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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.
That's how I (and I think a lot of Trump voters) feel about it. For a long time now the standard line has been that immigration is good, as long as it's legal and limited to people with some credentials. Which basically means either middle class white-collar migrants, or students aiming to enter that class. We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do. But instead there's millions of them here competing for scarse positions in the upper-middle class.
I guess from the point of view of Musk and other billionaires, the middle class is so far below them that he feels no threat there. For me in the middle class, I don't see much threat from the lower class, but I can see how a low-wage worker in the border states might feel more of a threat. I'd like to live in a society more like Dubai or Singapore, where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class.
I think i speak for a lot of the American right when i say "fuck no".
The left claims without evidence that immigration is neccesary because immigrants do the jobs Americans don't want to do. The Right responds that necessity has nothing to do with it and that the truth is that they're doing the jobs that the left is unwilling to pay an American to do because the left are a bunch of moral degenerates who value cheap access to avocado toast over the health of thier community, and would rather have a serf than an employee.
It is the attitude of people like you that has made this an issue of contention in the first place because like it or not, proles vote.
But those are functionally the same thing. Pay us enough money and sure, you can get an American to work in a chicken processing plant or wherever. But you'll also have to massively jack up prices. It doesn't raise overall prosperity, it just raises inflation. People have this fantasy that the entire country can all be rich and prosperous, but it's never been like that, there's always an underclass doing unpleasant work for shit wages, it's just a question of who is going to be that underclass.
As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.
At one point, all of these jobs were done, and ones requiring a wage - as opposed to the family just doing it - paid living wages. The idea that it's mathematically impossible for chickens to be slaughtered at a living wage without immiserating the rest of the US flies in the face of all of recorded history.
Once again, I am begging the citizens of the Motte to stop with this "reasoning from first principals" nonsense; it doesn't work, it has never worked, and it is incredibly unlikely it can ever work.
And there were many more poor people in America circa 1960 than there are today! There were also far fewer labor-intensive services on offer- you mowed your own damn lawn.
You cannot run a society without Dalits. Middle class people don’t want to be janitors and meatpackers and peach pickers(I don’t either). When we stopped oppressing the blacks we needed some replacement.
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You say i should stop "reasoning from first principles", but that's what you're doing. The 1960s weren't some golden age of American prosperity. The average wage was far, far lower back then than it is today. The average person lived in a small, low quality house shared with a large family or many roommates. The average job was shit. They also had a huge underclass of both black Americans and refugees from 3rd world countries, in much worse poverty than we have today.
Please, show me your ideal society so that we can stop using reasoning.
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I have bad news to you about how most cotton was picked in the past. Even after 1865.
Immiseration is relative and it's well documented that relative deprivation is perceived far more sharply than the equivalent increase.
US poultry consumption was fueled by low prices -- taking that away now, even partially, is a dead idea.
I do agree that an objective sense, the state of Americans in the 60s eating far less meat was not immiseration. But that's not the same as saying that going back to that place now would not be perceived as such.
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Back in those days Americans were being paid well under what they're currently getting in real terms. If there are Americans willing to work for similar real wages as to what they were getting back then then yes, they can build homes, mow lawns, raise children etc. The problem is that they're aren't willing to to this for the much higher wages they are currently being offered, so what makes you think they'll happily accept the much lower wages (yes we are more technologically advanced today which means we can offer them higher real wages than those days without much loss, but we're not that much more advanced that we can just give them however much money they are asking for)?
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This is true, but you are overlooking the fact that the average American in the past was very poor compared to Americans now. Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then, but the standard of living was much lower. How many Americans would really be willing to pick fruit or lay roof for contemporary fruit-picker or roofing wages today if we just magically departed all the illegal immigrants? You might like to go back to the demographics of the 1950s, but you can't magically unroll immigration but not all the economic and technological changes since then as well.
Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.
From Oren Cass' "Jobs Americans Would Do" https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/
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(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)
No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.
These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.
So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.
To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.
For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).
But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.
The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.
All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.
