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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.
I'm careful to say this since so many have said this before and been wrong that it's become a meme at this point, but this may be an indication of the breaking point between Trump and the traditional MAGA base. From his emergence in 2015 to roughly 2022, this was pretty much all he had. There were some moderates who voted for him in 2016 but turned away from him rather quickly. There were also traditional Republicans who opposed him up to the point that his nomination became inevitable and then backed him out of necessity, but in this case it was clear who was driving the car. Every once in a while he'd allow himself to be talked into doing something that was unpopular with his base but he had no qualms about throwing the responsible party under the bus when this became apparent (hence all the high-profile firings).
This seems different. Elon, Vivek, JD Vance, RFK, Joe Rogan, and the like aren't the MAGA base, and they don't represent the MAGA base. The pro Trump posters on The Motte don't represent the MAGA base. The left spent years trying to tar Trump as a racist, and while those smears weren't exactly fair, they tapped into an underlying truth that those charged with defending Trump couldn't admit: The MAGA base isn't exactly the most enlightened on racial issues. What I mean by this is that they don't bother trying to hide their opinions on things beyond the most basic kind of justifications. Here's a quote from the Pittsburgh NPR affiliate about a local community with a large Hatian population:
These people don't interact with Indians here on H-B1 visas for software companies; they interact with Indians who own convenience stores. they could care less about sophisticated arguments surrounding immigration because "they shouldn't be here". The only thing they offer as an argument besides dislike of foreigners is that they take American jobs. When someone like Vivek says that these H-1Bs are necessary because of "American mediocrity", the true MAGA folks don't nod in agreement. They blame Democrats; it's the liberal world where schools only teach Critical Race Theory and pronouns rather than The Three Rs, where coaches hand out participation trophies, where people don't smack their kids anymore. The solution to this problem isn't importing Asians or Asian culture but returning to traditional American culture. So if you're a Vivek Ramaswany or an Elon Musk and you can't find any Americans you want to employ then that's just too fucking bad. These jobs should be going to Americans, period.
I don't know much about Laura Loomer, but her criticisms are spot-on. The MAGA base didn't vote for Trump so they could hear horseshit excuses about how actually we really need to import people from India and give them high paying jobs. These are people who buy $70,000 trucks that get 15 mpg and then complain about the price of gas. They don't want to hear about how a multi-billionaire like Elon needs their tax dollars to subsidize his line of electric cars because he'll save us all from the global warming non-problem. The base, who has been there from the beginning, is right to question why a guy who seems hell bent on draining the swamp and dismantling the deep state is being unduly influenced by people who supported the opposition until recently.
There are two reasons I give this a better chance of causing a real split than previous controversies. First, immigration is a core issue. Trump has in the past taken positions contrary to the traditional conservative base on a number of issues, but he had the cover of not having taken positions on them. And he was able to split the baby on abortion. Here, he's made an unequivocal statement that runs contrary to his supporters' expectations on a core campaign issue. The second reason is that he's taking Elon Musk's side over that of his base. Elon gave Trump's PAC a lot of money and now expects, and is getting, influence in return. The fact that a non-American billionaire who supported Biden and Clinton can get that kind of influence just from writing a check, and use the influence to get Trump to waver on immigration, can't possibly sit well. And then there's the fact that Trump clearly came down on the side of Musk when he could have just stayed out of the whole thing. I could be wrong. This whole thing could blow over (H-1B visas are unlikely to become a major policy point), Trump could have an unrelated falling out with Musk, etc. But this seems to give greater odds of Trump's MAGA downfall than anything we've seen thus far.
It’s not just Trump’s core base that’s unhappy about mass immigration. No one likes suddenly having ten times more competition to get a job. The only reason most liberals were ok with immigration was that the people coming in weren’t the type that were going to compete with college educated urbanites. That’s why there’s so much vitriol about Indians: it isn’t really anything about Indians in particular. It’s just that this is the first major demographic of immigrants that can compete for white collar jobs. Judging from the discourse on this site, Silicon Valley people aren’t any happier about it than factory workers in the Midwest were. Sure they may keep quiet about it in public, but privately they are pretty upset.
There’s all kinds of people in America who are not otherwise very racist, but who will just straightforwardly say they don’t like Indians. I think it being Indians has something to do with it.
I agree, and the only way I am able to really explain it is that there is the strain of, what is in America, very low class behavior, by ostensibly white collar PMCs. The first is trash. Littering is something low class people do in America. Whether it is a black or Mexican neighborhood in the inner city just throwing backs and bottles on the ground when there is a perfectly good trash can on the corner, or a guy with 5 broken lawnmowers in his front yard out in the sticks. Thats low class. But well paid Indians tend to do something similar, but different. I've noticed it in neighborhoods, but also workplaces. It does feel more uniquely foreign to have 3 Indians in an office than 3 Koreans. This is also mirrored in the business world, my dad was very active with small businesses, he would deal with a lot of ethnicities as a result. For whatever reason, Indians and Arabs have the worst reputation as attempting to cheat on a deal.
I think i know what you mean, while no means universal there is definitely an attitude particular to upper sec indians where they seem to think that they are somehow "above" common courtesy or having to clean up after themselves. There seems to be this attitude that using "pleases and thank-yous" when speaking to serving staff lowers ones own status through the implication of equality. Ditto picking up your own trash instead of having a servant do it for you.
Of course the result is that when Brahmins find themselves in a more courtesy oriented environment such as Japan, Korea, or portions of the US, behavior like being rude to servers and leaving a mess for others to clean up immediately codes as "low class" and no amount of appeals to your Brahman ancestry is going to change that. If anything the Shudras and Dalits come across as more desireable neighbors because unlike the thier "high caste" bretheren they are at least polite.
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