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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34533 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.

As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports

I think the modal American at this point has just had enough of the velocity of the demographic changes. And the short-term lockout effect where we seem to be importing the upper middle class rather than growing our own natives into it. Long-term it’s probably true that this kind of immigration is good for the economy and makes the pie larger for everybody, but it’s just too much too fast. Every professional job given to an immigrant is a loss for an American that could have grown into it, and god forbid the company actually trains people into it.

So I don’t really care about these immigrants, many of them my coworkers, who I agree are clean and relatively polite, orderly, etc. I want America to feel American, these people do not feel American, they are civil but distinctly not American.

My 22-year old cousin joined the wave of CS grads and had an absolutely brutal time finding a job. He’s probably not FAANG-level but he can absolutely do any of the bullshit WITCH jobs or be a database maintainer for some bank or insurance company. He was ready to go be a car mechanic like his father until he was lucky enough to get a bank to hire him on a temp basis about one year after he graduated. In real-time, this is the cost of the H1B program and the disgusting fraud associated with it. A young man, born in America, trying to better himself through education so he can be better than his car mechanic father, and he had to scratch and claw to find a temporary CS job in the 21st century in America despite being 100% capable because we somehow decided actually millions of dudes from India were necessary instead. Now play this out on a widespread scale in the aggregate and we see how damaging this shit actually is.

Every professional job given to an immigrant is a loss for an American that could have grown into it, and god forbid the company actually trains people into it.

I am ignorant of economics, so feel free to school me on it, but AFAIK the number of jobs isn't static, and an economy that grows more quickly also offers more jobs than one that stagnates due to skill shortages?

It is not just CS, this sort of issue exists across all of STEM. Engineering grads from the State U where I live (a top 20 undergrad program by basically every metric) are graduating with 1 or 2 industry offers IF they are top 20% in the class AND did a relevant industry internship/co-op. To reliably have multiple offers you need to be top 5%+ experience or be a minority candidate. Bottom half graduates (and this is an engineering school that still washes out about 1/3 of freshman, and is very competitive to enter) are receiving practically zero offers. In the business environment we have been in for at least 10 years now, the whole idea of a non-fraudulent H1B visa is silly. There are dozens of qualified people Americans for any job opening in white collar work, there are gluts of degree holders in every field from Math to Chemical Engineering to LGBT studies. There are also, by this point, millions of "retired" Americans who have 2-3 decades of industry experience and have been forced into retirement, long before age 65, because they got too expensive, but even if willing to take a 30% paycut cannot find work.

Long-term it’s probably true that this kind of immigration is good for the economy and makes the pie larger for everybody, but it’s just too much too fast.

It doesn't. Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add). US still has positive real GDP per capita growth, but that's probably due to US having a larger population able to absorb more immigration and the fact the US is still the centre of technology and innovation.

The pie technically does get bigger, but the number of people who eat the pie outpaces it. Liberal politicians love it, because it does technically grow GDP even if it makes their countrymen individually poorer. I'm reminded of the fact that Boris Johnson increased immigration ("Boriswave") because he wanted positive press coverage from the Financial Times. Any GDP growth is probably captured by the rich anyway, due to the wage suppression caused by immigration among other things.

Maybe once upon a time immigration does increase GDP (per capita) when immigrants were of a higher quality, able to integrate well, and came over to work and had no expectation of being supported by the state. Those days are long gone.

Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add).

Apples and oranges. H1-B's are a tiny fraction of the total immigrant population and are selected for education and skills. The process could certainly be made more selective, but in no way does it compare to the kind of mass influx seen in Canada, Europe, or across the southern border.

And the short-term lockout effect where we seem to be importing the upper middle class rather than growing our own natives into it.

The average person who thinks this (ie falls victim to the lump of labor fallacy) is frankly too stupid to make it to the upper middle class, and even if stopping H1B immigration miraculously didn’t simultaneously reduce labor demand, would never be in the running for a good tech job anyway. The right model for these kinds of people is that they are peasants who in other eras would’ve been fine with a low status peasant job, but in the era of social media cannot stomach that reality and so are lashing out.

The Trump movement is so obviously a movement by and for losers-in-denial. Everything that happens is easily understandable in those terms (the extremely cringe Charlie Kirk lionization is a perfect example of this).

  • -19

Even if we take this as true, can’t you see why a peasant would rather be ruled over by their kin, countrymen and culture sharers than foreigners?

Too combative by half.

Please review the rules on the sidebar.

This guy reads far too much like Alexander Turok. I suppose that there is a case to be made that he is genuinely a Hannia-ite Elite Human Capital stan but those people are annoying and impossible to argue with, because all they do is cast their opposition as disgruntled resentful proles. That is the definition of bad faith and should be more proactively clamped down upon.

If he is Turok then we should be thankful that he has been gracious enough to return, as Turok never should have been banned in the first place.

You only think that because you're a resentful poor person. /s Woke right, woke right!

Why isn't it clear whether it's 100K per year or 100K lump sum? Lutnick was apparently saying annual fee. But the Press Sec says one-time payment.

https://x.com/PressSec/status/1969495900478488745

Serious failure of planning and state capacity here. Like with the tariffs where they go up and down on a whim. If you're going to implement a policy, be consistent and stable. Implement, test, review, iterate. Don't flip-flop from day to day.

Implement, test, review, iterate. Don't flip-flop from day to day.

That is not Trump's style and never has been. He is not a technocrat and does not claim to be. It is also not the Democrats' style, though they claim it is (generally the 'test' and 'review' are rigged or absent, so it's just "implement, double down")

Yeah, there are a lot of people criticizing Trump for always chickening out but I think "chickening out" when he starts doing something disastrous is one of his best attributes.

I still wish he would think a little before doing things, but at least he's not afraid to reverse course.

This was previously vetoed by Trump as a favor to tech people (Musk, Bezos, Pichai, Altman, Ellison and Nadella), who he now likes because they flatter him and support him publicly. It was advocated by Miller and Lutnick and obviously commentators outside the admin like Bannon.

Now Trump is annoyed with Modi for buying Russian oil, which he sees as the reason for Putin being nonchalant about a deal on Ukraine, so he asks what will annoy India, and they pitch this again and he says “OK, fine” but without much more detail.

I mean, we're constantly told that H1B's are for absolutely essential roles and skills that can't be found in the US at all for any price.

Ok. Then companies will gladly pay another 100k for that, no H1bs should even be affected - being so essential and irreplaceable, right?

I mean, the only way this move could actually wreck the H1b system is if... somehow... in defiance of everything we're constantly told... those skills DO exist in the US, and for less than 100k extra. But... that would mean the entire H1b system is just state-sponsored undercutting of American labor, and always has been. Strange.

Watching people argue themselves in knots about this issue has been quite amusing. I mean, we're told that cost is not even a factor - not even a factor! - in hiring H1bs. No no, the skills simply don't exist among American workers! It's not that we're dramatically undercutting the labor market and that the skills ABSOLUTELY exist, and in quantity, but for 50k more a year. It's not that we're importing foreigners as scabs against American labor, the skills just DON'T EXIST.

But if that's true... why does raising the cost of H1bs by less than the median tech salary suddenly destroy the entire edifice? I mean, if these skills really don't exist in the US, I guess American companies just need to pony up. But it's not companies panicking about the extra cost that they just HAVE to eat, is it? It's H1bs and the entire grift industry around it that are panicking. Wait, but... that means... cost is a factor. In fact, if H1bs are panicking that costing 100k more to be employed is going to make them unemployable... that necessarily implies that cost was the ONLY factor that led to them being employed... So, the entire system is, was, and always has been a lie. It was always and only and forever about hiring foreign workers for cheaper than Americans. Oops, the Emperor has no clothes.

Looking at https://jobs.now/, these companies deliberately post job listings in low-circulation newspapers to be able to claim that there are no American workers. I think you're right on the money.

An acquaintance was posting on Facebook about hiring iconographers to paint frescos on the inside of the church. There aren't many such people in the US, it's quite specialized, so they were bringing over people from Eastern Europe to do it. Presumably if it cost another $100,000 they would wait for a different administration to reverse the decision. They would probably not go ahead and hire an American, because they want a very specific look, and also it's a team of several people. Possibly for that sum of money they could send some Americans to Eastern Europe, train them for several years under a master there, and have them come back and do the work. On net, I would be fine with that solution, and might have volunteered as an apprentice.

I don't know how many work visas are odd little edge cases like that, and can appreciate a law that doesn't try to incentivize more people to make their IT help desk or whatever look like a quirky little cultural job.

In practice, I suspect that you'd cover these people as religious worker visas. Even if they're lay.

Obviously Bulgarians are the best at icons(and nothing else, I might add). But bringing in people for this specific need is quite doable without an H1B.

I would accept a neoclassical art visa and make it very generous, in exchange for the Trump Administration firing hellfire missiles at architectural students and their maniac mentors - ala Nasser Al-Awlaki.

At the very least, it would lead to a renaissance in brutalist bunker design.

While I am totally on board that H1Bs are an excellent wage suppression tool. My business autism compels me to point out that it's simultaneously possible for an essential skill/thing/McGuffin to be required but also have a higher marginal cost than the marginal revenue it provides. Your business doesn't work if this is true, but it's not impossible.

Isn't any sort of immigration a wage suppression tool?

Yet we, the United States, need it. We have 4% of the world's population and a fertility rate of 1.62 (also for the "race conscious crowd" amongst us, don't look closely at which race has the top fertility rates here). We need immigrants to maintain our long-term economic domination, or at least to slow down our decline if it is inevitable. If China or India gets their shit together, they'll out-compete us on demographics alone, and it's increasingly apparent that at least China is getting its shit together.

If we need immigrants, I rather they be from the top percentiles of other countries.

Hispanics technically have the highest fertility rate in the US, but it's falling much faster- every sober commentator agrees that the most demographically stable major group in the US is white conservatives. I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Immigration increases wages in the long run

Is there a rival to the United States that is experiencing a demographic boom? Are you afraid of the coming Nigerian wars or something? Any potentially rich country (which obviously doesn't include India lol) of the future has demographics much worse than white Americans

Chinese demographics are much worse than the US, I’m pretty sure they are sub-1 fertility rate and have been for years at this point. Sure the population is large but if half of their population is 50+ they are long-term not going to turn into some superpower

China graduates several times as many scientists and engineers as the US every year. Even if each of them is of lesser quality and their future demographic collapse is certain, that doesn't mean they aren't a rival in the short-term.

If China or India gets their shit together, they'll out-compete us on demographics alone, and it's increasingly apparent that at least China is getting its shit together.

While I agree with your general argument, I don't think this is true of India. The only potential peer competitors of the US are China and the EU, at least this century.

For the race conscious crowd, immigration can not ever be a solution to a fertility problem.

Suppose you were an ethnic nationalist Japanese man concerned about replacement rates. Would it really save Japan, in your view, if Japanese birth rates never recovered, but you replaced every single Japanese person with an Indian over 75 years, so that in three generations there are no Japanese people on this Earth, but there are 200 million "Japanese" Indians, and the GDP line never stopped going up?

As usual, the Trump admin picks a real problem and then decides on the most retarded possible solution and executes it with the finesse of a linebacker. Plus half of it is walked back already.

If the goal was to raise $100K over the 3 year term of an H1B, then raising the salary floor to about $200K or so which would easily raise $35K/pp/y. That's far simpler, fixes the corruption around the marginally-paid and aligns everyone.