If you live in a relatively new house which has been hooked up to cable/fiber it's $70-90 now for gigabit. And Starlink is $120/m, which gives you less than a gig but you can have it practically anywhere.
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I'm skeptical that you're getting a "normal" view of society from reading novels. Basically, anyone who can write a novel is above-average intelligence and motivation. Even more so if it's a famous novel like "On the road."
As a teenager, I worked a few shitty minimum-wage jobs. One I particularly remember was being a dishwasher at a fancy restaurant. It was basically like you described- I showed up, the manager told me bluntly that it was minimum wage, I told him I had no experience but I was friends with another kid who worked there, we shook hands and I started the next day.
It sucked. It wasn't "a step on the jobs ladder." It didn't teach me any useful skills. It mostly just sucked up all my time and energy and made me too tired to concentrate on my schoolwork. It also injured my body with scalding hot water full of sharp metal objects, which I had to work in like a maniac to keep up with the pace of dishes. The only way to get a break was to go smoke, so basically everyone in the kitchen was a hardcore smoker. Also, almost everyone there had a prison record. Most of them were not young people on the path to a better job- they were pretty much stuck in shit jobs for their entire life.
So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that, and be on my merry way to my "real career" as a novelist or whatever. A lot of jobs just suck, that's why we pay someone else to do them for us because we don't want to do them. Most of the people who do those jobs get stuck their for their entire life (or in a similarly shitty job). That's why we call it a "dead-end job."
But, like, you did.
But your very own account, you had this job as a teenaged, hated it (but made some money) and then worked hard at your studies to go build a different career. Not hopping-in-and-out of it would imply you either a) never got the job in the first place or b) are still working there (or a similar job).
You're proving my point here. Shitty jobs are shitty. People shouldn't have them for very long. But they're hand to have if you're close to destitute and need quick, honest cash (or if you're, I don't know, a student who would like some small income).
Please re-read my original post. I'm not advocating for shitty jobs as actually not shitty. I'm not saying people should be thankful for their shitty jobs and stay in the forever. I'm saying that shitty jobs should have low friction of entry and exit and that, because they do not, this contributes a level of extra competition at the lower end of employment that is wrong and unfair, especially for legally complaint native born Americans.
I think that there's some misinterpretation of what my point is and I'm not totally convinced it's innocent misinterpretation. I agree with "people shouldn't have to work shitty jobs" as much as I agree with "we shouldn't have wars" -- A nice thought, but unrealistic. Worse yet, I find that people who are super-duper anti-shitty job tend to be in favor of very generous Government cash transfer programs. This is a negative-sum game; the taxpayer base gets a raw deal, and the welfare recipients become strange pseudo-indentured wards of the state.
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One of the important lessons of price floors/caps is that they cause competition on other margins. Think back to when there were price caps on gasoline. It caused shortages in terms of price, and produced competition on other margins - specifically, it caused people to have to compete or "pay" in terms of time spent sitting in line. Alternatively, you could curry favor with a supplier (say, your dad's brother runs a gas station; he might be willing to let you skip the line; presumably you're "paying" with good will).
Similarly, a price floor on low-skill labor (minimum wage) results in shortages in terms of price (unemployment) and competition on other margins. If you're not willing to work under shittier conditions, for example, you're easily replaceable by someone else who is, and since you're going to cost the same either way (in terms of monetary price), who do you think is going to "win" the job? It's very similar to rent control as a price ceiling. Tenants can't compete on price, so they implicitly compete on who is willing to endure the housing conditions getting worse and worse (lack of maintenance, etc.). If the "price" of shittier conditions gets too high for you, someone else who is willing to pay the higher "price" of shittier conditions, but is mandated to pay the same monetary price, will win the competition.
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The job you described is basically a frivolity, a way for the rich to waste time, a way to skimp on a dishwasher, no one needs to do it. The people who work those jobs are obsolete. Their jobs suck because there’s not enough demand for their supply, so they need to accept bad work conditions for low pay. Improve their conditions and offer better pay and it’s not a dead end job any more, but to do that there’d need to be greater demand, tautologically proving these people and their work aren’t very important.
