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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   20955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Caps on high skill immigrant workers might be worth the tradeoffs, but I think we as a society should acknowledge they are serious tradeoffs.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through. Of course just like the apps there's often some amount of pickings but they're limited and get scooped up quick of course and we're still overall limited to Y production. Even during periods of layoffs, companies don't tend to fire their best talent, they fire the weaker ones so even picking through those is still trying to find a diamond in the rough.

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.

But that's a discussion with some hard tradeoffs is it not?

The other part is that the firm has the option to open a subsidiary office somewhere else and hire locally there. This is a substitute for trying to recruit those folks to physical move stateside.

That has lots of drawbacks: there will be additional overhead for travel, management, legal, compliance and whatnot. The remote office will be less productive (all told) and probably at a weird time zone.

Still, people forget that even in the world of tariffs, there's literally zero legal penalty for a US company to just open an office abroad and hire people.

I work in public accounting. You do not need to be particularly smart to work in accounting. You need a college degree, about a ~105 IQ, and an okay work ethic to be a good employee. Every firm I’ve worked at big and small has tons of H1B employees because you can underpay them (as in like $50k for an entry level vs. $65k for an American in the same position), promote them slower, and not worry about making them a partner one day. What benefit does this bring to the country? It’s laughable to call a 23 year old doing outsourced bookkeeping for some guy’s plumbing business “high-skilled” in any meaningful sense. It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research. Accounting is a perfect career path for our replacement-level college grads who just want a safe, steady job. But nobody is majoring in it anymore since the pay sucks and the hours are terrible because firms can just hire indentured servants to fill any labor shortages. If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.

That sounds great -- but it's not an argument for throwing all the H1Bs out. Make it $250K and it returns to being a truly high-skilled program.

All in all it's a M&B -- the motte is "the H1B salary floor is too low and it's not skilled enough", the bailey is "immigration bad".

I don’t think it’s a Motte and Bailey. Maybe some people on Twitter are claiming every last immigrant needs to be deported but even that is hyperbole. People wouldn’t care if it was just cutting edge STEM researchers, renowned surgeons, etc. But instead what is happening is that entire towns are being overrun by Indians making $120k working in IT at a bank or something, plus their parents that they bring over and their citizen children. I guess an economist would say this is good, they’re net taxpayers and not criminals, but I don’t see how this materially benefits the nation like they’re working on the Manhattan project or founding Nvidia or whatever. It just feels like additional competition for the ~1 SD above the mean citizen who makes up the bulk of the mid-middle to upper-middle class of the country for some marginal positive effect on the government’s balance sheet, plus all the more qualitative negative effects of increased diversity.

Very few people are arguing you shouldn't be able to import Alfred Einstein but it's also inherent to the system that whatever cutoff line you originally use to define unique genius is going to get eroded over time as business & humanitarian cases pile up. Plus people outside the country learn to adapt their individual cases to better resemble the Diagnostic criteria.

Agreed. From an engineer's perspective: it's clearly a wage suppression scheme. This is a trick to push down the middle class.

It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research.

I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.

If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.

Yeah this seems like a good policy decision and I expect it doesn't happen because of specific lobbying to prevent it, not because it's unpopular with voters.

I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.

As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.

In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.

OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.

This whole argument relies on the idea that foreigners are higher skilled on average than Americans - what proof do you have of this prior?

No, it relies on the fact that American talent is very well tapped. Once that marginal talent is mostly taken, there is more elsewhere that's willing to come because we pay workers far far more. Far more than even "worker friendly" socialist places.

Or at least it used to be that every high school counselor in the US was an effective magnet for figuring out which hick-born genius should go to MIT or CalTech and build rockets or computers.

There's literally billions of them. 85k get H1B visas per year. With a barely working filter we should be able to skim the cream. And yes, complaints abound about how we don't always get obviously exceptional people. They somehow found a way to screw up this much selectivity.

Working now at a major tech company, the foreign born engineers are pretty capable. They did something right.

Or the idea that perhaps we should have functional immigration pipelines specifically for high-skill workers, rather than almost ignoring human capital in our immigration process.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.

OK why would you believe the international labor pool is different than this description? Again the argument relies on the idea there is some difference between domestic and foreign labor pools otherwise there’s no point of bringing foreign workers.

It doesn't need any difference between the labor pools. America has 1000 great workers (toy example), India has 3 times the population, same quality labor pool, so they have 3000 great workers (TOY EXAMPLE), then, assuming America can actually find a need for, say, 2000 great workers, then the only way we could fill those jobs is by importing great workers.

I don't agree with this and think the high-skill immigration argument is 99% fake, but the argument works even if the labor pools are exactly the same.

They even work if the labor pools are very different and the foreign country is way worse. Say the top 10% of American workers is the same as the top 1% of Indian workers, the US is still operating with a fundamentally limited pool of around 20 million top 10% workers, if we need/want more than that, we can import them from the 9 million top 1% of Indian workers.

But why would you expect that the American labor pool is full of lemons but the Indian pool is not? Sure assuming identical distribution of talents there are 3x but why then are Indians not subject to lemon effects that OP claims make it hard to hire qualified Americans?

