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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.
The longer version of Bryan Caplan's take still seems reasonable to me:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-india
There are serious problems with Indian governance. And the Soviet style experiment that you think can easily be shaken off is still influencing them to have awful agricultural policies.
The difference between the worst poverty in the world and one of the richest countries in the world is not biocapital it's government policy. It's most clearly visible in Korea, where the DMZ separates two governments, not two people. And the difference between them is as stark as things get.
The governance is a result of the people though. Policy no doubt makes a difference but we have to realise that some things just can't work. You can't for instance have stable families and high tfrs post sexual revolution if you're a liberal secular democracy.
With India, envy, revenge and clan loyalty will never go away.
The biodeterministic hypothesis effectively asks us to believe that there is some magical property of the 35th parallel that causes Koreans born above it to be genetically predisposed towards Communism and Koreans born below it to be genetically predisposed towards Capitalism. Ditto the border between the former East and West Germany.
Do you believe in magic?
It absolutely does not, that's an absurd strawman.
Nobody is literally 100% biodeterminist (in the sense that your genetics determines things like what language you speak). Biodeterminists believe that genetics matters a lot, not that it is literally the only thing that matters.
It's not an "absurd strawman" it's the logical consequence of the claim being made by multiple users in this thread (including the one i was responding to) that "bioleninism" will always trump policy and culture.
My point is that unless these people are prepared to argue that the observed disparities in quality of life between North and South Korea, East and West Germany, Red States and Blue States, etc... are all biological in origin I am going to argue that thier hypothesis has been falsified via experimentation, and that the best thing the "policy and culture don't matter" crowd could do for thier cause is to stop attracting attention.
No one is arguing that the differences between capitalist and communist countries are biological in origin. That the gaps in wealth between North and South Korea or East and West Germany are explained by economic policies alone is self-evident. That does not mean that biological and cultural differences don't exist or matter.
Looking at communist countries alone we can see the difference between those with high human capital (East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea), which are able to maintain an orderly society with advanced weapons manufacturing and scientific research and pose a credible military threat to their neighbors, and those with lower human capital (Angola, Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia), which are a threat to no one but their own miserable inhabitants.
They are though, or rather they are arguing that people become capitalist or communist due to biology. Which then begs the question, what is it about the 35th parallel or the border between East and West Germany that causes genes to express themselves one way on one side and a different way on the other?
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