They are also raising the salary floor.

Then the fee story is unnecessary in addition to being unwise

Thank god. The H1-B system is well-known to be an absolute cesspit of corruption and fraud. The original purpose was for US businesses to selectively fill positions that there was a shortage of US talent for, but it's been heavily gamed by Indian diploma mills. Even the idea of a "labor shortage" doesn't really make sense when since it's not like the market would have never cleared, it was more an issue of the right pay/benefits. Indians were much more willing to put up with crappy conditions and lower pay, which made the field worse for everyone, and that's before talking about the blatant nepotism they'd often engage in.

Here's hoping the rule will actually stick, but given Trump's previous track record, I'm kind of doubtful. There's a high chance the courts either shred this outright, or at least significantly water it down.

Indians were much more willing to put up with crappy conditions and lower pay

The solution to that is the salary floor. Given that the modal diploma mill graduate isn't that smart, if you put the floor in the right place, firms won't pay that for what they get.

The salary floor is in the works. That is something which, to the best of my knowledge, needs to come from Congress. Thus the American Tech Workforce Act, which would raise the floor from $60,000 to $150,000, among some other things which all seem aimed at reducing the number of H1B visas. It would also get rid of the provision that allows recent graduates of American universities to work here for three years.

Agreed. This 100K payment thing seems less effective than a salary floor, which is an idea that's been floating around for a while. That, and don't tie H1Bs to employers like serfdom so they'll be less willing to put up with crappy conditions.

I think in some of these cases (I'm going to not express an opinion on the policy change itself at the moment) we're seeing the lawyers in the administration find the closest approximation that is (arguably) allowed by the text Congress passed. In this case, it seems to be that they're allowed to recoup the costs of the program via fees (and government accounting is famous for keeping costs reasonable). I suspect --- but would need to wade into far more details than I care to tonight --- that they weren't directly empowered to raise the salary floor. The first AI agent I asked suggests that the floor is set by Department of Labor statistics, which may not be easy to change without even larger side effects.

Isn't tying H1-Bs to the employer just a necessary function of the entire concept? The company applies to hire them for a specific position it claims it cannot find Americans for. Ending the corporate bondage is just ending the entire program.

They could just ask Congress to change the law. Trump can whip congressional Republicans to do pretty much whatever he wants, and there would be more than enough Democrats in favor of liberalizing H1-B work restrictions that it would almost certainly pass.

Yes, I suppose it is theoretically possible to functionally end the program by just tolerating free immigration by anyone who ostensibly has a job, but I'm not sure why you think the Trump administration would not just tolerate that, but actively spend political capital (such as a scorched earth revolt by it's base) to achieve that end?

Hooray economic zone?

But if in exchange you make the fee be 150k paid then first employer over three years (and renewals cost 75k for every additional three years), then you would probably severely limit the people coming over to be only truly good people.

Why would an employer pay any of that if there was no restriction on the H1-B dipping to a different job? From an employer who can afford to pay them more because they didn't just drop a bunch of money and HR hours on bringing them over?

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It helpfully clarifies that the issue is not actually exploitation of H1-Bs and is in fact just opposition to immigration.

Hooray economic zone?

Can you clarify what this means? The US is an economic zone. It will still be an economic zone if it expels every single foreign-born individual and closes the borders.

Things can have more than one reason. AIUI, a large part of the appeal of the H1-B from the immigrant perspective is that it's a foot in the door that leads to permanent and eventually chain immigration. That might be more tolerable if we were getting generational talents and specific, genuinely needed skills, but the system seems to be systematically gamed to hell and back.

Can you clarify what this means?

The US isn't just an economic zone. Put it this way, would you be ok with being deported to India if it made numbers on a chart go up? Or do you think you have some sort of right to be here?

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Indians were much more willing to put up with crappy conditions

If people's true objection to H-1B workers is that they allow employers to get away with shitty employment practices and bad working conditions then the correct way to fix that is to lobby for the government to end at will employment and introduce unfair dismissal/working standards directive regulations etc. like we have here in Europe. That will go a much longer way and be more legally secure long term for ensuring better rights for American workers.

In reality the true reasons why people don't want H-1B are those that (still) can't be talked about in polite society and so we all get put through this charade instead.

The low pay and bad conditions is one part, but solving that with regulation has proven to be worse than the problem in Europe. When there is an easy solution in front of us in America: Ban fake resume H1Bs and let Iowa State and Florida Atlantic grads with B averages actually get STEM jobs, it is not a hard tradeoff.

To be honest, I wasn't aware that the problem that H1B visa holders generally are not good at the jobs they are typically allegedly overqualified for was not a topic that could be brought up in polite society. But maybe that is because I work in the legal field now and only interact with engineers as part of my job. Where I work, time falsification is a huge point of discussion, for example.

I can talk about the true reasons in polite society: it undercuts wages and makes an underclass of workers who effectively cannot leave their jobs. It is an attack on the wages of a subset of professional workers.

The solution to that problem is to allow H-1B workers to shift employers after say 1-2 years which is how Canada and Australia do it with their permanent residence process, plus put a penalty on the employer if a worker they sponsor leaves a job with them to go elsewhere (like for example restricting them from sponsoring further workers in the short term) to ensure they provide good enough conditions that migrant workers don't want to leave them.

I'd go further and let them take any job at any employer. Assuming the new employer will sponsor them. I think tying people to their jobs is generally bad. And if the market determines such a person is suited for a different job title with more or different responsibilities then they should be allowed to do it. The fact that they have to ask bureaucrats for permission to professionally grow by accepting new job titles with more or different responsibilities is horrible.

For instance, supposedly decades ago Massachusetts' enforceable non-compete contracts slowed their tech industry growth and resulted in California overtaking them. Locking employees into their jobs is enforced stagnation and yet another scheme to push down wages. Such contracts were greatly restricted in scope in 2018 and completely banned last year. Good riddance.

If an employer finds an underpriced asset who then leaves 2 years later they get punished? Kinda nonsensical implications even if employer working in good faith.

I'm a fan of three-strikes type rules. If one guy does it there are multiple possible explanations but if people keep leaving maybe something is going on.

Nothing prevents the employer from offering higher pay to the worker to keep them there. People, especially migrants who are new to the country will place a premium on stability so unless they're being paid significantly under what they could get on the free market and the employer refuses to budge the large majority of them will choose to stay put.

Depends on the enterprise. Employees can easily graduate the pay scale of one organization especially in tech.

This is also a key problem with the industry that would be solved if the market was less confounded by things like H1B visas. Very few people have to leave the car dealership they work at to get paid fairly.

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Why would Trump’s constituents, and the wider voting public, want this when they can just opt for the simpler solution and turn off the tap?

Why would you prefer a total overhaul of American labor law and work culture instead of restricting a program that’s very unpopular with the American public?

I think increasingly, day by day, it’s becoming rather easy to state the preferences of the Trump base and the American voter more broadly in polite society, and it’s increasingly difficult for the people who oppose it who vocalize their opposition without revealing hidden preferences.

What is the executive even allowed to do here? Does the law let the president turn off the tap?

Congress is so passive that presidents end up enacting policy through rather strained interpretations of existing law. The law says they get to impose processing fees? Then instead of $250 it is $100k. And then hope courts agree this is valid.

Congress is so passive that presidents end up enacting policy through rather strained interpretations of existing law. The law says they get to impose processing fees? Then instead of $250 it is $100k. And then hope courts agree this is valid.

No, it's much worse than that. There's a law (8 U.S.C. § 1182(f)) which says the president may exclude or restrict certain classes of aliens if they are detrimental to the interests of the United States. The proclamation uses that discretion to impose the fee -- it's a "restriction". The law does not mention fees. This is IMO the sort of thing the Major Questions Doctrine is supposed to rule out; you shouldn't be able to build an entire regulatory structure on what appears to be an emergency provision. I doubt the Supreme Court has the balls to go against Trump on this, though.

What is the executive even allowed to do here? Does the law let the president turn off the tap?

The executive didn't seem very concerned with this with the Tariffs or with DOGE. Why start now?

The tariff case is at the Supreme Court now. IIRC, Trump won on most but not all of the DOGE things.

Because turning off the tap doesn't prevent shitty employers from being shitty directly, while introducing proper employment protections and letting migrant workers switch jobs by right does this. Why go for the roundabout way where your stated preferred policy aims may be reified as a second order consequence when you can just legislate for it directly?

Regulations of workplace conditions being poorly implemented is so frequent that it is basically the iron law of workplace regulations. Your solution is akin to proposing amputation of a person's leg to solve their athlete's foot.

Because shitty employers access to a virtually unlimited pool of willing foreign serfs enables much of the shitty behavior in the first place, and it’s a much simpler and direct way to put upward pressure on employment conditions by siloing off the pool of potential ‘employees’ that would accept them in the first place.

Cutting the Gordian knot is always preferable to some theoretical future action that is so complicated and conditional its chance of success is slim.

The perfect being the enemy of the good and whatnot.

I’ll state again; the H1B program and its consequences are uniquely unpopular with the Trump base and broadly unpopular in the American voting public, therefore this attack on it seems very politic and straightforward. Is there some special reason you’re defending it?

As an American, I’m puzzled as to why I should emulate European employment practices that have resulted in such a weak economy and society rather than seek to return to the health and dynamism of the American past? Or construct a uniquely American future based on our own values?

return to the health and dynamism of the American past

That's right. Bring Ellis Island back. As long as someone is not a felon, bigamist or anarchist and has a ticket to their ultimate destination and $1780 dollars per person, let them come and work without recourse to public funds.

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Americans by and large like at will employment. To the American mind a company should be able to fire who they like, unless they're discriminating or something, because otherwise managers will be less willing to hire(and it does seem basically true that the American labor market is more flexible and easier to find a job in compared to internationally. Illegals enjoy their higher wages but they also love the ability to find a new employer comparatively easier, for example).

A lot of it is cultural. I really don’t mind third world elites, probably 85% of my apartment building consists of them and they are generally polite, comparatively well dressed, keep to themselves and keep communal spaces clean. Having grown up around rich Americans I can’t really say they are any less pleasant to be around.

But the last 30 years have seen large numbers of peasants come in, in addition to existing third world peasant populations like the Mirpuris in England, rural Anatolians in Germany and so on.

A few very rich westernized Bangladeshis in Mayfair and Chelsea doesn’t bother (almost) anyone. Tower Hamlets becoming a Sylheti Islamist ethnostate does. This is pretty simple stuff.

I understand that Canada and the UK have this problem, but I've never seen a South Asian ghetto in America. Perhaps a few neighborhoods in Queens come close, but in general Indian immigrant enclaves seem cleaner and more orderly than average, certainly compared to their Black or Latino equivalents. If there's some corner of Silicon Valley where H1-B's are shitting in the street while pretending to work entry-level code monkey jobs, I'm curious to know where that is.

but I've never seen a South Asian ghetto in America

Patterson, New Jersey. Maybe not a "ghetto" but no 5 star resort either.

My sister's neighborhood has recently hit a 30% ish tipping point, and now is a constant hotbed of HOA litigation whereas before there were no issues that took more than a piece of mail to resolve.

I have, where I live has a very large Desi population and in my line of work I have to deal with a lot of relatively lower class Indians.

The negative effects on the social fabric are distinct from large scale Latino immigration but notable. There’s a clustering effect that I can see happening in real time.