OP’s argument is that it’s easier to hire overseas workers because the international labor market is different so you don’t have the lemon problem you have in the US. Why does OP believe this?

The general pool of foreign workers does not have to be identical to the pool of foreign workers we bring in. We can and should be selective.

The top 10% of people who would come to the US if they had a chance are genuinely more skilled than the median American, and there are enough people who want to come to the US that we could pull from that top 10% for a long, long time. We're a country of immigrants, and we should be strategic about that.

Here is my compromise for the United States:

  • Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards a year based on getting a three-year contract to work at an annual salary at least 2X the American average income (something like $250k) If more demand than that, the visas go to the highest bidder. Also, give no more than 10,000 to a single country of origin.
  • Give up to 50,000 provisional green cards to youth under the age 20 who score the highest on an old-school SAT test, test to be taken in the United States or a consulate at a cheating proof facility.
  • Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards to people of any age who score the highest on a battery of scientific, engineering, and mathematics tests.

This replaces all H1bs, student visas, OTPs, diversity visas, etc. If the worker brings their wife and children that comes out of the quota. They cannot bring their uncles and brothers and nephews.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

There is a vicious cycle here where we encourage native born Americans to enter the college->fake job pipeline, then we bring in immigrants to do the real work. This suppresses the wages for the real work, which creates all the more incentive for a native born American to get some kind of fake patronage job, and so forth. Of course, then the immigrants have children and we tell them they need to go to college and get a fake job, and thus we need even more immigrants and the entire thing becomes a ponzi scheme.

I broadly agree but also this inherently leads to a cottage industry springing up where what should be an innate test of 'intelligence' gets gamed to the enth.

at an annual salary at least 2X the American average income (something like $250k)

The American average income is $125k a year?

Total personal income (including income from dividends and asset sales) divided by the workforce is something like $150k. But then you want to take out imputed rent from the Personal Income number, and also maybe include seniors earning income as well in the divisor. The best way to do the calculation would be total aggregate income as reported to the tax authorities, divided by number of people with taxable income.

But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce. One approach would be to look at BLS CEX survey, which has annual average household income of $102k in 2023, with 1.3 earners, so really more like $78k per earner, which is in line with the income per earner for the 80-90th percentile. Top decile income is $168k, so we are probably not getting to $125k per earner until about the 90th percentile. (https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm)

Or you can look at average personal income directly, which gives only $67k in 2024, though I agree that this one is too low because it is everyone 14 and up. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N

$125k seems way too high as an estimate of average income, and $250k is an extremely high salary. I would think a more appropriate threshold would be around $175k. Though I am fairly confused on why a numerical limit on visas would be needed with high salary thresholds and required time commitments, which are already ensuring that you're only bringing in pretty rare abilities.

But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce.

Yeah, it would be better to divide by total people with taxable income, to include the retirees.

I think the Census and BLS surveys have problems, I'm not sure if they include dividend/asset income, and I've also heard they cap the income recorded for privacy issues (because high earners are rare enough that if they were reported, it would deanonymize the data)

You want to include dividend/corporate profit income as part of the average income calculation, because the whole idea is to put a floor on how much the owners of capital can push down wages using immigration.

It seems like it would be more that sample size starts to get small at crazy high earners and that response rate is probably pretty low for extremely highly paid people. I'm also not sure what privacy issue there is when the max granularity is top 10% of households - this is roughly 30 million people or whatever.

We can also look at the CPS and start to get a lot closer to the question of "What is the normal income for working people in the US?", as there is a specific category of 18+, full-time. Average total money income was $96k in 2024, which seems pretty reasonable to me as an estimate. This sounds to me like it would also include that investment income you are looking for, though I don't think I agree that this should be included for the purpose of this exercise since the idea seems like it is to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker truly is valuable to a company and not easily replaced by a domestic worker with up to double the average earning power... is your idea on including all income to capture things like stock options as compensation or something? Even a 100% average threshold if using $96k would go a long way to fixing the problem of H1Bs frequently going to mediocre-tier workers. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-02.html

the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth,

Main problem I see with this characterization is that laziness is both a relative concept and a habit.

Relative: Everyone is lazy compared to migrant who works 60h+ like an indentured servant because he/she has to. However, increases in GDP are supposed serve human flourishing, not the other way. I suppose that is the "trade-off" you are talking of.

Habit: Humans are habit-forming creatures. Live some time as unemployed and yes, most people will learn lazy unemployed habits that are hard to break out of. For this reason, it is quite important to keep unemployment rate low.

Another aspect is that habit-forming does not stop at unemployment. Majority of people are quite industrious when they find themselves in a positive feedback cycle and it is clear to see results of your work. It is how most computer games are structured, people play them for pleasure. Many corporate jobs, however, are structured so that easiest habit to form is, "do what you are told and don't make too much trouble for anyone, including yourself". I am kinda lazy employee these days, myself. Key was when I realized that my attempts to go above and beyond results in more work, no change in salary, any fruits were reflected in my managers' bonuses than mine, any failures were still mine to bear, and any path to making it otherwise was illegible. Of course my manager would rather have a "less lazy" migrant worker who has to go above and beyond anyway than reorganize anything.

