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I think there are two separate though somewhat linked questions in the whole debate over Vivek's recent extremely controversial post:
I think that the answer to #1 is a very complex one and largely boils down to what you value. Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors. A lot of one's answer to this question will depend on whether you want to maximize your at least short term market value and are willing to accept a sort of socialist nativism to try to maximize it, or whether you value other things more. There are also obvious questions of the possible dilution of culture by immigrants, fears of future race wars, and all sorts of complicated issues.
I would like to focus on #2. Is the Asian work model actually better than the US one? To me, the answer is pretty clearly no, and this is what offends me mainly about Vivek's post. The whole idea that Americans are too lazy and we should have a work ethic more like Asians.
I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.
But does it even bring objectively better economic results? To me the answer seems clearly to be no, it does not. Take Japan for example. It has had more than 70 uninterrupted years of peace and capitalism, yet despite its Asian work model, it has never managed to economically catch up with the US. Now to me it seems clear that Japan is in many ways a better place to live than the US is - it has much lower levels of violent crime, it seems to have a better solution to finding people housing, and so on. But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture. I see no fundamental reason why Japanese could not adopt a more Western type of work model while also retaining the low violent crime rates and the better housing situation.
Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome? Of course America has many advantages, like a historical head-start on liberal capitalism and great geography and winning wars and so on. But it's been 70 years now... the geography is what it is, but certainly modern Japan has not been plagued by a lack of capitalism or by wars or by authoritarianism. If they slave away working so hard, or pretending to work so hard, all the time, then why are they still significantly poorer than we are? To me this suggests that the Asian work model is not essentially superior to the Western one, and it would not only be personally damaging to me if we were to import it here in the US, but it would not even make up for that by yielding better economic outcomes.
The whole Indians debate is perfect example of why high skilled immigration is a bad idea.
The side pushing for more Indians is largely Indian with another prominent figure being Elon who is an immigrant himself. The America first crowd is noticeably more rooted in America. US politics is devolving into the farce that is democracy in Iraq. They don't really need elections as they could just use the census data to assign seats to the Kurdish party, Sunni parti, Shia party etc. The system isn't going to have any long term visions, any cohesion or any sense of national interests. It is going to be each little group squabbling to maximize short sighted self interest.
Agreed. We need another 40 year period of extremely low immigration in order for ethnogenesis and assimilation to occur.
But Elon did clarify the amount of immigration he thought was necessary to maintain US dominance and it's not high. He's talking about 15,000 people per year. Current immigration is at least 100x greater than that.
We need some common sense reforms that make it easy for true geniuses to move here without allowing legions of low-skill H1Bs.
If Elon only wants 15,000 of the best of the best, then the current EB1 and O1 visa processes should be sufficient. EB1 is a green card "for highly skilled foreign workers who have extraordinary ability, are outstanding professors or researchers, or are multinational executives or managers" with a quota of 40k per year, and O1 is a three-year, extensible-until-end-of-contract nonimmigrant visa for "people with extraordinary skills" which admits about 20k per year (22,430 and 23,680 people admitted in 2014 and 2015).
So it sounds like Elon is lying, and wants more than 15,000 individuals. I presume his incentives would be in the direction of having more employer-dependent skilled labor visas like the H1B, but having a higher quota and making them more predictable (remove the lottery, approve faster). This puts him at odds with MAGA.
EB-1 and O-1 are heavily slanted towards academics. The criteria are not good for working software people, probably not for working engineers either.
Thanks. The only person I know with an EB1 works at Apple, so I assumed its usage was roughly equivalent to H1B.
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