Where I live they’re neck and neck with El Salvador as the major origin point of migrants, and now that El Salvador isn’t a violent hellhole but rather a stable and prosperous country, the flow of people from there to here is slowing down.

I mean, my metro features areas that are more Indian than white(like the city of Irving). The Indian parts are much nicer looking than the mexican parts, even if I prefer the mexican parts for a variety of reasons. I'm curious where these Indian ghettos are and what they look like- AFAIK there's simply not a lot of dalits coming to the USA.

I'm not entirely opposed to the things you advocate for, but for me this is more of an object-level issue. I really don't want to have to have to compete against a billion Indians, especially when the field has relatively high unemployment at the moment.

I really don't want to have to have to compete against a billion Indians

Sure, that's a valid way to feel, but do you equally accept the arguments of liberal elites who want to exclude US citizen conservatives from being able to compete for elite jobs for the same reason, especially when elite overproduction means their children now have to work harder than they themselves had to for these sorts of positions?

Your culture provides no reciprocity, you advocate for competition because where you come from has nothing to offer us. You appeal to the spirit of competition in order to manipulate us into allowing you into our society. I just don't want to live with you; I don't want you in my neighborhood. I don't want to compete with you- I don't want my children to compete with you. I just don't want you around. You only care about competition because you only get upside from that arrangement, you have nothing at stake. I have my neighborhood at stake, and much more than that from the prospect of allowing millions of Indians to live with me "because competition."

"I really don't want to have to have to compete against a billion Indians" isn't an argument, it's an expression of a preference.

@TheAntipopulist might have some kind of political principle behind his statement, but if he does, he hasn't expressed it. He's just expressed a preference to face less competition from Indians. As for me, personally, I just want to face less economic competition from people in general, it doesn't matter to me whether they're US citizens or foreigners.

As for me, personally, I just want to face less economic competition from people in general, it doesn't matter to me whether they're US citizens or foreigners.

Fair enough, that's actually defensible. I wouldn't agree with it but at least it is a logical reason.

but do you equally accept the arguments of liberal elites who want to exclude US citizen conservatives from being able to compete for elite jobs for the same reason

No, because citizenship actually means something. Which means that, in spite of the countless issues I have with our black underclass, I prioritize them over illegal Mexicans competing for their same jobs.

Citizenship means nothing to me. I just want to have less economic competition, whether it's from other US citizens or from foreigners.

You really ought to try to have some feeling of fellowship with your fellow citizens. At a minimum, pretending that citizenship means nothing is a big part of what allowed the woke madness (especially in regards to immigration) to take hold in the first place. But this (surprisingly coherent) video from Sam Hyde might help convince you for other reasons: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YvcUQI6gAaI?si=yIqiiZSn1C4nAos9

I don't see any reason to have a feeling of fellowship with my fellow citizens, specifically, as opposed to having a feeling of fellowship with groups defined in other ways. But I do see that in certain situations, it is best for society in general to at least pretend to have a feeling of citizenship.

So I think you do have a point about the woke madness.

For me one of the interesting things about immigration is that, I think that for the most part, neither wokes nor right-wingers have any real principles about it.

If most people illegally crossing the US border were white conservative Christians, the wokes would be demanding to build a border wall and the right-wingers would be setting up sanctuary cities.

More comments

What if we don't want those things, because the market will naturally sort out good conditions if the Indians are gone.

What makes you believe it's the Indians causing poor employer behaviour rather than say pretentious US citizen rurals (or conservatives or whatever) who at the moment can also compete freely for these good jobs? Would you be OK with explicit policies that tried to limit their access to "elite" jobs because them trying to supply labour is little different than Indians trying to supply labour?

  • -12

There aren't a ton of rednecks competing for these jobs, and while they have somewhat different workplace expectations, it's not India tier different.

What if the Indian population goes back to their country of Origin, takes a moment of pause to help right the historical wrongs suffered by the Backwards castes and give them their moment in the sun instead of trying to dodge overseas to avoid the truly needful passing over of privilege.

because them trying to supply labour is little different than Indians trying to supply labour?

Objection, facts not in evidence.

"I don't want H-1B workers because I would prefer, as much as possible, not to compete with other people for jobs" can be said in most kinds of polite society, I think. It might make you seem selfish, but it wouldn't make you seem like a terrible person.

Your comment is analogous to "I don't want increased opportunities for US rurals because I would prefer, as much as possible, not to compete with other people for jobs which US rurals will do if they are given the same opportunities as me". If a liberal elite made such a comment in regards to elite jobs they'd be raked over the coals in the current zeitgeist and absolutely get called a terrible person.

  • -10

They might be called a terrible person on social media, but it's not a statement I would be worried about making in polite company in person, like at a party or something, as long as I said it in such a phrasing and tone of voice as to make it clear that what makes me happy about having less competition is the having less competition part, not hurting others.

I'm not specifying a particular group any more than you're specifying H-1B workers in your example. Would you be just as OK with someone who is a liberal elite and wanted to prevent conservatives (amongst others, like the poor) from being able to compete for elite jobs because that way there's less competition for them and their kids to overcome to get these elite jobs?

Sorry, I misread your comment. See my other reply. But to your question, yeah I'd be fine with it if it seemed like the motivation was just a global desire to avoid competition, not some particular hatred of conservatives.

By the way, I'm not a conservative, so your example might be a bit mis-targeted.

Well there goes most of my complaints.

To be clear:

1.) This is NOT an annual fee. It’s a one-time fee that applies only to the petition.

2.) Those who already hold H-1B visas and are currently outside of the country right now will NOT be charged $100,000 to re-enter.

H-1B visa holders can leave and re-enter the country to the same extent as they normally would; whatever ability they have to do that is not impacted by yesterday’s proclamation.

3.) This applies only to new visas, not renewals, and not current visa holders.

It will first apply in the next upcoming lottery cycle.

I'm surprised they removed the fee for renewals too.

Jeez-us. I mean, great that they've walked it back to a more sensible policy. But they literally had people convinced that anybody abroad would be paying a $100k fee to re-enter tomorrow. Apple's immigration lawyers sent me an official communique about this. It's the tariffs all over again. Sowing this kind of certainty is not ok.

Trump may not be Hitler, but he might be Hilter.

Right after Lutnick said yesterday that it would be an annual fee. LOL.

This administration acts weird. Announcing tariffs and then cancelling them, leaving manufacturing companies with no idea how to plan in the long term. Waving H1-B red meat in front of the voters and then snatching it away. Strange messaging.

And yet I'm here arguing with people who seem to think that the administration hasn't started any major wars yet, so its relationship with the truth is actually better than previous presidents, don't you get it?

Sort of like when driving, it's often more important to be predictable than anything else, big democratic economies like ours work best when there's some general stability and transparency. Bad communication leads to inefficiency and I believe it's partly why the economy is doing so poorly.

Sort of like when driving, it's often more important to be predictable than anything else, big democratic economies like ours work best when there's some general stability and transparency

I know what you mean and I don’t even disagree but equally stable, predictable managed decline like we have in the UK isn’t good either. It can be worth a bit of uncomfortable screwing around if that gets you out of a stable attractor.

Assuming it gets you into a better attractor

Of course. But you can't know until you try, so ultimately it's just a question of how dissatisfied you are with the status quo.

Ok, this turns the proposal from an absolute joke into something that you can put a (thin) veneer of respect on, which makes it much more dangerous as it might actually stick.

Of course I'm sure the original proposal from Trump himself was a $100k yearly/each entry fee and now footsoldiers of the administration in their characteristic fashion are trying to sanewash the policy.

Why was it an absolute joke, according to you?

I mean the whole idea that the correct thing to tax was every single entry of an H-1B worker into the US in the first place is ludicrous. Even if you believe H-1B workers damage the US the amount of damage they cause doesn't change if they take 0 or 4 visits outside the US for holidays/on work/to visit family etc. etc., there's no sensible reason why anyone would decide it's the individual entry of a H-1B worker into the US which causes detriment (not to mention the complete silence on how entries of people who are dependents of the H-1B worker would be handled). Calling the policy half-baked would be doing it a credit.

Ah, you're critiquing the details of the policy, not the idea of the policy.

Well yes, as with so many things Trump, the implementation concept is strange, the members of administration seem to not be on the same page about what it entails, and it's likely to be walked back.

Yeah, a $100,000 one-time fee feels a little high, but it's not a disaster (except to the Indian consulting companies, who totally deserve it). Still has Major Questions problems though; Trump is attempting to build an entirely new regulatory structure on a provision that simply allows denying or restricting classes of aliens. He's also claiming H-1Bs are harmful when I'm pretty sure the legislation establishing the visa says otherwise. If Roberts had any balls I'd expect this to fail, but it seems to me the prevailing winds have changed in Trump's favor and the wimpy move is to allow this to stand.

Still has Major Questions problems though

Which is silly because the law already allows the administration to set the salary floor for H1Bs and you can easily convince yourself that you can raise exactly the same revenue that way, using authority you already have.

One of the most common tools of effective leadership (LBJ was famous for this) is deciding what you want to do and then finding an existing legal authority for doing it.

Trump admin replaces rules-based system with corrupt exercise of personal executive discretion, episode 2847. The big catch in all this is that the administration can waive the fee.

Also, it's probably illegal, though that hasn't been a major impediment so far.

I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires

This seems incoherent. H1bs are simultaneously undercutting wages but also not actually a replacement for domestic equivalents?

American workers are the most highly paid in, literally, the world. Companies preferring far lower quality but much cheaper replacements is the most plausible thing in this whole scenario.

People are complaining about different H1Bs here. Some are critical skills that USA lacks, some are race-for-talent bullshit, but much of H1B is simple visa abuse like this https://h1bgrader.com/job-titles/pickleball-program-manager-70o5jd4vkz/lca/2024 It isn't a cheaper H1B coming in to replace an expensive US citizen, its a new title stuffed up to get someone in through visa abuse.

Perhaps we should consider that these cheaper replacements aren't replacements, but simple corruption by in-house hiring managers extracting funds from their host organization to bring in new hires for in-group coordination. https://kotchen.com/jury-finds-cognizant-engaged-in-pattern-or-practice-of-discrimination/.com The health of the company is utterly secondary to them, the advantage is to get that sweet in-group coordination in the company to begin with. If the parent organization or even parent country is diminished as a result of this, who the fuck cares, the gora deserve it anyways for colonialism.

H1bs are simultaneously undercutting wages but also not actually a replacement for domestic equivalents?

The simple existence of InfoSys is a strong argument against the efficient market hypothesis, the legitimacy of whatever contracting process got them involved, and a kind and loving God. The expectations for that class of ‘IT’ shop are low, but it is very, very hard to understate their competence. They’re banned from contracting with the Indian government. Cognizant and Tara are only a little better, and that’s in the sense that they’ve been caught benching (rather than replacing) employees that were such a liability as to be actively dangerous.

It’s most obvious in IT: a bad employee can absolutely wreck your entire business at the outlier, and cost you five or six times their annual salary at the more common end (go go gadget AWS). But there’s a lot of areas with the tail end risk are extreme.

It is well known that academic and credential fraud amongst Indians is rife, which is why you see the most superhumanly qualified employees in the world apply for a job that pays 50,000 USD a year.

Come on. It doesn't pass the smell test. I am tired of addressing arguments to this effect. The only good faith reason I can see for people presenting arguments in this light is that they genuinely do not know anything about the subject at all. If that's the case, why do they bother 'just asking questions' over something that can be trivially researched. We have AI now, even. You don't even need to google search it anymore. They are undercutting wages by lying their asses off and credulous HR departments with no technical knowledge hire them because beancounters want to pump growth by cutting salaries this quarter.