However, increases in GDP are supposed serve human flourishing, not the other way.

Says who, exactly? After all, GDP is relatively easy to measure, and gives you a numerical answer, while we can't even agree what constitutes "human flourishing", let alone measure it. So why wouldn't people choose to take the former as their measure of societal quality — 'line goes up equals world more gooder' — and then argue that, just as the job of corporate executives is to maximize "shareholder value", the job of a modern technocratic government is to maximize the GDP of the geographic territory it administrates… even if that means replacing legacy populations with cheaper imports?

Another thing: it is weird that pro-migration lobby has advocated for the need of skilled migration in nearly all developed countries (the US, Canada, the UK, near all European countries) despite the vast differences in population, resources, economic outlook, unemployment rates, and other policies. The US has 350m people and has a large, varied economy and resources, unemployment rate 4%, it could be self-sufficient, and they say, America needs 'skilled' migrants. Sweden is smaller economy, unemployment rate 9%, economy specialized to few key industries and services, they live and die by trading for other resources, but they also say (until perhaps recently), they need more 'skilled' migrants. Repeat for any country and any economic situation.

This is because of how political groups in one country feed on political groups in another.

That's why Japan has much less of this sort of thing. It's really hard to have influence when the country is thousands of miles away and speaks mostly Japanese.

There's no shortage of skilled or potentially skilled workers in the US. We have 350 million people. And immigrants of the extreme tip of the intellectual distribution will generally get an exception to any immigration policy that might hinder them.

What the actual vast majority of immigrants do is either unskilled manual labor, or from a higher class immigrant, functionary white collar licensees doing corporate scutwork or providing services in places white collar white people don't want to work, or for wages and in conditions they wouldn't accept.

We've had sort of a natural experiment on this, in the form of the Great Depression followed by WW2. There was a ton of long-term unemployed people from the depression, and many of them became...not very good people, after years of riding the rails and being homeless/broke. Very high crime rates, and just a general fragmentation of society. Not the sort of person a sane person would want to hire, even if the economy wasn't in the toilet because of the depression.

But then the war happened. Governments started spending money like crazy, causing a surge in demand. Obviously the government needed lots of bodies to fill the army and war industries, but then regular jobs also started needing to get filled, so employers were willing to take a chance on people they'd never normally consider. Including both hobos and housewives who had never worked a regular paid job before.

And for the most part... it worked. Despite all the destruction of the war, countries grew their economies during the war as those long-time unemployed people came back to work. It turns out that people aren't just widgets- if you give them a chance, the right environment, and some training, they can learn and grow to take on a wide variety of tasks.

But in a world where there's high unemployment, and every position comes with large mandatory headcount costs, plus potential lawsuits if anything goes wrong, noone wants to take a chance on a questionable hire.

I suspect, although I’m not sure how one would go about proving or quantifying it, that this mechanism has been broken down by what I suppose you could call the vices of modernity. The type of “long-term unemployed” people who in the early 20th century would be riding the rails, as you say, today either end up on the streets and become addicted to hard drugs, or shut themselves up at home and become grotesquely obese. These conditions are supported by welfare programs (and in the former case supplemented by petty crime) such that they never have any incentive to even attempt to find work, their conditions worsen, and eventually they become functionally irreparable parasites on the society. Many of these people, in decades past, would’ve picked up low-skilled jobs as drifters, doing a lot of the work that today is done by dubiously-legal low-skilled immigrants. The path to becoming a true “lost cause” in this sense, someone who is not merely disincentivized from working but so far gone as to be genuinely incapable of it, is far shorter now than it has ever been, and I think this has more of an effect on the economy than is usually discussed.

Maybe. But they had plenty of vices back then too. Bootleg licquor, drugs like opium and barbiturates at pharmacies, and stds like syphalis. And, yes, since stay at home shut-ins and fat people. Somehow they found a use for all those people.

Yeah, I’m not trying to go too far with this take. Very true that we’ve always had alcoholics, opium dens, and weirdo hermits. But I really do think the barrier to entry for that sort of extreme dysfunction is significantly lower now than a century ago, and that has to have some effect.

What do you mean 'high skill immigrant workers'?

There's a world of difference between 'mid javascript jockey', 'mid accountant', 'mid miscellaneous office worker' and 'fabulously talented UV lithography genius' or 'hypersonic plasma fluid dynamics expert'.

I suspect you don't mean the latter but the former, since you're talking about 'the job pool' rather than 'high powered R&D positions'.

If mass immigration were so great, we'd see the rich countries with the highest immigration rates having huge productivity growth, right? Canada and Australia have been much more aggressive in mass migration than the US. They're fairly free market anglo-derived liberal democracies, the closest analogues to the US. Australia has a points system supposedly targeting skills shortages and 'high skill migrants'. Both Australia and Canada have had a terrible time in terms of prosperity and economic growth, despite (because of) all this immigration. Canadian GDP per capita has been stagnant for about a decade. In truth it's not high-skill immigrant workers that are coming in, many of them just do food delivery. There are a small fraction of actually-high-skill workers and a huge number of people gaming the system to work or gain access to a richer country than their birthplace, which is understandable but not necessarily in the national interest.

