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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 other reaction I had to this post was somewhat surprise to hear that the pro-immigration side "won". I don't really follow twitter/X stuff at all. I instead hear about politics through second hand sources, the main one is themotte. But the secondary one is via comedy podcasts.
Tim Dillon is one of my favorites. I feel like he has a good understanding of what I'd call the dirt bag political pulse. The kind of people that barely pay attention, and if they were to pay attention it would not add anything positive.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3_LVaHqP96k?si=i4nFHV-slWKMUOXV
His latest episode covers this topic. And he unashamedly bashes Elon and Vivek. Especially Vivek. And the overall impression I got was that this is one of those embarrassing and wonky positions that people high up in the Republican side will take. But that it is a distinctly uncool position to take.
It might be an uncool position with the base, but does that matter if the overwhelming majority of important politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties, plus the overwhelming majority of rich Americans, support the Elon/Vivek position? MAGA nativists can complain online but does it amount to anything more than one of those Middle Ages peasant uprisings that got quickly dispersed once the elites sent a few mounted knights in their direction? What are the MAGA rank and file going to do? Vote Democrat? Buy ten more guns that they will never use for any political purpose? I mean, they can sit out the next few elections and cause a bunch of Republicans to lose elections, but that would just mean the victory of a bunch of Democrats who are also in favor of the pro-immigration side.
If the MAGA base tanks their support of Trump then a significant number of Republican politicians will follow suit. I do not see MTG, Boebert, etc. going against the base, considering they will get primaried if they do. This results in two possibilities. The first is that it becomes impossible for Trump to do anything and he ends up in the same position Bush was after 2005 where he's still the president but has no influence and no one pays attention to him. The second possibility is that the Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans support the Elon/Vivek position. Trump can get things done, but not without making concessions to the Democrats, which may or may not be worth it. Either way, I don't think Trump wants to end his time in office being pilloried by his own base as a fraud and sellout.
MTG has already come out in support of Elon/Vivek, as has Alex Jones (not making this up). The real threat to on the fence republicans is not the base primarying you if you don't agree with them, it's with Elon and his fat stacks of cash primarying you if you don't agree with him (God Musk is amazing!).
Interesting. What's even more interesting is that her support stems from owning a construction company and understanding how hard it is to find employees, which suggests that she'd be willing to extend immigration beyond the H-1B level to find employees. If there's actually this much consensus on the issue then I'm optimistic we can reach some kind of deal where we make it easy enough for people with job prospects to get work permits, expand the numbers for those, crack down hard on illegal immigration, close the asylum loophole, and declare the whole problem solved so we can move on to other things. Democrats get increased immigration, Republicans get crackdowns and mass deportation. Everyone wins. Except people that don't like immigrants altogether, but Trump can always point to the "great big door" he talked about during his first campaign.
Yep, that's probably the best solution we can get on the issue: Much easier to legally come to the US (ideally as difficult as immigrating to Australia or NZ or the UK) if you have a specialized skill there is a shortage of and can get an employer to sponsor you while anyone who tries cutting in line and jumping the border gets summarily booted out.
A country the size of the US can easily handle an average yearly load of 500k skilled immigrants (over all visa types) + their dependents.
This turns gobs of power over to whoever gets to decide that there is a "shortage" of something. Moreover, it avoids asking important questions like, "Why is there a shortage? What are the barriers that are preventing the market from clearing? Can we get rid of them?" Of course, the answer to those questions depends on things like whether you use the domestic supply curve only or the world supply curve (which will have different equilibrium prices/quantities)... and again, it is almost certain that the real power will be who gets to decide to implicitly use one or the other for deciding whether there is a "shortage" in any particular industry. Obviously, folks like Elon want to use the world supply curve for determining that there's a "shortage" of tech workers, while the unions will want to use the domestic supply curve to claim that there is no "shortage" in their industry.
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