side (which i don't) I'd side with Musk. We need these folks to do the (digital) shit work--same as always.
***Yes, I'm making a prediction: wholesale deportation won't happen. My prediction is that the growth rate of deported aliens will not exceed 20% of what it already is. According to Reuters and others, there were almost 3 million border interactions last year with around 270k deported. I predict that number will not exceed 350k for at least the first two years of Trump's presidency. I have 85% confidence in this prediction. I think we're already sending back as many as we can and the debate over H1-B's is an attempt to goose the numbers.
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