The US gets most of the best anyway, since why would anyone really talented think 'I want to move to Australia and start a company there.' Tiny market size, limited capital, great distance from the rest of the world, barren manufacturing sector, high energy prices...

If you're gonna have immigration, better 'high skill migrants' than refugees from shithole countries. But better still to just skim the very best, the actually high skill migrants. If a company wants to bring someone in, charge them 200K as a flat fee to ensure they're really getting their money's worth, that they absolutely need this person. If a university wants to bring someone in, make sure they'd be in the top 5% of domestic students, were they a domestic. The US could cut immigration 98% and do just fine.

See also: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/brain-drain-as-geopolitical-strategy

jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth

Do we then need jobs programs for the civilizationally impaired, those peoples who couldn't make a rich, safe country themselves? This line of reasoning cuts both ways. If Americans are so lazy, inept and stupid, shouldn't these talented and deserving foreigners stay at home rather than come to babysit these lowlife Americans who don't know how to do anything? Americans invented Javascript, one imagines they can find some mid Javascript developers at home.

What do you mean 'high skill immigrant workers'?

At first read I think they clearly meant "'fabulously talented UV lithography genius' or 'hypersonic plasma fluid dynamics expert'."

Reading it again, I think they probably mean both the above and "'decent javascript jockey', 'decent accountant', 'decent miscellaneous office worker'"

If mass immigration were so great, we'd see the rich countries with the highest immigration rates having huge productivity growth, right?

I'd say the history of North American population and productivity growth shows fairly clearly intelligent immigration is fairly effective at this.

I will also say, as a Canadian, what we've been doing in the last 5-10 years has been anything but intelligent immigration. We've essentially flipped from having a logical points based system to wholesale importing of low quality human capital (to put it delicately).

I agree with your prescriptions for how to run a good immigration system. What's sad is the west already figured this out, I don't know why we decided to fuck it all up. Actually I do, line must go up, labour must be cucked.

Yeah, they game the entrance system. Canada too supposedly has a 'skills based' immigration system but like Australia it's a joke. Universities are supposed to admit people who pass a rigorous test but they're phenomenally greedy and the entrance requirement is de facto 'has money and a pulse', nevermind plagiarism or anything else. And then there are fake journal articles they write to seem smart...

Every test becomes something to game and it's hard to convince people to test rigorously if their financial interests are advanced by bringing in high fee paying foreign students. On balance I think it'd be better for universities to receive no more money from foreign students than domestics, possibly less. Right now there are perverse incentives. The university business model should be to educate the domestic talent base first rather than bring in as many foreign students as physically possible, only if there's surplus capacity should foreign students be admitted, or if there's some other special reason like exceptional talent.

This appears to be a consistent failure mechanism with all "high skill immigration." Because there are clear metrics, they are clearly game-able by motivated by people who are from a worse country and have no buy in to the social contract of the country they are moving to.

Also in the case of Australia the local trades are so unionized and wildly overpaid that there's not even really much of a pathway for sheer weight of bodies to help solve the housing issue through forcing construction wages down to regional norms.

The whole 'high skilled' thing feels like a relic of manufacturing economies with true artisans when now in the days of services being ascendant aside from a few obvious niches like surgeons and lawyers there's a great fungibility of labor in milquetoast laptop sinecures.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.

'Nowadays?'

How long, per chance, do you believe this state of affairs has held before it didn't? Years? Decades? 'They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work' was the joke of an entire economic system of the 20th century, so we're probably looking at centuries.

Did the hiring managers of feudal Europe five hundred years ago think their serf pool as highly competent, honest, diligent people devoid of alcohol addiction or other serious flaws? Chinese mandarins? Byzantine administers? Illiterate tribal chiefs the world over?

The problem is that the jobs are getting a lot more complicated. In peacetime, Johnny Serf has to farm a few acres of land with a couple of different types of crops. It can get tricky but it’s not rocket science and Johny has been doing it his whole life. If Johnny is lazy or a drunk and his crop yields are ten percent lower than his neighbor that mostly doesn’t affect anyone other than Johnny. In wartime Johnny has to hold a pike on a marginal section of the line and let his liege lord do most of the real work.

His great-great-great grandson John Tradie has to drive a semi truck, and if he’s not constantly paying attention every second he could kill a dozen people with it. Or he works in an office doing rather complicated drafting and clerical work that in Great Grandpa Johnny’s day would only be done by monks, scribes and merchant guilds (he has to read for God’s sake!). If John Tradie goes to war he has to operate the radar system on a Patriot battery that costs more than his grandfather’s liege-lord’s entire fief.

Subsistence farming is actually a very complicated job which brutally punishes laziness. You are correct that a stellar IQ is not needed but apathetic, un conscientious farmers starved to death or wound up enslaved.