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I think you're the first person I've seen in the wild who seems to agree with me thay not all jobs need to pay a "living wage", and that that's okay! That some jobs should be just for the high school kid after school or during the summer, or someone who isnt trying to support a family on it ling term. I don't know how you deal with people getting stuck in a rut and eventually not being ready for retirement, though... I'm sure many will say that it isn't their problem to make sure others don't make poor life choices, but that doesn't help convince the general population when the news is publishing sob stories.
I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who:
Rounds to zero.
Let's say you get the "burger flipping" job because you're not really doing anything else. You're living at home (or with a bunch of other underemployed roommates). Sure, maybe you get some cheap beer every weekend - fine, whatever. If you retain that job for two years, you're going to be promoted to some sort of assistant manager position by inertia and availability alone. The cycle repeats.
Or, you get the burger flipping job, decide that, yes, it does suck, and figure out a new job a little further up on the skill/wage level. You like this and do it again. The cycle repeats.
My more controversial take is that this should be the path for pretty much everyone.
College has become a pay-to-play social proof mechanism for bullshit jobs that mostly fuels middle class over-capture of resources - especially housing. There are some hacks around this (military service, community college pathways) but it, most of the time, boils down to a family being able to pay between $100,000 - $500,000 to jumpstart their kid into the professional class. Oh, by the way, for something like 50% of graduates, this has not worked and has been a fraud for 20+ years. Please ignore that.
At the bookstore job I alluded to in my original post, I got unofficially promoted to assistant manager by my second month mostly because I would follow the store close down procedures correctly each night. This was as a 17 year old. Several of the other 20-somethings working there would routinely forget to lock doors, secure the cash box, or do basic cleaning and organizing. It doesn't take much to be an above average performer and, with just a dash of talent, you can accelerate quickly. I've seen too many graduates of "prestigious" universities who can't metaphorically close down the bookstore making $100,000+ per year because they have the fancy sheepskin on their wall.
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Given the latest election under moderate inflation, I suspect that you wouldn't do that if you wanted yourself or your party to remain electable.
FWIW, I think it would be worse than just price increases. Many entire classes of services and establishments would no longer be viable. It's not just that Chick-fil-a would charge $10 for a sandwich, I think they would cease to exist.
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This seems super important.
Even worse, it opens up the possibility of large-scale working-class organised labour movements engaged in industrial action, as with the UK General Strike. But still worth a shot, I think.
Perhaps, but ... those houses were smaller, shoddier and had few modern conveniences (or safety features), and every man had to be a handyman to keep the walls and roofs up. Would you want to live in a 1940s (with no modern upgrades) house? Would you want to have a lot of children whom you will struggle to keep fed and clothed and educated? My point is that people point at how folks lived back then ("Large families, everyone had their own house!") but little notion of just how much harder and poorer their lives were compared to ours. Maybe that is a tradeoff a lot of trads would be willing to make, but I think the majority of people would not, and you should at least be honest that deporting all the immigrants doesn't mean suddenly lower class people will get to live like middle class people and middle class people will all be richer and more numerous.
In Britain this is basically standard, for reasons which have been discussed elsewhere. New builds are rare and the extent to which modern upgrades (dishwasher, tumble dryer, central heating, double glazing) are available varies wildly.
What you have to remember that where mod cons were unavailable they were compensated for by other things. My granny didn't get air conditioning until a couple of years before she died because she had a permanently-fuelled coal-fired oven, and she spent the whole winter in the kitchen next to it. Add thick walls, blankets and jumpers and you're sorted. The only mod cons I have trouble doing without are hot water and washing machines.
I read Scott's article on Cost Disease once and I've never forgotten it. I think that lots of people would be happy with 1940s housing and education at 1940s prices (adjusted for inflation). Medical care not so much. Food is complicated, because the form, quantity, quality and satisfaction associated with it has changed in so many ways that it's not easy to pin the changes as wholly positive or wholly negative.
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In practice, those fifties houses don’t seem to exist at fifties price points in places people actually want to live in- clearly, people today are willing to live in them.
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