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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.
Well, if you paid attention what Trump was actually saying on the right you would get called a traitor / globalist / a fed / blackpiller / loser / brown / some combination thereof, so there wasn't a lot of critical examination going on.
Then there is the 4d chess plan truster thing - "of course he has to say that to get elected, but he's actually based you guys, once election is done all doubters will be deported / put into crystals". For some reason they never consider that 4d chess is for tricking them.
The real actual 4d chess happening right now is Musk doing a feint and pretending to retreat slightly from his positions. Give it a few months and when his position is a lot more secure and the Trump admin is chugging along he'll come out and strike the final blow out of nowhere against the nativists. The dude is one of the most skilled business operatives of our times, you think he can't play the (medium to) long game?
Im curious what do you think the political fallout would be if he did this and got domed in the head at range?
Well, it depends if whether the assailant was successful or not. If successful then there's massive blowback from pretty much everyone in the mainstream, the Dems probably find that they liked Musk after all (in death much is forgiven) and use him as a cudgel stick to beat the republicans with. Swing voters generally abhor violence so we get large Dem victories in upcoming elections and for the next few years which they use to push immigration even further (this time adding in the unskilled to the original plan for only skilled immigrants because Dems like unskilled immigration too). Republicans who wish to present a respectable face to society (most of them) disavow the ideologies of the shooter and lean into neoliberal policies (remember, Musk isn't the only big billionaire on the tech right, there are a few dozen other powerful people with similar views who'll step up if given the chance) even harder to capture more of the center which is slowly shifting away from them because the Dems keep making justified comparisons between the low brow right and the Brownshirts.
In the medium term (10+ years) the assassination of Musk turns out to only hurt their cause (not to mention massively hurt humanity too because at the moment Must is one of the few people really pushing us out further technologically). They end up emasculated and derided to the point no respectable person wants to be associated with them. Even people like MTG deny them completely and high immigration continues anyways because coming out against it marks you out as one of "them".
Now this might sound bad, but it's nothing compared to what happens if the nativist right tried to do this and failed to kill him. As they say: if you come at the king, you best not miss and now it's personal for Musk (I'd argue the current situation is already somehwat personal for Musk but this would be double extra 100% personal for him). Lets not forget that he's a highly highly skilled operative who's going to want to exact revenge, and his vengeance will be like that of a farmer against one of his flocks of sheep he has been wronged by: bloody, brutal and harshly efficient.
We probably start with the Republican party getting totally captured by the Elon wing after which they cut off the nativists entirely from polite society, cheered on by the left leaning 50% of the population (who think the Republicans aren't going far enough). This is followed by them getting declared as "Enemies of Humanity" (or something similar) and a regime something like the Chinese treatment of Ughyurs being imposed upon them, the goal of which is to completely eradicate their culture so that two generations down the line even their descendants hate what they stood for. Total memocide if you will. Think woke, but actually managed and implemented by competent people whose direct goal is punishment and reform rather than internal status games. The nativists will be left wishing they could go back to a world where everyone, regardless of their origins gets is treated equally.
And honestly, this is exactly the right and just thing to do if an attempt on Musk's life happens. Assassination attempts should not be free, you don't get to go back to the status quo if you fail, that just encourages people to try because worst case you're no worse off than at the moment. For a proper deterrent we need to have a system where if anyone attempts to kill another human for a cause the whole cause gets set back decades (like how Palestinian statehood has been set back by the Oct 7 Hamas attack).
You see I think you make several assumptions here that are wrong, we live in a post-Luigi world. The left and even normal dems would not be tut-tutted by their media to feel bad at Elon being got and would react with unrivaled glee at his death, there would be many memes. This would leave the economic zone wing of the republican party with the realization that they have no real allies anymore and the general public with the realization that you don't actually have to sit around while the billionaires run circles around you and run the country you can just shoot them. Once people realize the emperor really isn't wearing any pants? I have no idea after that.
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