Do you know any good books on this? I know about "peasant studies," but the peasant studies books I've read tend to be highly sociological/politicized.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year.

How close are you to reaching Y? Is a person's contribution to X fixed at birth (or shortly after), or can it increase through training, education, and experience?

Your argument relies on the idea that X is both largely fixed among the existing population and that it's a relevant near-term constraint on industry, while I'm not sure either is true. Underemployment is rampant, with only 56% of college grads working at a job that needs any degree. Still no perfect candidates? Just hire someone 80% qualified and train them up the rest of the way. Can't handle the last 20% of the job having no competent people? Hire them earlier and train them up before it becomes a critical constraint. Can't plan ahead that far? Sucks to suck, git gud.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.

As both a hiring manager and a grass-toucher, I really do not believe this. Yes, our recruiters, both internal and external, bring in a lot of garbage, but I don't think that's because there are no qualified applicants. It's because in the last ten years, then has been a sharp increase in the offensive capabilities of "bad actors" in the employment market (Indian tech consultancies gaming the visa system, Linkedin spammers) with an especially sharp increase in the last few years due to the adoption of LLMs. It's more difficult for me to judge the quality of an applicant before meeting them by checking their Linkedin, CV, cover letter, or email correspondence. Everyone has learned that all text-based communication can be polished by an LLM, and so typos, poor writing skills, and obvious bullshitting are all easier to avoid (although em-dashes and chatgpt-speak are still giveaways sometimes). I have a lot more screening interviews now that are a waste of time since it's more difficult to vet ahead of a video call.

However, this is probably a temporary state of affairs. Hiring managers and recruiters optimizing for quality will improve their defensive capabilities by inventing new, harder-to-fake vetting procedures. We just aren't there yet, the defense is still catching up.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year.

I dunno, man. This just does not pass the smell test for me. In a country of nearly 350 million people, there aren't enough bright, talented people to fill jobs? I get that companies want to hire a top 1% intelligence/conscientiousness person for their very important software role, but will it doom American industry and creativity if we force them to use the top 5% of the American talent pool instead of the top 1% of the global talent pool? We may move forward slightly slower, but we will also avoid the negative effects of creating a new class of alien elites who see America as merely an economic zone. If we tied work visas to renunciation of other citizenships and the ability to pass civics test or something, I might change my mind a little.

... man, it would be nice if the US could just have some areas that are primarily there as economic zones, and some areas that were reserved for protectionism and preservation of American culture. SF / NY / Boston / Seattle could host the global megacorporations that want to bring in the world's best no matter the cost, while much of the rest of the country could be reserved for cultural preservation.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

I think that this part of your argument is mistaken. My experience working in tech isn't that the H1B program is used to bring in high skilled immigrants to expand labor beyond what the native population can support. It's that the H1B program is used to bring in employees at below-market pay, rather than paying the native citizens market rates for their work. Not only that, but then the employer has an indentured servant to whom they can do whatever they want, because if he leaves the company he has to go back home (and while the pay may be below US market rates, it's above the rates in his home country). This isn't exactly a situation where employers are giving people a win-win fair deal. The ideal is certainly as you describe, but I don't think that the reality lives up to that (thanks to good old human greed).

It's that the H1B program is used to bring in employees at below-market pay, rather than paying the native citizens market rates for their work.

I guess I'm not enough of an expert on economics and immigration law to feel confident this is a good option, but why not auction the H1-B visas, rather than a lottery? The government chooses the highest N salaried applications and collects an extra percentage payroll tax on such visa holders. I have heard complaints that this would probably drop them all in high-cost-of-living areas, but it seems easy enough to adjust for that.

Maybe I'm missing a reason why that wouldn't work that isn't "existing H1B body shops have too much political power."

A lottery would be better than the current system for sure, but it doesnt address the problem that once the top 10% of the bids are actually filled, there will still be a bunch of people offering "job openings" in the 60-80k range that they claim they cant fill with Americans and then the bottom bidders still can fill those. Unless there really is enough actual high end demand for H1bs for all of them to make like 500k. But given the current market that seems extremely unlikely.

I have heard complaints that this would probably drop them all in high-cost-of-living areas,

Which is a problem why exactly? Most of the people who object to immigration are living outside of those extremely HCOL areas anyway, seems like it would do a good job of ensuring that the areas that wanted lots of immigrants had lots of immigrants and the places that don't like immigrants don't get them.

IIRC the reverse: "my factory in flyover country that needs real experts won't be able to compete with the coastal tech companies hiring entry-level JavaScript developers."

Yeah, "there are 4 experts on this equipment in the world and none of them are US citizens and we need one of them for 4 weeks" is a problem which is not well addressed by my proposal (or by our current system).

Yeah, "there are 4 experts on this equipment in the world and none of them are US citizens and we need one of them for 4 weeks" is a problem which is not well addressed by my proposal (or by our current system).

