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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter, which is a fairly surprising thing. I try to not post about India but this is kinda important and has to do with the US so here we go.

In the h1b debate, the point about country caps for skilled migration in the US recently picked up a lot of steam. Trump appointed Sriram as Senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence and his tweets about the removal of h1b caps caused a lot of chaos. David Sacks and the entirety of the tech platoon was defending Sriram, the removal of country caps and ultimately sacks tweeted that Sriram will not control the vias issues since his department is AI.. Many also pointed out Srirams tweet where he openly advocates for active IQ Shredding. Spandrell who coined the term IQ shredders as an example makes a case against such migration as in the end both nations lose bio capital, sriram for instance believes America to be an idea over a people and is fine with all smart Indians leaving en masse which will drop the average iq permanently here. They won't have kids in the US either and the US will have to keep incentivising more people to join to keep up the rate of tech innovation.

India has the highest wait times for h1b visas due to having had IT sweatshops and plenty of fraudsters hustle the legal immigration route. You see most H1Bs coming from three states of 29 here and IT sweatshops which make the backbone of the Indian IT sector indulging in absolute fraud to the point of regular fines spanning more than a decade, fun fact, the founder of Infosys is Former English Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks Father in law. It is a difficult thing, India itself has had anti-migration sentiments within the country as the largest IT hub Bangalore has people routinely asking for fewer migrants as they are not Kannadigas, the local ethnic group.

The political class, however, was unanimously criticising it. Blake Masters, another Theil Capital person turned politician, even asked for the total removal of H1Bs and only keeping O1 visas. All factions of the right did this, including Andrew Torba, Zionists like Laura Loomer, dissidents like BAP, Captive Dreamer and ofc Groypers.

Full disclosure, I am an Indian guy who is in tech, I am still in my home country and cannot comment on this topic without being called a self-hating Indian. India has fat tails and a lot of Indians are not politically scheming migrants, at least not the competent ones. I can't lie about this on an anonymous forum here since I don't like lying but inevitably I also cannot say this publicly as I don't want decent people to get cornered. I am an Indian dude who very likely may migrate after all. It is far easier to simply generalise groups, Tutsis or Yorubas are simply seen as Africans. The Amerikaner is correct but if you are an upper-caste male here, you will never sniff political power, anyone who is smart will be made to live as a nerd and might as well be a nerd doing cooler stuff in a better society than live here and be treated like garbage.

Trump is unlikely to curb the h1b but the most likely outcome will still be more Telugus and other south Indian states having a small number of sweatshops gaming the migration in the US even harder like Gujarati and Punjabis in Canada and rest of the anglosphere.

Like so many systems dreamt up by congress, the H1B mechanics were poorly designed from the start. A lottery? That's incredibly stupid. The DV lottery is one thing, kind of dystopian but one can see the 'logic' (in the progressive mindset) of allowing random people in poor countries to gamble on a kind of Ellis Island vision of making it in America.

But the H1B system requires certainty. A simple fix would just be to cut the total number by 60-80%, then turn it into a bid system. Each visa is auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would have two effects. Firstly it would provide companies with some certainty, because prices would be pretty stable, with some fluctuations depending on the strength of the economy/employment market. Secondly, it would immediately cut out Infosys/Tata/Cognizant etc because the "apply for literally every engineer we have in India, then send over the ones who win the lottery" tactic would no longer work and the new bidding price would be unaffordable for anyone who wasn't generating substantial economic value.

Another issue is the abuse of the O-1 system, which has risen from like 10,000 to 40,000 visas a year (inc dependants). There's no way there are that many exceptional people moving to the US each year. This is a visa designed for Hollywood stars and Harvard academics that is again being exploited by the tech sector.

There's no way there are that many exceptional people moving to the US each year.

Extraordinary, not just exceptional. Just having a PhD from a top UK university counts as exceptional under US immigration law (and probably should). Exceptional ability doesn't help much with the first visa (it makes you eligible for certain discretionary waivers), but when you are applying for one your green card comes out of a different quota pool which doesn't normally have a lag.

Extraordinary ability means meeting three out of eight criteria, one of which is "high salary" and some of the others of which are gameable. But the intent was "one of the top 100 or so people in your subfield in the world".

Interesting, I always thought the criteria for O-1 were much stricter. As things stand I'm probably eligible for the visa which is good to know...

You know, that would have made an unironic christmas gift for yourself to start on yesterday.

'This year, my gift to myself was starting my path to becoming a bloody Yank.'

Good point, although I'm quite happy here in the UK close to family working in one of the very few industries where the pay differential between the UK and the US isn't all that big. NYC is also a lot more expensive than London to live in from what I hear the people visiting us from the US say.