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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.
I don't have a lot to add but Bryan Caplan's take is just so irresponsible:
Like, what if you're wrong Bryan? Where does he go from there: "Well, shucks, I guess we ended up with two Indias after all. My bad."
To me that's the problem with immigration. It's permanent. Even Communism, as destructive as it is, can be tried and discarded. But immigration permanently alters a country.
We don't have many historical parallels to the sort of mass immigration that has happened in recent years. Prior to recent times, most large scale immigration was on the heels of an invading army and usually involved genociding the old population. America might be a country of immigrants, but tell that to the Pequots.
Caplan is Jewish. If he's wrong, he can just fuck off to Israel. Must be nice to have a backup country...
Israel exists because the US pays for its existence, if support from the US wanes sooner or later Israel will be overwhelmed by its hostile neighbors.
Israel would be fine if the U.S. withdrew its support tomorrow.
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Israel was able to fund its existence for decades before the US started "paying for it", and so long as the counrty has nukes I don't think they're ever getting overwhelmed. Who among their neighbors would even be capable of that? Lebanon?
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You've been told not to post low-effort sneers like this before. I tell you the same thing I tell all the Joo-posters; you're allowed to hate Jews, and you're allowed to write about why you think we should consider Jews invidious parasites, but you have to put effort into it (and also pretend you believe the Jews you are talking to are human beings who are entitled to participate here too, even if you don't), not just drop snarls about how anyone can be dismissed because he happens to be Jewish.
You have a very bad history. You are in that category of poster whose posts are 90% "Goddamn I hate Jews and women." You earned a couple of AAQCs over a year ago but since then have a long string of warnings and temp-bans (and tons of posts that are borderline but we usually let pass).
Improve the quality of your posts and tamp down your spite or you're going to be banned again.
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Rich, intelligent people with powerful passports always have a backup country, whether they are Jewish or not.
Caplan is pretty open about wanting to cultivate his own little bubble and not caring about the rest of the country he's in.
Unlike most American elites, I don’t feel the least bit bad about living in a Bubble. I share none of their egalitarian or nationalist scruples. Indeed, I’ve wanted to live in a Bubble for as long as I can remember. Since childhood, I’ve struggled to psychologically and socially wall myself off from “my” society.
I feel like the passage you quoted should be near enough to convince anyone not to take this guy's open-borders ideas seriously.
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Is there any actual evidence that he specifically has dual loyalties?
He's a citizen of nowhere. I'm sure he'd be just as open to migrating to Israel as he would to Singapore, Switzerland or any of the many tax havens around the world.
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It doesn't matter, Israel will take in any Jew: American, Russian, Ukrainian, patriot of his old country or not.
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