In the current system they could theoretically come in on an O-1. In practice, the expertise may be too narrow to be legible to the US government.

thanks to good old human greed

It's not just greed, is the inability to compromise. Just like with abortion, where neither party is willing to offer a sensible compromise because it angers their extreme wing, is a platform to shit on the other party from, and poses a defection risk from the other party (like with gun control), the ruling parties of the US both acknowledge the shortcomings of H-1B, but can't create a bipartisan bill that reforms it into something that matches its original design (providing short-term high-skilled labor) or its current purpose (naturalization visa for white-collar workers).

Honestly, Trump Mk.1 was the Dems' best chance to run a reform like this through the Congress. Instead, they spent four years making Trump, who struggled with GOP support, their sworn enemy. Now Trump Mk.2 is all about owning the libs and rules by decree.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.

This is a false premise on a number of levels. Productivity is the value generated per worker. Production is the total amount of goods and services created. Production is a function of a number of different inputs - labor, capital, land, etc. If a company needs to increase production in an environment with a constrained labor market, it can do that by increasing productivity. In other words, investing capital into technology, automation, and other labor-saving improvements. Production can also be increased by offshoring low-value components of the supply chain to other countries, like mineral extraction, textile manufacturing, etc. Of course as we have seen this needs to be done judiciously to avoid building our own competition in unfriendly countries.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

If your new venture is creating more value than whatever these people are already doing, do the capitalist thing and poach them. That's the free market at work - businesses with higher margins can afford to attract labor from companies or industries that are generating less value. That's part of how productivity increases, generating more value per worker by having workers move to higher value positions.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through.

The vast majority of employees are "on the market". Just offer them more money. It's that simple. People hop jobs all the time, especially in hot industries like tech. Even if they aren't officially looking, it's easy to put the word out that you're hiring and have your staff refer people into your hiring pipeline. What's more common is that companies have unrealistic expectations - they want 90th percentile employees at 50th percentile pay and mediocre benefits.

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it.

This is a bullshit false dichotomy. How about just incentivizing the 72% of STEM grads who don't work in a STEM job to actually work in STEM, if we have such a skills shortage?

This is a bullshit false dichotomy. How about just incentivizing the 72% of STEM grads who don't work in a STEM job to actually work in STEM, if we have such a skills shortage?

This number includes social science majors (for whom there are no jobs in their chosen field) and people who work in management (who would not necessarily be better off as ICs).

It also includes STEM grads in healthcare jobs - if you count those as "STEM jobs" the number drops to 62%. And teaching doesn't count as a "STEM job" either - not sure how many maths and science teachers there are or how that affects the numbers.

This number includes social science major

Where are you getting that from? This would be a rather unconventional use of "STEM". Not saying you're wrong, but finding out would require a lot more clicking into his link, than I can do right now.

Ctrl f "social" bro

It's got science in the name.

So does "pseudoscience".

"Very droll, minister."

Hopefully the Census is capturing the legions of pseudoscience majors in this statistic as well.

It does, you pointed it out yourself.

It is a fair criticism, for whatever reason the census bureau decided to include social science and psychology in STEM. They do have a very nice visualization though, by clicking on the major it shows the percentage of employees who end up working in STEM jobs, and highlights their placement in different job groups. For computer science and math, it's 51.1%. Engineering is 51.5%. For physical science majors, it's only 27.6%. Those are pretty grim numbers that aren't explained just by management being excluded from the stats.

This, of course, mirrors what any engineering or chemistry grad would tell you if you just...walked around and interviewed a bunch of seniors at local state university. Ask them if they have job offers and what they are in and at what number. Lots do not. Even your 'B' students that have done an internship often will only have 1 pretty mediocre offer. And if you don't get an industry offer within 6 months of graduation your likelihood of ever getting one drops off pretty significantly.

On top of that, there is also the large cohort of "retired" engineers. We use this term sparingly because almost none of them have retired voluntarily. They were all let go for being too old and given a BS reason, and no one else would hire them because they are too old (and also given BS reasons). Sure, they just have 3 decades of industry experience being wasted while they run an online CNC custom parts website, but he's 50 freaking years old and wants 6 figures to work 40 hours a week with standard sick and vacation! Insanity!

I knew traditional (non-software) engineering was screwed up, but I thought they were less youth-worshipping than tech, not more.

A company I used to do jobs for had a pretty good team that churned out steady work and a decent number of patents a year. Nothing that makes a practice, but a good client. They had a 56 year old guy on the team that was clearly slowing down, but still was sharp, just not 8am-8pm shift sort of on his game. But he was the best at helping me draft their patents. Any questions, go to Richard. Richard picks up the phone every time and always can clarify a point with a helpful few sentences, and then go on to point out some more things he thinks were not explained properly in the specs they sent over (almost always correct). So this guy was still a good engineer, and outstanding communicator. One day they submit a spec and his names on it but he doesn't pick up. Ask another guy, "oh Richard had to leave." That sucks I say. Something about being in the bottom 30% of deliverables 2 years in a row.