I don't give a damn about your reverence for rules or processes. The human intestine is a process, but you don't praise its product: you flush it away. Breaking the rules in this case is a good thing. It should happen more.

I don't give a damn about your reverence for rules or processes. The human intestine is a process, but you don't praise its product: you flush it away.

Upvoted for this alone.

I don't give a damn about your reverence for rules or processes. The human intestine is a process, but you don't praise its product: you flush it away. Breaking the rules in this case is a good thing. It should happen more.

I'd just like to chime in here for expressing this view, which I share, in such a clear and pithy manner.

It is well known that academic and credential fraud amongst Indians is rife

Is it? I'm sure it's non-zero, but is it of an actual scale that we should care? "Everybody knows" weirdly doesn't seem to include anybody I know in the tech industry. Admittedly, these people are all employed, so they're not really worried about being outcompeted by an allegedly illiterate Indian software dev.

The pervasiveness of blatant racism amongst the "everybody knows crowd" does not exactly lend them credibility, and the severity of this supposed problem seems wildly overblown by people who want to use it as cover for more general anti-immigrant sentiment. (I'm old enough to remember when the nativists were promising it was only 'illegals' they had a problem with).

I don't give a damn about your reverence for rules or processes.

I know you don't, but you should at least care about naked corruption (but I know you don't care about that, either). Flawed processes should be replaced with better processes, not replaced with arbitrary and easily corruptible discretion from an administration that is already among the most corrupt in US history.

  • -12

If we're trading anecdotes 100% of my industry cohort (consulting, so competing directly with cognizant etc) including citizen indians will speak about this 1 on 1.

It is obvious, it is pervasive, and it is why offshoring has such a poor long term outlook.

Admittedly, these people are all employed, so they're not really worried about being outcompeted by an allegedly illiterate Indian software dev.

I don't have to be unemployed to be concerned about downward pressure on wages due to an increased supply of labor.

"Everybody knows" weirdly doesn't seem to include anybody I know in the tech industry.

Does anyone you know work for Infosys / Tata / Wipro, or work closely with anyone who works for that cluster of companies? My third hand impression is that those particular companies are the main problem, and that the venn diagrsm of (people working at serious tech companies) and (people with experience with infosys) is two non overlapping circles.

No. Not going into specifics, but mostly a mix of prominent tech firms and small startups. A lot of Indian co-workers, but no distinctive complaints.

The pervasiveness of blatant racism amongst the "everybody knows crowd" does not exactly lend them credibility,

Yes, and? Are they wrong? Who is more right: the racists who pay attention to the issue, or the know-nothings that pretend that this has not been going on for a decade? The burden of evidence is heavily tilted towards proving that it is the case: that Indians are exploiting the system, en-masse. Where's your proof that they're not?

Very recently, a Walmart executive was fired for taking kickbacks from Indians (he was Indian as well.) Is this corruption you don't care about? Or the very obviously noticeable fact that Indians in middle management only hire their own? Or the systematic abuse of H1B that three-quarters of the allotted visas are for Indian nationals?

The H1B subject is the hottest topic of internal right-wing debate for the past year: how could you not know?

Or the systematic abuse of H1B that three-quarters of the allotted visas are for Indian nationals?

How it this fact by itself evidence of systematic abuse? India is the most populous country in the world and all of them want to be engineers in the US. The only other place that could provide a comparable number of applicants is China, which is both a geopolitical rival and a much nicer place to live these days, explaining the disparity in numbers.

credulous HR departments with no technical knowledge

This is exactly right. Just wanted to highlight the best part of your post.

It's fairly common for indian and chinese hiring managers to only ever hire connationals.

As much as progressives bewail Trump, Trump did something fundamentally progressive here.

To use the language of progressives, the CEO class took away jobs from hard working and skilled Americans by giving them to H1B hires instead, lowering wages and worsening working conditions. By effectively stopping H1B Visas, he is redistributing wealth so that more middle class working Americans can have a living wage.

I find it supremely ironic how progressives decry this move when they have been wanting less money in the CEO class and more money with “hard working Americans” for so many years.

I think that probably most self-identified progressives do oppose the move for various reasons (brown people harmed, desire to oppose Trump in everything, etc.). However, I think that saying "progressives decry this move" is too simplistic. "progressive" is not well defined, and you only link one person writing on one website. From my online impressions of the last 24 hours, it seems to me that "dirtbag leftists" like the move. I think it would probably be fair to say that "leftists who care more about cultural issues than economic issues oppose the move".

If I seem overly pedantic, it is because I have observed how much political discourse on social media has been damaged by people's tendency to say things of the form " believe in / are doing <thing I don't like>". Which is often necessary, because it is impossible to discuss politics without generalizing, but I think that generalizing too much causes discussions to lack important nuance.

I think it would probably be fair to say that "leftists who care more about cultural issues than economic issues like the move".

The other way around, no?

Whoops, you're right, thanks! Slip of the fingers. Just edited.

But it comes at the cost of brown people as well

He also tried to get rid of the SALT tax exemption in his first term, which is probably the single most progressive piece of tax policy pushed in the past 70 years (and perhaps the only thing AOC agreed with him on).

Prediction: in 50 years historians will look on Trump like they are now looking on Nixon- unexpectedly the most progressive president of their cohort, and completely unrecognized for it in their time.

Trump 1 was okay in my view, but Trump 2 has been a disaster due to SALT reinstatement and other OBBBA bad ideas, not to mention tariffs and DOGE's hyperincompetence. With the deficit expansion, I think the long term outlook is pretty bad.

That said, I have no problem with this H1B change given the clear abuses in the existing system.

What were the bad things done by DOGE?

My main complaints are haphazard rather than targeted cuts, wild overcounting of savings from cuts, failure to make substantive cuts (i.e., no government departments are more in need of efficiency than Medicare), disorganized nature of cuts leading to short term wasted resources, simultaneously serving as a means of political revenge (e.g., cuts to DEI and arts, though I personally find these cuts acceptable given deficit) but also making a whole bunch of cuts to basic research and data gathering. In general, they did not seem to hire a good team for DOGE, which resulted in a great deal of disorganization, squandering political capital and what could have been an opportunity for a sustained, broad recommitment to efficiency.

I think their biggest issue was was letting any details out. If they could’ve kept things under wraps for 3 months, validated the data, and not get the lawfare against them, then I think there could’ve been a difference.

Also, I think Vivek should’ve helmed a separate team that took aim at the regulatory issue.

The US is not an economic zone.

While the implementation is cruel (giving people out of the country essentially 24 hours to return), this had to happen.

The 2008 housing collapse could arguably be blamed on the appraisers. They were going along with the scam and giving 20% annual appreciation to houses, while the rating agencies were fudging the quality of the debt being sold. People were supposed to be watching each other, but they weren't and everybody was getting rich.

In US tech jobs, the blame lies on the HR departments. The obvious fake resumes the obvious nepotism and discrimination between Indian hires, etc.

Everybody who works in this industry has seen how this scam functions. You get one Indian in a position of power in your company, and shortly thereafter, the entire company is Indian, and the quality of work has dropped to 0. HR doesn't understand because the resumes claimed that these were all "high quality" employees with tons of certifications (fake) degrees (fake) and experience (fake).

Yes this benefited many Indians, benefitted India, and may have benefitted some American companies, but it was all at the detriment of middle class Americans.

Again, we are not an economic zone. The H1B system was blatantly abused, specifically by Indians, and now it's ending. Good.

(Although my guess is that this get's reversed over the weekend, I'm still going to enjoy the few more hours where it's real)

The US is not an economic zone.

What does this mean? Like, policy-wise, this idea would seem to suggest support for social services and doing our best to ensure a minimum standard of living for all Americans. In practice, it seems like the people who say "the US is not an economic zone" are the people most prone to treating the US like an economic zone - indifferent to the welfare of their fellow citizens and primarily interested in making the country a captive market for the purposes of rent-seeking.

If only the party that historically supported those two things would treat their country like a community rather than an economic zone.

There's been a realignment. Trump (a pretty standard '80s New York liberal) reunited the FDR coalition. It started with Bill's (sold as "temporary, for the sake of winning") economic "triangulation," and evolved into this.

It is OK to think a community's culture needs time to adapt to change; it is OK to think this means immigration sometimes needs pauses; it is OK for a country to control immigration; it is OK for a country to decide how much immigration it wants right now; it is OK for that amount to be different at different times. (Runaway "none of that is OK, all of it is racist" is what led to this; but I'm sure you've heard that before.)

People have repeatedly voted to control immigration and had politicians not act on that. Members of the political class will sometimes allow that they are unshakably convinced that the economy needs immigration, needs more and more immigration, or else it will crash, period--and that's why they ignore the will of the people. Thus complaints about treating the community like an economic zone.

Not to mention the repeated "This will economically help more people worldwide than it hurts, and we'll have social programs to help out those it does hurt." Reality: We got the "giant sucking sound," we did not get the social programs. I'm old enough to have seen that happen over and over. I know that's frustrating when the party intended to do both, but there comes a point where intent doesn't matter. Right-wing (libertarian) economics without the left-wing social programs to ameliorate their effect is just...right-wing economics. Thus, again, complaints of treating a community like an economic zone.

We are in a predicament: We have an economic system designed around constant growth, yet actually, constant growth is not physically possible (see, you know, The Limits to Growth?). The political class' attitude has been to accept the former but not the latter. And to hope that immigration can prop up continued growth. Regardless of any negative externalities it...becomes clearer and clearer it does have (Bowling Alone etc.) Because if not, well, then what?

It still has those negative externalities, so.

Bowling Alone etc.

What does that have to do with immigration?

Very simply, "A country is not an economic zone" rebuts the idea that policy should be made purely for economic gain above other goods. Specifically, this is used in Far/Alt right circles against Neo-Cons and Liberals as a rebuttal against the idea of importing workers and offshoring work. The point of the argument is that a country is not an economic zone, but a culture, a people, and a land. An "American" is not someone who lives and works in America, or even merely an American citizen, but someone who shares American culture. In the American example, "American people" doesn't really mean anything because Americans are such a mix racially that there's no real such thing as "racial Americans." The point about culture is very real, though. For the most stark example on race, look no further than Japan. A "foreigner" with a Japanese passport who is even born in Japan is not and will never been considered "Japanese."

Consider the example of Japan for a minute. Suppose that in the blink of an eye, all Japanese people on Japan ceased to exist. Then, in another blink of an eye, Every single Japanese person that used to exist was instead replaced by Indians. How long do you suppose it will take before Tokyo resembles Mumbai or New Delhi? At that point, would "Japan" still exist? If you agree with "A country is not an economic zone," you would say that if that happened, Japan would essentially become India, and "Japan" would no longer exist outside of the name and as a number on a spreadsheet. Therefore, the more a country imports foreign workers in search of cheap labor and economic gain, the more that country destroys its own culture. Eventually, this reaches a critical mass where the country would have replaced its original population. This is essentially the death of the original country. Consider again the Japan example. Suppose that the Japanese people, instead of disappearing instantly, slowly went away over the next 20 years. Over the same 20 years, Indians come to settle Japan. I'll ask the same questions again. How long do you suppose it will take before Tokyo resembles Mumbai or New Delhi? At that point, would "Japan" still exist?

