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I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.
The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science
Agreed, as @Stellula suggests above there seems to be a semantic bait-and-switch going on. What's being sold is something like Operation Paperclip or the Rockefeller Foundation's Assistance to Refugee Scholars program that brought figures like Werner Von Braun, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Alexander Solzenhitzen to the US. What we're actually getting in practice, is a bunch of minimally competent third-worlders who are, to all appearances, contemptuous of Western norms/values, and more concerned with extracting value than producing it, and who's only observable contribution to the community is diluting the supply and thus lowering the wages of native-born code-monkeys, medical professionals, finance bros, Et Al.
I consider myself reasonably "Based and MAGA-Pilled" and I am totally onboard with the former, while being deeply opposed to the latter.
I'd sooner accept a 100 immigrants from Central America or Sub-Saharan Africa who sincerely love baseball, apple pie, and everything else American over a single immigrant like @BurdensomeCount as even "low human captital" is of greater value than negative human capital.
Sir, I demand satisfaction! Even if you think I am negative value to society (naturally I disagree) at the very least you must grant that the magnitude if not the sign of my contributions is leagues and bounds beyond that your average sub-Saharan African is capable of.
The average human being, even if they try their damnedest, is not capable of making a big impact on society either way, positive or negative (discounting of course banal crap like shooting the person they got minor beef with, but that doesn't count because even here they are merely channeling the destructive power of a far greater force than themselves); true perniciousness is firmly beyond their capabilities.
Even if you think I am a net negative (which is your prerogative) you must admit that the extent of my negativeness is extraordinary- that is, I am not like them in any way at all beyond the superficial.
EDIT: I must also add that the job I am working in at the moment is one that's completely borders agnostic. Functionally I'm already taking a job away from an American if you're the sort of person who thinks in those terms, except that right now the US is getting precisely $0 in taxes from me. Giving me a free green card (not that I'd accept it, US has very onerous tax policies on their worldwide income for permanent residents living anywhere in the world) and welcoming me to the US is basically free money for you with no downside.
Have you considered that people don't like having new neighbors who openly look down their noses at them?
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