My personal issue with a lot of the 'high skilled immigrant' discourse is that a huge chunk of high-paid positions in the modern economy are essentially vapor atop vast flows of rent-seeking. I've done pretty well out of the tech economy personally, but there's massive chunks of jobs which don't really have much of an objective function.

This is further exacerbated when you import from certain countries where there's a cultural understanding of intense gaming of KPIs and little-to-no interest in actually 'building' anything. I have sympathy from the people from those countries, as their internal political economy means it's very hard to get ahead in a vast sea of standardized tests and affirmative action, but it's on them to go remake their country into somewhere nice to be instead of needfully KPI-maxing into high ranks of the Western Celestial Bureaucracy in companies that essentially just exist. Most of these jobs could be adequately performed by a local, or a flow chart.

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.

There's a strong argument that this has outsized effects in said 'key' industries when placing a lower-skill worker into the process results in higher-than-acceptable failure rates for complex products and complicated processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_development

And this gets worse if those 'key' industries feed into other industries. You know, like if power production gets spotty b/c your plants have too much downtime, which brings down every other industry. Or factories can't put out enough intermediate goods that are needed in other projects, and this bottlenecks productions in other areas.

Explained in excruciating detail here:

https://mgautreau.substack.com/p/nice-things-and-why-we-cant-have

So there's certainly an argument that you should pull in as many high-skill immigrants as possible.

But now there is the question of where to stick the low-performers were they won't do as much harm.

And perhaps the big one, what happens to the country you just brain-drained high skill immigrants from if they don't have enough such people left to maintain domestic industries...

But this also assumes there's no major risk of... deliberate interference/sabotage. Now I'm thinking of the especially high-sensitivity 'industries.' Who is maintaining nuclear arsenal? Building fighter jets and tanks? Keeping your government's communications and networked systems secure?

You NEED, as in NOT OPTIONAL, loyal, high skilled, 99% reliable workers in these industries. So does every other country. And they are also motivated to compromise your supply chains if they can. So maybe they send a few high-skilled immigrants over with specific instructions on how to make things break.

So yeah, bringing in high-skill immigrants is almost conclusively a net good for all involved to the extent you can support more and more complex, high value, high-wage industries across the board and thus vastly improve the productivity of your entire economy.

This is, as I gather, the beautiful good intentions of the H1B program.

But this is a very fragile system at these important points of failure, if you let in lesser skilled immigrants (who present as high-skilled), this can break important stuff. If you let in high-skilled immigrants who ultimately want to benefit their home country over yours, they can steal or break important stuff intentionally.

And this will break many other things downstream of the initial failure.

And the more such critical industries your country depends on (i.e. the more developed/complex the economy) the more places where such breaks can occur.

Filtering. Filtering. Filtering. How good are you at it, and do you have the political stomach to do it as aggressively as necessary.

Now I'm thinking of the especially high-sensitivity 'industries.' Who is maintaining nuclear arsenal? Building fighter jets and tanks? Keeping your government's communications and networked systems secure?

I often see people bemoan the seemingly small number of American citizen engineers at tech companies, but I can say that of my friend group going through a highly-ranked engineering school, if anything most of the eligible candidates have ended up working in defense or adjacent spaces. Most of these places keep a low profile: "don't put that you work here currently on LinkedIn" is something I've heard, um, a few times, and few at Lockheed are bragging about GitHub followers or making the Hacker News front page.

You go to work, do reasonably cutting-edge radar/hypersonics/robotics work for 40-ish hours, get paid reasonably and stably, and you don't talk about it otherwise, which I think unintentionally skews the narrative of engineering more broadly (a bit).

I'd guess recruiting is done more directly, possibly even in-person as well, so candidates are 'guaranteed' their spots and never actually enter the job search market in the first place.

I often see people bemoan the seemingly small number of American citizen engineers at tech companies, but I can say that of my friend group going through a highly-ranked engineering school, if anything most of the eligible candidates have ended up working in defense or adjacent spaces.

"Seemingly" is doing some work here -- there's a fair number of second-generation American (dot)-Indians and Chinese at tech companies. Though an ethnonationalist wouldn't count them.

Most of these places keep a low profile: "don't put that you work here currently on LinkedIn" is something I've heard, um, a few times, and few at Lockheed are bragging about GitHub followers or making the Hacker News front page.

A lot of engineers in tech are mostly unaware of this market for various reasons -- it only accepts citizens, it feeds largely from different schools (including my own alma mater), it's secretive. There's definitely some movement from the defense market to the open market, but of course the people who move don't talk much about their former jobs. I moved out of it before Big Tech got Big, so I don't know for sure, but I bet pay is a lot less. A lot more bureaucracy too, though the big tech companies are working on solving that.

I reject pretty much every aspect of this post. I think you present your premises as a false consensus and a false binary choice as your conclusion. The actual policy discussion on the ground is not "we're only gonna do high-skill immigration. How much should we do?" but the beginnings of a "not any more, you're not" response to "we're just not going to bother enforcing immigration law against illegal migrants". Which means there's a lot of low-to-medium-skilled work being done by immigrants. There's no point in my mind to discussing the numbers of truly high-skilled immigrants a country should import when unskilled labor, fast food, taxi driving, food delivery, etc. are all done by immigrants with varying legal status, and chain migration rules allow the high-skilled migrant to bring a family who brings their family (who ...).