I'm partial to this argument as it's something that is not really in dispute outside of the West. I'm Chinese, and if you ask a Chinese person what "China" is, you'll get a very similar answer: Chinese culture, Chinese people, and China as a landmass. It's mainly the West (America, Canada, and the Eurozone) that's done away with this idea, much to their detriment in my opinion. Ask Canadians about how well importing Indian workers has been for them. Ask the British about how well the Muslim population gels with the native population.

Very simply, "A country is not an economic zone" rebuts the idea that policy should be made purely for economic gain above other goods.

Advocates for immigration do not contemplate immigration policy purely in economic terms. At least in the US, and to my knowledge in Canada, Australia, and Britain as well, support for immigration is often pitched as an expression of values or a crucial part of national greatness. More than a few progressive immigration advocates are averse to making economic arguments for immigration, preferring to couch it as a humanitarian obligation.

But, to be more direct: there is a massive unfilled gap between "A country is not an economic zone" and ideological ethnonationalism. The US is more than an economic zone now. It was more than an economic zone in the mid 19th century when it had functionally open borders. There is no actual substance behind saying "a country is not an economic zone". The people who say it are not cultural traditionalists, nor are they concerned for solidarity with their fellow citizens (and are in fact often openly disdainful of their well-being).

Consider the example of Japan for a minute.

I don't find this hypothetical to be interesting or relevant because it has no relationship to the actual reality of immigration policy anywhere. Whereas, "what if we had mass immigration" isn't even a hypothetical. It's American history. About ten million Germans and Irish immigrated during the 19th century. There was a great deal of anxiety about this: they were largely poor, many were (shudder) Catholic, they were uneducated, they were acculturated to despotism and would make poor citizens of a Republic, etc... Spoiler alert: it was actually fine, and nowadays anti-Irish/German bigotry is a punchline to suggest someone is a next-level racist. Similar things were said about the Italians, the Poles, the Japanese etc... and now they're all just Americans. By far the majority of conflict and integration problems that have arisen from large-scale immigration in the US have not been from immigrants but from nativist backlash against immigration.

Now, if you were deeply attached to maintaining the purity of superficial elements of Protestant Anglo-Scots culture, this was probably extremely distressing, but the reality of how humans act was bound to disappoint anyway: culture is dynamic everywhere and American culture had already substantially diverged from its British roots by the time of independence. Obsession with ethno-cultural purity thus strikes me as irrational.

I'm partial to this argument as it's something that is not really in dispute outside of the West.

Broke-ass losers I don't really know that that is indicative of much other than liberalism mostly being a western phenomenon. Outside of the West, ethnonationalism/ethnocentrism seems to have very mixed results. It certainly does not seem to promise harmony, stability, or prosperity. Conversely, here in the West it is very normal for immigrants to be scapegoated for issues they have little to do with (e.g. housing, economic stagnation) or simply serve as a focal point of resentment (e.g. Red staters mad that immigrants to Blue states take advantage of social services they don't have in their own states).

Before I do a long reply, let me ask you two questions. Are there any differences between the German, Irish, Polish, Italian, and Japanese examples you listed and the Indian and Muslim examples I listed other than just geography (i.e. one example is specific to the U.S. and the others are not)? If so, what are the differences between the examples you listed and the ones I listed, and are they large enough so that the examples you list don't apply anymore to immigration today?

If the answer is no, there aren't any differences, then we should just leave it at that.

Can you clarify what you mean by 'differences'? Because I feel like you are eyeing suggestively in the direction of HBD theories, which I find to be non-credible. Obviously, Germans, Japanese, and Indians are different groups of people, but no, I don't think there is some fundamental, underlying difference that makes Germans assimilable in the US and Indians not.

I'd suggest that all of the groups you listed (barring Japanese, who never existed in large enough numbers to matter) are at least of Christian denomination, and while cultural differences between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant are large, they're nowhere near as large as the differences between any Christian denomination and Hindu or Islam.

Further, the culture in the U.S. in the 18th century was vastly different from even modern day U.S. culture. Integration and assimilation was both expected and enforced. Nowadays, not only is it not expected, but to suggest that some immigrant group should integrate is treated as racist. You say that nativist backlash against immigration was an integration problem, but I'd suggest that it's the exact opposite. Nativist backlash happens when immigrants do not integrate. Without any pressure from natives, why should immigrants integrate? You see this exact problem in Canada and Europe. Do Indians in Canada behave like Canadians? I don't even mean that they need to stop being Hindu, but do they stop throwing their religious idols into public waterways or stop shitting on public beaches? Do Muslims in Great Britain act British? I don't even mean that they need to convert to Christianity, but do they not stab you for burning the Quran or not harass women for not wearing a covering?

a) I think you are underestimating the historical levels of animosity Anglo Protestants had towards Catholicism, especially in the first half of the 19th century. Anti-Catholicism was a major animating force behind the original nativist movement. b) Indian immigrants have assimilated absolutely fine so far c) I would also point towards the current level of animosity being directed towards the overwhelmingly-Catholic, European-descended immigrants from Latin America (despite protestations to the contrary, this is not confined to illegal immigrants). There's not nothing to the cultural compatibility argument, but it strikes me as being very weak, especially in an American context, and mostly deployed as a pretext for garden-variety racism and/or classism.

Integration and assimilation was both expected and enforced

Immigrants assimilate faster now than they did in the 19th century. I'll admit that I can't speak to the British experience, but here in the US the common critique that immigrants aren't assimilating isn't borne out. Immigrants learn English if they don't already speak it, intermarriage rates are high, etc... This is largely a conflict between the norms/aesthetics of (white) liberal and conservative Americans with immigrants as props, not between natives and immigrants.

It's American history. About ten million Germans and Irish immigrated during the 19th century. There was a great deal of anxiety about this: they were largely poor, many were (shudder) Catholic, they were uneducated, they were acculturated to despotism and would make poor citizens of a Republic, etc... Spoiler alert: it was actually fine, and nowadays anti-Irish/German bigotry is a punchline to suggest someone is a next-level racist. Similar things were said about the Italians, the Poles, the Japanese etc... and now they're all just Americans.

Putting aside the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment [1] [2], I don’t think that we can conclude that the immigration of these groups (which have indeed assimilated) has not had a huge impact on the American republic. One good piece of evidence that I’ve seen for this is a blogpost that analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants. Something along the lines of “the rightmost Italian-American Republicans have views on fiscal policy to the left of the median American Democrat.” Assuming that these conclusions are true [3], if immigration really does significantly impact the long-term political fabric of America, then it’s hard to just brush off the effects of immigration as changes to mere “superficial elements” of the culture, as you put it.

Beyond those specifics, I think you’re being too dismissive of the desire to not see drastic changes in the political and cultural makeup of one’s country. I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure, would you be happy if America instantly imported 10 million of the most hardcore traditionalist Afghanis? A way more extreme way of putting it: would you be happy if the number of red-tribe MAGA lunatics [insert further epithets here] suddenly tripled?

I would be surprised if you answered “yeah I’d be cool with that.” Now, if your argument is rather something like “those numbers are too large to be reasonable; realistically, we would be better able to assimilate the number of immigrants that are actually on the table in the real world”, then that makes more sense, but at this point, we’re just “haggling over the price”, as the old joke goes.

[1] For example, check out the political cartoon at the top of the Wikipedia page for “Hyphenated American”, calling American immigrants who retained their ancestral identities “freaks” and implying that they shouldn’t vote. In modern times, this sentiment would be relegated to the loony wingnut cartoons your grandma would send you, but at the time, that cartoon was published in Puck, a respected New York political cartoon magazine (ironically founded by an immigrant).

[2] Notably, Germans were assimilated in a mass ethnolysis in the 1910s and 1940s, for obvious reasons.

[3] And I sadly can’t seem to find this blogpost despite throwing all the search terms I can think of at Google. If anyone reading this can remind me of it, even if to debunk it (or especially if!), then I’d be really grateful.

the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment

I don't think that's actually true. The central group of contemporary concern, Hispanics/Latinos, are assimilating extremely quickly. The major difference I perceive between 1900 and 2025 is the acceptability of explicitly racism - everybody is still more than a little bit racist, but almost everyone agrees, on paper, that racism is bad and feels the need to launder racist claims through other paradigms.

analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants.

Assuming this is substantively correct, it doesn't meant much on its own. Different immigrant groups were not uniformly distributed around the country. Germans were heavily concentrated in the Midwest, Italians on the East coast, etc... These places have their own regional politics that will confound efforts to trace an ideological lineage through immigrant populations.

I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure

I think this hypothetical is nonsense. It's not far off asking, "in the absence of air, would you be happy taking a plane from NYC to London?"

The pressure to assimilate doesn't come from having people lecture you about the importance of assimilating. It comes from being immersed in the host society, from unavoidably picking up the norms and values of that society, from the countless petty conveniences of conforming to that society's expectations, from having your children grow up in that society. To a large degree it comes from being allowed to assimilate.

If you think the US right wing, more importantly the nationalists among it are economically liberal these days you have missed a few political cycles.

The reason Trump wants tariffs so bad (independently of whether they achieve this end) is quite literally the opposite of your claim.

Even if it gets reversed, the beneficial uncertainty it's introduced will remain and chill immigration a bit. It's still a good thing. The revolt of the public continues apace.

This may be "directionally correct" but it's too much and too sudden. This is currently positioned as a direct fuck-you to H-1B holders and the companies who hire them, with policy goals secondary. If they want to fix the abuse problem long term of companies underpaying H-1B, they can put a sliding salary tax for companies hiring under the median H-1B wage, up to a cap on the median wage. E.g. if you pay your tech guy 100k and median is 130k, then pay an addition 15k to the government.

Currently there are two problems:

  1. America has only 4% of the world's population but 25% of the GDP. We need to brain drain other countries to ensure economic dominance in the long term.

H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries. ~100-200k H-1B holders in the country is only 0.1% of the 160M workforce, which is evidence that it is used to attract exceptional talent, for the most part. Top companies like FAANG plays by the book here, they do not generally pay H-1Bs less than local talent, they just want the best people.

  1. There's H-1B abuse in lower tier consulting companies, where they use H-1B as a source of cheaper labor.

This is the problem the administration should fix by adding taxes and fees.

The difficulty is to solve both problems at once. I don't think the program is perfect, but effectively killing it will be detrimental to the US in the long term. Yes, instituting a 100k/year fee on top for every H-1B employee will effectively kill this program.

There are 580k h1bs.

Thanks for the correction, I looked at the wrong data.

When gradual, principled change becomes impossible, only blunt instruments remain. The last dutifully considered major policy the US was able to enact was the ACA 15 years ago. Governance since then has consisted of rule by fiat: sometimes the executive; sometimes the court. Doesn't matter. We're burning hard won norms for temporary positional advantage. Nobody really believes in the system anymore.

In this environment, a genteel and thoughtful reform of the H-1B program is impossible. It's as if Trump were some Ringworld Pak protector trying to stabilize a long-neglected world and, finding all the usual maintenance and repair mechanisms broken and almost all the stationkeeping thrusters stripped for frivolous reasons like ago by reckless people who didn't know the damage they were doing to their home, has to use the crudest and bluntest instrument imaginable just to stop the immediate problem.

What you're describing is acceptable collateral damage we have to incur to make the immediate crisis stop.

