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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 complete cope with no evidence. I can partially agree that it's not the Twitter anons that got Trump elected, though you're overselling it, but there's a reason why every other candidate got slaughtered in the primaries.
I don't remember them giving a lot of weight to the "but they're here legally!" argument when it was applied to Haitians.
A wet paper bag could have beaten Biden/Harris. Biden has obvious dementia, but even beyond that, there was the economic crises (inflation AND recession), billions for Ukraine, the complete botching of hurricane relief (there are still people living in tents), and the border. There’s no positives to vote for.
Trump is winning because he at least wants to upend the system. Whether another person could win that handily, I don’t know, it’s possible. But only the ones who promise to fix the broken system so Americans have a functioning government again.
Yes, everything is obviously inevitable now that it happened. Just go back to the pre-election predictions on this forum, even Trump supporters where pessimistic. I was maintaining "it's a toss-up" and I was in the minority, I remember precisely one guy telling everyone that they're nuts for being this blackpilled.
https://www.levernews.com/how-democrats-learned-to-love-losing/
I think honestly the secret sauce of MAGA and Trump is breaking the consensus of hyper normalization. Hyper normalization is the thought that basically, it’s broken, it sucks, and nobody can actually fix it. They don’t even try, and until Trump, nobody bothered to pretend to try. And especially on the democratic side, there’s just no thought process of “just doing something” to fix whatever the problem is. There’s no “buck stops here” in government in which the person or group promises to make actual concrete changes that will actually fix the problem. And because Trump is the guy at least claiming to try to fix things, he’s the guy who can actually win and people like him can actually win. Biden Harris were absolutely the opposite. They can pass acts that everyone knew wouldn’t fix inflation, they can appoint czars to head up not fixing whatever crisis they’re appointed to pretend to care about. But they lack the sort of extreme ownership, the will to actually take the levers of power and do something with them, the will to make decisions that the6 intend to stick with.
I think given how into hyper normalization the DNC is, just about any not-democrat could have won. The DNC is the party of “whelp, we tried absolutely nothing, and it didn’t work. Nothing else we can do, sorry, it’s just going to suck now.” Anyone promising “I can absolutely fix immigration, and here’s how we do it,” has the edge. Anyone who says “we can fix the government and make it work again,” who isn’t desperate to hear that kind of thing? Whether Trump can actually fix all of these problems is an open question. But I think the hope he’s giving that we can take the powers of the government to actually make life better — that we don’t have to accept that everything will be getting worse and we should sit and drink wine and watch America slowly rot away from the inside. Even if you don’t like him, the thought of someone trying to actually fix things is hope.
Politics runs on hope. When you have no hope to offer, no credible policy proposal that can serve as a vessel for the public's aspirations for a better life, policy starvation sets in and the public transfers their support to the most credible available proposal. Since people are lazy, the most credible available proposal will be at least somewhat more radical than the recently-discredited proposals. Repeat until the problem is solved or radicalization triggers a crisis that eclipses all previous priorities.
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