I see so many migrants who make the simultaneous arguments of 'the locals aren't skilled enough to do high skilled work' as well as 'the locals find low skilled work beneath them', with the general theme being 'the locals are lazy and incompetent, so give all the jobs to migrants'.

Meanwhile you've got a plethora of other states like Singapore, Malaysia, the Gulf Arabs etcetera where the solution to this is bringing foreigners from less-advanced economies to do the shit jobs but not providing any particular pathway to family migration and/or permanent settlement.

It also is one with, from my perspective, mostly imagined tradeoffs. The problem with incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts or otherwise exists in the low wage market (and fir the first 3, very prominently in the H1b market), but the tradeoff for employers looking abroad vs. at home at the high end is mostly about age discrimination and wage expectations. Take, for example, this recent viral tweet: https://x.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1964097707636625671

Essentially, this guy is complaining about the fact that he needs a couple of retired/semi-retired 50-65 year old guys to come out of retirement to found a transformers company and is complaining that their salary demand is... slightly under $500k? Of course, if you are at all familiar with the mid-high end engineering work environment this is not at all new to you. The thought of hiring a 55 year old is offensive to most people in hiring. The thought that they are just as important as a founder with seed money, probably moreso. So even though this startup cost is actually a drop in the bucket, it seems unteneble to this fellow (who is representative).

So what will he do? Likely he will give up on the idea, but if he doesn't he's likely to try the H1b route. And if you are familiar with that you will know there will be many applicants with resumes that say they have experience designing and fabricating large transformers under various industry standards. They will not. If the company ever launches it will flounder and never get out a product until this guy caves and pays an old guy, OR one of his like 25 year old incidental white guy hires from Colorado School of Mines befriends one of those old white guys and fixes everything.

Essentially, this guy is complaining about the fact that he needs a couple of retired/semi-retired 50-65 year old guys to come out of retirement to found a transformers company and is complaining that their salary demand is... slightly under $500k? Of course, if you are at all familiar with the mid-high end engineering work environment this is not at all new to you. The thought of hiring a 55 year old is offensive to most people in hiring. The thought that they are just as important as a founder with seed money, probably moreso. So even though this startup cost is actually a drop in the bucket, it seems unteneble to this fellow (who is representative).

That's hilarious. "I believe I have a market of $50B, but to get started I need to hire one knowledgable retired guy who won't get out of bed for less than $0.0005B. What should I do, what should I do?"

Sometimes there are actual shortages (e.g. there's 4 qualified people in the world and 10 companies looking to hire them), where upping your price just results in a bidding war. But in this case it looks like it isn't; they just have to convince one of a number of middle-aged guys to get off his fishing boat for a while.

He goes on to say:

Huge red flag for investors (I don’t yet make the rules), basically they take it as a synthetic judgement around alignment: The person is going to own 15-35% of the company. Are they going to be willing to work hard, work fast, and succeed?

LOL, no, they're not there to "work hard, work fast". If you know what you're doing, you're not hiring them for that. They're not the Wozniak or Jobs and certainly not the Randy Wigginton or Bruce Tognazzini, they're the Mike Markulla there to provide "adult supervision" for your younger guys who are doing the "work hard, work fast" thing.

My thoughts exactly. But this case is simply illustrative. I work with engineers in my law practice. My brother is an engineer. I swear, these firms treat age 50 as if it is death, and 45 as pushing the reaper. If someone in mid/mid-sr management on the engineering side gets laid off and they are over 50, they might as well just start their own model train shop right away. There simply is no appetite to hire them, even at 1/2 rungs below where they were let go from. This is why people in the industry have such skepticism about the whole model of immigrant labor. Companies inevitably ignore dozens or hundreds of qualified domestic candidates, often accompanied with a very specifically worded job posting. That then gets forwarded to the H1b agency that takes a half dozen even less qualified foreigners and writes them perfect resumes for the position (regardless of the truthiness of those words), and now you have 3 engineers for the price of 1! Or do you? For some reason the project is always "going well" or "coming along". But deliverables always seem lacking, often the claim is they are contingent on someone else's work (who is often some recent StateU grad, and "his work" is the whole project).

Yeah this is the issue that whenever somebody sets out to simplify the immigration question with a 'fair and unbiased criteria' inevitably a massive cottage industry converges to game the fuck out of those rules whilst also finding any possible legal angles for discrimination and humanitarian exemptions.

The best example was once the TCS contractors I was working with claimed they couldn’t proceed because I hadn’t defined what I meant by “the button should log the user out of the application” in regards to “logging off” meant DESPITE THE LOGOFF FUNCTIONALITY ALREADY EXISTING.

Meanwhile in China somebody can take a crack at building a business that actually has some sort of tangible impact on the physical world (and not the ''AI-powered Grindr for Dogs'' somebody in that comment section mentioned) instead of the current SAASpit that defines modern Western tech.

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