It's as if Trump were some Ringworld Pak protector trying to stabilize a long-neglected world and, finding all the usual maintenance and repair mechanisms broken and almost all the stationkeeping thrusters stripped for frivolous reasons like ago by reckless people who didn't know the damage they were doing to their home, has to use the crudest and bluntest instrument imaginable just to stop the immediate problem.

That's the nerdiest analogy I've ever had to read on the Motte.

Thanks, I think.

I mean the problem with incremental changes is that they’re often gamed along the way. If you make sudden drastic changes then you can’t simply keep going while your lawyer finds the loopholes. And thus you end up doing things like fudging job titles to make tge lower wages not taxable. Sure a senior developer might get 160K a year. But Pajeet is actually a junior developer (just ignore that his tasks are exactly like a senior developer). Or if it’s 180 days in country before fines or payments kick in, you just need to get the guy on a plane on day 180, wait a few days and bring him back on a fresh H1B. If you give the. Until tomorrow to cough up the money you can’t rules-lawfare your way out of it.

Having predictable laws that allow people to plan for the future is good actually.

Having predictable laws that allow people to plan for the future requires law-making/law-compliance to be a cooperative rather than competitive game, where at least roughly-similar goals are held by both the rule-makers and the rule-followers. If you are in a war, preventing the enemy from planning for the future is an obviously good thing.

It seems to me that there's a pretty good parallel here to the dynamics we see in gun regulation, where regulatory agencies are fundamentally hostile to the businesses and individuals attempting to operate under their regulation, and use regulatory ambiguity and mercurial rules-redefinition as basic tools of control against people who actively don't want to be controlled. There, when getting the counterparties to comply with one's intention grows prohibitive, we see government action retreat from even-handed, routine enforcement of clear rules, instead centering on "making examples" of people more-or-less at random and with little regard to whether they crossed the line or not. When people aren't sure where the law actually is or how bad the downside for crossing it might be, they get a lot more cautious about living on the borders of the law.

Legible rules can never constrain human will. People who do not share sufficient values cannot coordinate together, and this sort of pseudo-legal warfare is one example of how that plays out, it seems to me. Look on the bright side, probably no one gets shot in the head by federal agents in a nautical-twilight raid over this one.

I don’t think we're at war with legal immigrants who came here to work. H1Bs tend to integrate pretty well, follow the rules, and just generally are productive members of society. You can reasonably make the case that 700,000 is not the right number of H1Bs to have in the US. I don't think you can reasonably make the case that we should consider ourselves at war with them.

It seems to me that we have a conflict between companies who want to import foreigners who work for cheap and lack many legally-mandated employee protections they would be compelled to respect for native employees, and a faction now with control of the federal government who want them to pay native workers standard market wages with full protections instead. Certainly there seem to be a number of other commenters here framing it this way, including several claiming that the H1B visa system was "abused". I use quotes there, because it's pretty clear to me that in situations like this one, we say things like "this system was abused" when what we want to say, but cannot, is "they clearly broke the law". I'm pretty sure if we prosecuted these companies for violating immigration law, their legal defenses would succeed. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of people don't want them to do what they're doing, and are willing to coordinate efforts to make them stop doing it. That's the conflict, and in that conflict, as with FFL licensing under the previous administration, giving those regulated a clear, consistent, stable set of rules to work under is not a good way to achieve the regulator's objectives.

And as with FFL licensing under the previous administration, the issue is that the regulatory goals should be achieved by laws but are not popular enough to achieve the necessary support among elected legislators.

In any case I don’t know how saying "any h1bs who were abroad must pay $100k to reenter effective basically immediately" serves any non-applause-light purpose.

Sure a senior developer might get 160K a year. But Pajeet is actually a junior developer (just ignore that his tasks are exactly like a senior developer).

A few years ago (and maybe still) the game was that the real developers had "Software Engineer" titles and the Infosys programmers-by-the-pound were called "Programmers". Different salary for each, though they're the same job. So FAANG hiring $125-$200K H-1B Software Engineers didn't stop Infosys from hiring $60K programmers. Even though most of FAANGs rejects could do a better job than the Infosys people

This may be "directionally correct" but it's too much and too sudden.

With the pace of AI, I disagree. Everything is going to be fast and sudden and we need to be moving at pace.

There is going to be real economic fallout and unrest with AI. Look at the unemployment rate for CS grads. I suspect folks like Vance in the administration realize this, and this is part of getting ahead of it. People are not going to suffer massive white collar unemployment while we keep importing Indians to plug the gaps left.

Yes, instituting a 100k/year fee on top for every H-1B employee will effectively kill this program.

That’s the joke. If the H1-B program was being used by companies to bring in small numbers of absolutely indispensable exceptional talent (like they were all claiming) than a 100k per person fee shouldn’t be much of a problem.

100k per person per year. 100k per person per 3 year term, perhaps extensible to 6 years, would be more reasonable. This policy is bad because of the specific numbers chosen, the core idea ks fine.

An auction instead of a lottery would be better still, allowing the market to discover the price. Then you can mess with the cap until the market settles on a price you like. But I never particularly expected the government to listen to the economists here.

Also 24 hour notice is not reasonable here. That's just performative "fuck immigrants" posturing, which is par for the course for Trump but still disappointing.

$100k per person per year is totally reasonable. It wipes out the body shop business model, but a highly talented software engineer making $500k in TC at a FAANG will be just fine. This raises the bar for H1-B to the point where it will be used for what it was actually intended for, filling short-term gaps in highly specialized fields where demand vastly exceeds supply.

If the H1-B program was being used by companies to bring in small numbers of absolutely indispensable exceptional talent (like they were all claiming) than a 100k per person fee shouldn’t be much of a problem.

That's not what H-1B is for, regardless of what its proponents or opponents say. That's what E-1 and O-1 are for, though the priority dates make E-1 pretty useless for people from India or China, even if they ARE Ramanujan-level.

I think this policy actually seems pretty reasonable, if you are a company that is using this program to hire exceptional people you can afford it(google earns like 2 million per employee). If you have been abusing it to run your IT help desk then you won’t be able to do so any more. If it’s a lot more expensive it will also mean that it’s easier to get an H1Bs visa since the system won’t be flooded with applicants as it is now.

Access to the us labor market should be expensive. There a lot of negative externalities associated with the kind of inequality the us has now and enacting policies which increase wages are one of the best ways to address this. As an aside if you want to understand how detrimental this program has been in terms of suppressing wages for technical professionals just go onto https://www.clearancejobs.com/ and look at how much more these roles pay compare to similar roles in other industries where hiring foreigners is mostly prohibited.

just go onto https://www.clearancejobs.com/ and look at how much more these roles pay compare to similar roles in other industries

do they pay more? I browse ClearanceJobs on a decent basis, and I've found that it's mostly similar to the outside market, maybe a bit lower on average, even.

The policy is "directionally correct" but the effective date should be pushed back several months to lessen the immediate shock and the dollar amount has to be reduced to be more effective at encouraging good behavior while discouraging the bad ones.

Even FAANG can't afford 100k on top. The median total comp for an experienced engineer (IC4, IC5) is somewhere around 300k-400k and adding 100k on top of that means H-1B is effectively dead in the water. From personal experience working at big tech companies, it's not the H-1Bs that scare me, it's the off-shoring. Even at FAANG, I'm seeing entire teams getting moved to Brazil and Europe, and for head counts to only be assigned to non-US locations. Eliminating H-1Bs will only hasten this move.

Access to the us labor market should be expensive. There a lot of negative externalities associated with the kind of inequality the us has now and enacting policies which increase wages are one of the best ways to address this. As an aside if you want to understand how detrimental this program has been in terms of suppressing wages for technical professionals just go onto https://www.clearancejobs.com/ and look at how much more these roles pay compare to similar roles in other industries where hiring foreigners is mostly prohibited.

Can you quantify exactly how much the gap is? I looked around and it seems like for comparable roles at Boeing, the salary is in the ball park of median H-1B tech salary. If the difference is small, like 10-20k, then it's more appropriate to levy a smaller fee than 100k.

So either the compentencies only exist with the absolute best of the best who need to be onshored for elite FAANG activities... or they can find some random guys in Brazil to do it for pennies on the dollar?

The problem for the US is that the guys in Brazil are not spending their salaries in the US, they are spending them in Brazil. You want companies to leak money back into the national economy. A guy on an H-1B visa doesn't send it all as remittance to his home country. He's spending it on rent, groceries, gas, and coffee-flavored sugary milk from the nearest coffee shop.

Even FAANG can't afford 100k on top.

Have you seen their profits. They absolutely can.

H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries.

Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.

H1-Bs are for filling "specialist" roles that "cannot be filled by Americans", and are universally acknowledged to be heavily abused. While I have only run into a few H1-Bs in my industry, none of them impressed me with their acumen or work ethic, and frankly i would have let them go if I had control over it. The EB-1As Ive worked with though have all been frigging rock stars.

I posit there's two different worlds in H-1B, one rife with abuse and the other working-as-intended. All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less. We should solve the abuse problem but not eliminate the program entirely.

Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.

I don't only mean rockstars or literal geniuses. It's still very worth it to brain drain the top few percentiles of labor from other countries, even if they are not geniuses. Considering we only import tens of thousands per year and there's over a billion people in the work forces of China and India, it's not a stretch to think that we are getting their cream of the crop. And to the extent that we are not, due to cheating and abuse, then that's something we should fix.

All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less.

Then respectfully, their jobs should be going to American workers. There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans. As an industry "tech" does not have any super secret squirrel sauce that you can't find employees for in most first world countries, its just about how many you can find and what you pay them (chipmaking is a different ball game of course). American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year. But its easier for a company to import H-1Bs (and even pay them the same!) who's loyalty you own and who on paper have the skills you need than hire domestic talent that might on paper need training and experience.

But a country should have labor policies that benefit its citizens, maybe even at the expense of other countries citizens, thats one of the points of being a country in the first place.

Then respectfully, their jobs should be going to American workers. There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans. As an industry "tech" does not have any super secret squirrel sauce that you can't find employees for in most first world countries, its just about how many you can find and what you pay them (chipmaking is a different ball game of course).

You sound like a trade union organizer. A lot of American dominance of the world economy relies on the fact that it's not generally encumbered by trade union deals (and it has lost the race in the industries where unions are dominant, like shipping, car making and teaching). What you're proposing is basically a massive country-sized white-collar union.

What you're proposing is basically a massive country-sized white-collar union.

Yes, we have a name for that: a politcal party. We could create a new one, or maybe just get one of the existing ones to pick up the idea in exchange for support at the ballot box.

I'm not sure where the idea that politics has to be about high-minded ideals instead of basic collective self-interest, but its crept in somehow and is disastrous in its effects.

There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.

American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year.

About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.

Unless you are talking about a very specific industry that I don't have any tangential relation to, this is simply not true. We are graduating more engineers and comp sci majors than are getting hired for those types of jobs, and the workforce is constantly in attrition at the other end as well in all relevant industries.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American

If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route. That at least triples your available talent pool.

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

I think this really cuts to the heart of why arguments about immigration policy get as emotional as they often do. What defines a "labor shortage"? Simple: when the cost of it is "too high". What defines "too high"? Government policy. What defines government policy? Politics.

When the government opens up an immigration channel that targets your vocation, you are essentially being told by power that you are getting paid too much for what you do, and you need to be paid less. When the government denies your entry into a higher paying market, you are being told you aren't worth that.

People get emotional about this.

Great point!

This part

When the government denies your entry into a higher paying market, you are being told you aren't worth that.

is kinda what people are responding to with, "But a country is not an economic zone." Like: "It's not that you aren't worth access to that higher paying market. It's just that you are part of a different community, rather than that one."

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

The price must increase unless reducing the supply of labor reduces the output by enough to make the labor not as valuable. There isn't a lump of labor to be done by programmers, who get paid inversely to the number of programmers in the field.

But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place. Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.

I do actually think there is something to this, as "tech" seems to be completely infested with solutions (and programmers working on said solutions) searching in vain for a problem. Adding in more people making more "solutions" is not a cure for the condition.

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Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase.

Yes. At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done. You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up; at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).

If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route.

Mathematics is about 25,000. Engineering is 145,000. But most of these people either already have jobs or are headed for postgraduate degrees also.

(and most of them couldn't cut it in a job that actually required software skill... but then, neither could most CS graduates)

At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done.

Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.

You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up

Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places. I'll still patronize my more local chains (in the vein of In 'n out but better), or even national ones (like Chick-fil-A) that don't treat their employees like cogs. Same with grocery stores. If a business can't cope with rising costs of labor than it deserves to go under.

at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).

Gonna start an engineering smug war here, but as I see it "tech" progress has already meaningfully ground to a halt outside of LLM babble, and even that is debatable. Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

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All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great

Honest question - how many of us have to endure the consequences of the rampant abuse so that FAANG can get their Good Ones? What's the break even point at a societal level?

Good question, can you quantify the consequences of rampant abuse?

I have some ideas, but this isn't an exhaustive list. That said, maybe it's a useful starting point.

  • Fresh grads having limited prospects because entry level jobs are filled with H1-B holders, despite those fresh grads existing and ostensibly being qualified.
  • A culture that rewards regulatory evasion at the corporate C-level
  • Having to personally do extra labor to un-fuck the work done by unqualified H1-B holders who probably wouldn't be here if their sponsors weren't able to treat them as de facto indentured servants.

I'll try to reply to the first point since the other two aren't really quantifiable.

I think currently the new grad situation in tech is predominantly caused by two factors: over-supply due to A LOT of recent CS grads and AI having a disproportionate impact on the lower tier of tech jobs. H-1B has always existed and I've not seen evidence that companies are hiring a lot more than they did several years ago. So new grads are mainly not finding jobs right now due to an over-supply issue and AI rather than competition from H-1B.

However, I'm not saying that just because H-1B's impact on new grads is limited, we shouldn't try make their experience better by fixing it. I recognize this is a problem. As you may notice in my first comment here, I advocated for a sliding tax that specifically targets the lower compensation band that will improve new grad's competitiveness against similarly skilled H-1B applicants.

What are these people in FAANG actually delivering? These are enormous mature companies frequently built on gigantic revenue streams from services that are only taking up like 10-15% of their headcount to actually maintain. Giving the best of the do-nothing largesse positions to foreigners is insane.

I think probably part of why they maintain the large headcounts is because they're run by people who have absorbed the lesson of some of the early wave of tech companies, which is "never stagnate, never become too focused on a steady source of income, since it's temporary". So they use headcount to experiment with novel approaches to money-making in order to avoid becoming the next Intel or Yahoo.

For better or worse, the enormous data processing facilities and technologies that FAANGs built in order to run their marketing, e-commerce, and data analysis also formed an important part of the technological groundwork and infrastructure necessary to deploy AI at scale. The FAANGs did not plan this, though, they just knew that they needed to be able to crunch and store data on scales previously never created (outside of maybe something like the NSA).

What are these people in FAANG actually delivering?

Ads.

Giving the best of the do-nothing largesse positions to foreigners is insane.

They're not do-nothing largesse positions. They may be futile attempts to build the next doomed project that will be canceled shortly before (or after) release (or maybe that's just Google specifically), but they aren't sinecures.

Toodling around on fun ideas since the actual revenue is secured elsewhere is pretty sinecure adjacent

They're "fun" for the VP running the show. They're less fun for the guys working on something useless.

Working on a doomed project is not fun.

The EB-1 priority date for several countries is years back, which means you have to wait years before they'll even start processing the application. And the standards for it (and its non-immigrant counterpart O-1) are very high. H-1B is certainly abused, but it makes sense to have a visa for highly skilled in-demand workers who aren't the tippy-top of their field. Doing something to prevent bringing in interchangeable morons on H-1B woud be great. Nuking the program with a ruinous fee is not good at all.

I disagree. H-1B is not just "certainly abused", it's universally abused. I'm not saying that H-1Bs are all morons, but some are, and the not-morons are, while competetant, not above replacement level. America generates highly skilled in-demand workers from its domestic population in sufficient numbers to fill any role an H-1B would fill, its just that corporations jave not wanted to spend the time and money to develop the pipeline.

Also, 100k is almost the perfect amount of money to do what you say you want- if your talking about a highly skilled worker (lets be honest, a coder at FAANG or similar) than 100k per year is not actually that big of a deal compared to the rest of their compensation package. It will prevent companies like Cognizant from just chain migrating half of Bengaluru to provide substsndard IT services, and will also prevent scummy hospitals from hiring immigrants instead of domestic medical workers, but isn't stopping Apple from hiring some uber talented backend developer.

I disagree. H-1B is not just "certainly abused", it's universally abused. I'm not saying that H-1Bs are all morons, but some are, and the not-morons are, while competetant, not above replacement level. America generates highly skilled in-demand workers from its domestic population in sufficient numbers to fill any role an H-1B would fill, its just that corporations jave not wanted to spend the time and money to develop the pipeline.

It is not "universally" abused, though the fact that it is used to bring in people who are the Indian equivalent of the bottom half of the class at Directional State is infuriating. 100K a year wipes out nearly all uses, including Apple's backend developer, including most of the non-absuive ones. Although I'm not sure where 100K a year comes from; the proclamation appears to make it 100K for the application and 100K per entry of the alien, which is cheaper but rather cruel to the alien.

Eh, again YMMV but speaking to my experience and that of my colleagues and family, I cannot point to an H-1B that I would say is good for the country. So yeah, I would say its universal abuse (this is not a universal judgement about the character of people receiving those visas, many are fine folks put in a sub-optimal situation).

100k absolutely does not wipe out Apple's backend developer. Thats between 25-33% of their salary, not including benefits. It makes them more expensive, so you have to be more careful, but this is big tech we are talking about, they have more money than God and are not afraid to sling it around.

highly skilled in-demand workers who aren't the tippy-top of their field

I'd certainly buy this argument if the average H1-B worker I've encountered were even in the 55th percentile for the job description.

That has, in my experience, not been the case. Most of them can sort of operate Salesforce or Oracle when everything is going perfectly. After that, I'd rather have a fresh grad who's willing to read some docs.

Yes, there's a LOT of H-1B abuse. It pretty much knocked the bottom out of the US tech employment market. But there's also a lot of H-1Bs nearer the top of the market where the program was intended for, and this kills that just as dead.

True, but I think the tradeoff is worth it at this point. Notwithstanding the negative externalities on societal cohesion as a whole, the culture that sprung up around the Indian H1B scam factory is so fucking toxic for the tech industry. America is not only the innovation factory because we draw the best and the brightest, but because of the unique entrepreneurial culture that prizes outside the box thinking.

The Indians bring their rote memorization culture with them. Of course there are the entrepreneurs among them as well who come here and push that culture along, but let’s be honest 90+% are just people-pleasing corporate ass-coverers who also happen to have a millennia-long tradition of built-in discrimination deep in their bones. Enough already, the industry is hardly recognizable as American anymore.

There's also O-1, in addition to EB-1.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/o-1-visa-individuals-with-extraordinary-ability-or-achievement

O-1A: Individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry);

It allows for up to a three year stay with a possibility of extension.

Yeah, I think one of the ones I called an EB-1A is actually an O-1 as he has family back in europe that he will return to. But same concept- the genius visa exists for 95+ percentile individuals, and frankly i dont think we should be recruiting below that at the expense of our domestic labor.

Honestly, if the law actually allows for this, Congress has fucked up even more royally than I expected. This sort of policy should be set by legislation, not the whims of the President.

Reuters:

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director of the American Immigration Council, questioned the legality of the new fees. "Congress has only authorized the government to set fees to recover the cost of adjudicating an application," he said on Bluesky.

The actual tweets: 1 2

Almost certainly illegal and likely to be struck down in court. Congress has only authorized the government to set fees to recover the cost of adjudicating the application. There is no statutory authority to impose fees designed to limit the use of a visa.

We haven’t seen the text of this yet, but to be clear, the president has literally zero legal authority to impose a $100,000 fee on visas. None. Zip. Zilch.

The only authority Congress has ever given the executive branch here is to charge fees to recover the cost of processing the application.

"Congress has only authorized the government to set fees to recover the cost of adjudicating an application,"

On one hand, this sounds like a reasonable take, but I feel like getting into a "it can't possibly cost that much to do this" fight with the US government is inherently a losing one.

This is the authority he claims:

8 USC 1182 (f)Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. Whenever the Attorney General finds that a commercial airline has failed to comply with regulations of the Attorney General relating to requirements of airlines for the detection of fraudulent documents used by passengers traveling to the United States (including the training of personnel in such detection), the Attorney General may suspend the entry of some or all aliens transported to the United States by such airline.

Looks like Congress really was that stupid. Though using this to impose a fee seems a step too far; it's arguable that a fee is not covered under "restrictions".

So he could say ”no H1Bs for anyone making less than $300k / year” but not ”that’ll be $100k for that H1B, thank you very much”?

A friend is a pharma chemist for 25+ years, has avoided the career ladder skirmishes so just does his hours / shifts in the lab. Chatting to him recently about impacts of technology, AI etc and he said that was discussing it with a colleague recently. The colleague said that “The only AI I see around here is Another Indian!”

The Indian hires are skilled, good workers, good colleagues etc but general sense is that they work for 10-30% lower salaries, work overtime / weekends without pay and take less annual leave / holidays. (This is in EU, not US)

In the end this had to happen. While illegal immigration and family / chain migration from places like Central America, Somalia and Haiti were and are far more critical (and still aren’t being stopped to the necessary degree) than a hundred thousand Indian programmers a year moving to America, the latter was still an issue.

The H-1B system was designed in 1990 when remote collaboration was nonexistent or in its infancy. Today there is no need to bring highly skilled foreigners to America permanently to collaborate. You can work together on Zoom, over email and instant message, can meet in person for social reasons a couple of times a year. Relocating a family from to America permanently, making all their descendants in perpetuity American citizens, that should be done for reasons more substantial than to add another database guy to the Tata team in Orlando.

I’ve long thought Trump should just make a better ‘America is closed’ speech. We had the era of mass immigration, we settled the country, now it’s ended, it’s not coming back.

If we're setting policy by executive order it should be

We had the era of mass immigration, we settled the country, now it’s ended, it’s coming back the next time a Democrat is in power

Remote collaboration still sucks, especially with big time zone mismatches. There's a world of difference between me walking over to my coworker's desk for a quick chat and we can pull up a whiteboard or look at a screen together and me trying to find time with a coworker with an 8 hour time difference (convenient overlapping hours are usually booked solid with meetings already) and try to make myself understood over zoom.

And if they're gone home for the day (which happens before I have lunch) I can't talk to them at all that day.

And if they're gone home for the day (which happens before I have lunch) I can't talk to them at all that day.

That's the best time of my day, when I can work without constant meetings and constant braindead queries from my jeet coworkers in Mumbai.

If your coworkers are morons, that's kind of a skill issue.

Well I can't fix their skills unfortunately. And I'm very well paid to be a tard wrangler for jeets, that's the only reason I stick around.

I've seen both sides, as I have some collaborators who go back and forth with enough significance that we keep up when they're abroad. There are nice things about being able to stroll down to their office. There are also nice things about, "Here's what I've been thinking about today; it's still kind of a hazy idea, but I think I'm on to something," and then I head home, go to bed, they work on it all through my night, and first thing in the morning, I have an email about their progress in taking my idea and running with it. Similarly for working a document toward a deadline. I can do what I can do, leave some notes, and magically, much progress has occurred while I was sleeping. It's a wonderful feeling when it happens.

Sure. I've worked with coworkers on a 24x7 rotation and there the time difference is a must for maintaining sanity. But when I'm working on a project (rather than keeping a system running) I find it way better to be nearby.

they work on it all through my night, and first thing in the morning, I have an email about their progress in taking my idea and running with it.

This works in the case that they have nothing going on, or are going to drop everything to pursue your project. More likely IME, they'll think about it for perhaps an hour and send you some feedback. That's the kind of thing that would have been way better as a meeting and that's most of my cross timezone experiences.

I'm sure it's quite field and role dependent, but mine is definitely a good one on that front. They're already pursuing "my project" as a large component of their role. So if I have the makings of a promising idea, it's not uncommon for them to spend hours trying to make the details work. I'm pretty impressed pretty often, but I also have managed to get myself a set of impressive collaborators.

This is an annual $100k fee, it's basically telling H-1B applicants they aren't welcome in the US as nobody is going to pay that much extra. Plus it's going to destroy the US international student college market as outside the very top schools a big part of the draw is a chance to work and stay in the US after graduation and nobody outside of Citadel etc. will pay $100k per year in fees for a new grad.

Good boon for the UK/Canada though as it means that instead of American companies hiring in the US they'll instead offshore the jobs and hire here instead. The country can generally do with some of the over inflated US salaries coming over here too.

I feel the US will regret this 10 years down the line, much like how they are now regretting limiting Nvidia sales to China forcing them to build their own homegrown system.

  • -11

I am a Canadian and I do not want more any Indians. India has plenty of Indians and, well, look at her. Any benefit they would bring is diminished by fraud, nepotism, and making my country more like their country.

much like how they are now regretting limiting Nvidia sales to China forcing them to build their own homegrown system.

What? This is not happening unless there is very new news. China's home grown system is still much worse.

FT article this week: https://www.ft.com/content/8fd79522-e34f-4633-bc87-ef0aae2d9159

Archive link: https://archive.is/UKulo

China trials its first advanced tools for AI chipmaking

Good on them for building it, but if you read the article you would see that the DUV tech they are testing is years behind the latest EUV stuff, and it will still be years before it is up and running.

EUV is a whole different beast from DUV and who knows when China will have one ready.

Well this article just also came out: https://www.ft.com/content/db286a0a-ca2d-4791-809e-c9a1ac73b8ad

Archive link: https://archive.is/jSRNH

Chinese tech stocks surge past Nasdaq on the back of AI advance
Beijing’s push for chip self-sufficiency accelerates triumphant comeback for sector

The whole feeling that China has come out on top here isn't on the basis of a single article or anything but rather a more latent sentiment shared by many that the US through their actions delved too greedily and too deep and now have awoken something best left sleeping.

Hello derail. You specifically posted the previous article arguing about the effects of chip sanctions. And I said that your argument was bs.

The chinese tech sector is doing fine but that's pretty much irrelevant. If you read the exact article you just linked:

Analysts still caution that the rally is being driven as much by speculation as any real progress in areas such as chip self-sufficiency. “We don’t really know what is happening,” said BofA’s Wu, noting the lack of disclosure details from chipmakers claiming substantial advances. The market was interpreting China’s ban on buying foreign chips as evidence of progress, she added.

Yes, they continue to try and play catch up, what I'm definitely not seeing is the regret for making them do that rather than just giving them the more powerful chips. Lack of access to nvidia chips is demonstrably slowing down their AI progress.

What is the end goal here? Or any goal?

OK, you're slowing them down alright. They will not have as capable models, as quickly or cheaply, in the next 4-6 years. Then what? Is this just banking on an AGI superweapon to make economic dimension irrelevant, or on the windfall from economic growth this is supposed to beget? Huawei is superior in networking equipment, China has an overabundance of energy and skilled labor, if they scale up production of even past-generation compute chips (and mainly HBM), they will have a fully adequate and incompatible domestic ecosystem and Nvidia and others will never reenter their market, and American slice of it will be that much smaller.

If China has the ability to leapfrog Nvidia and other western AI tech, they're gonna do it irregardless of any sanctions on chips. Like of course they are going to try.

Huawei is superior in networking equipment

What networking equipment? 5g or something else?

5G/6G is not very relevant to this issue, but they have extremely advanced datacenter network architecture and their new systems are based on it. This will allow them to cope with lower performance of individual chips.

If China has the ability to leapfrog Nvidia and other western AI tech, they're gonna do it irregardless of any sanctions on chips

This is not true. People act like "China" is a perfectly coordinated single entity, a game of Factorio Xi plays, but it's still a country with different economic actors. If Huawei can't sell their crap because everyone in China who is actually good at AI uses CUDA and Nvidia hardware (like, again, DeepSeek), Huawei will not improve as rapidly. Subsidies in isolation cannot replace organic ecosystem support, they just prolong the agony, and at the current level not even China can subsidize the development of the entire supply chain, it's to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

they have extremely advanced datacenter network architecture and their new systems are based on it.

Cool paper but it seems to be a way to achieve similar perf while spending less money on switches. I'm not gonna call it a nothingburger but I don't think it's a huge deal. Also seems to be something that would happen irregardless of the state of compute chips.

Huawei can't sell their crap because everyone in China who is actually good at AI uses CUDA and Nvidia hardware

China can sell their crap airplane and the airlines don't dare not buy it.

Of course China is not a single entity, but its well within the government's capability and desire to force players to take economically inefficient decisions.

OK, you're slowing them down alright. They will not have as capable models, as quickly or cheaply, in the next 4-6 years. Then what?

In the pessimistic view you seem to hold, maybe the horse will sing. In the optimistic view, then nothing and China never catches up to the western SOTA.

Let's turn the question around. We let American companies sell chips to America's geopolitical rival for less than 4-6 years until, apparently, indigenous Chinese capabilities match American capabilities, at which point China tells Nvidia to GTFO. We benefited our rival for... What? A few quarters of sales for a couple of firms?

Your inclination towards China makes it hard to take seriously your opinion on how America should conduct itself with China.

We benefited our rival for... What? A few quarters of sales for a couple of firms?

Do you realize that the entire windfall from Trump's tariff nonsense would be an order of magnitude less than those quarters, even as it destroys similar value (hundreds of billions)?

It seems Americans aren't happy with this whole concept of trade anymore. If they buy foreign stuff, that's bad because they're losing dollars, gotta reindustrialize and implement tariffs. If they're selling stuff to foreigners who aren't completely inept and subjugated, that's also bad, because then those foreigners may develop and get richer, and for an American, the world is zero-sum, so the only Deals Americans are now willing to make are that which make the other party poorer, like the humiliation rituals you subject "NATO allies" to. Trump's rhetoric around coercing South Koreans and others to "invest" (he apparently understands FDI in very childish terms, "they give us moneys because they're our bitches") completes the picture.

Yes, I admit this makes me even more sympathetic to China.

Do you realize that the entire windfall from Trump's tariff nonsense would be an order of magnitude less than those quarters, even as it destroys similar value (hundreds of billions)?

Yes? You'll never catch me defending the tariff retardation.

If they're selling stuff to foreigners who aren't completely inept and subjugated, that's also bad, because then those foreigners may develop and get richer, and for an American, the world is zero-sum, so the only Deals Americans are now willing to make are that which make the other party poorer, like the humiliation rituals you subject "NATO allies" to.

The world is positive sum. Abetting your enemies, however, is likely negative sum. At any rate, it's negative for you.

Trump's rhetoric around coercing South Koreans and others to "invest" (he apparently understands FDI in very childish terms, "they give us moneys because they're our bitches") completes the picture.

Yes, this is also retarded. Two retards don't make a right.

Do I really need some kind of special reasoning to oppose sending scarce resource that already sells out in western markets to a geopolitical rival to not only not direct gain but very straightforward direct losses to domestic firms? To sell our opposition the rope it needs to hang us is something a particularly short sighted firm might advocate for, but to do so below market rate? This is madness.

This lock-in effect is just nonsense and has not worked for literally a single firm that has sold out to china. China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.

Is this just banking on an AGI superweapon to make economic dimension irrelevant, or on the windfall from economic growth this is supposed to beget?

It's banking on the certainty that surrendering our major advantage in the AI race to china for no reason or gain will turn out badly for us, obviously. I can't even fathom how a thinking person could convince themselves otherwise. You've already highlighted their advantages, is your position that the race is already over despite us currently being ahead?

they will have a fully adequate and incompatible domestic ecosystem and Nvidia and others will never reenter their market, and American slice of it will be that much smaller.

This has always been the goal and the chips would only be used to push towards this goal faster. Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough then I just don't buy this fantasy that selling out now is going to give us a better seat in the future.

but to do so below market rate?

This is pretty asinine. You're defending export controls with the claim that their absence would… distort markets? Do you think that's what Nvidia is trying to do, sell GPUs below market rate, despite having an unsaturated domestic market that would generate higher margins? Why do you imagine they would hurt themselves like that? Might it be time to install some loyal apparatchiks on board, or do a little witch hunt for Communist agents?

China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.

As I've said before, "China" is not omnipotent and cannot create an ecosystem solely through political will and subsidies, they've been trying for decades and it hasn't been working so long as Nvidia was the obvious superior choice. Even now, nobody wants to use CANN if afforded the chance. I think this is how Jensen views this: he's straightforwardly fighting as the CEO of American company Nvidia, not just for line going up in quarterly reports but for enduring global dominance of his stack.

It's banking on the certainty that surrendering our major advantage in the AI race to china for no reason or gain will turn out badly for us, obviously. I can't even fathom how a thinking person could convince themselves otherwise. You've already highlighted their advantages, is your position that the race is already over despite us currently being ahead?

Are you avoiding the question, or does it not parse for you?

I think that to discuss whether "the race" is over, it's important to establish whether a race is happening and what it is that you are racing towards. The US is ahead in AI. Again, without American chips, China will be developing AI slower for the next few years. Is that a "race"? What happens when you reach the finish line? Don't huff and puff, say concretely. Do you build an AGI superweapon that disables their nukes with nanobots? Or what? What's the end goal, in the face of which every thinking person would deem hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of profits a mere short-sighted distraction? Can you spell it out?

Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough

Not enough for what? Like, what's the theory of victory here? Repeating the Great Divergence, now with automation, relatively growing so quickly that China is forever left in the dust? Lights-out factories spawning across the US, producing ungodly goods optimized by AGI, incomprehensibly advanced weapons systems, Pax Americana becoming permanent?

How likely do you think that is? And what happens if this doesn't work out?

I think the answers are basically "yes/likely/better not to think of this", and personally, I believe this is all deluded and very much in the spirit of last days of Nazi Germany. Both sides will have adequate AI to increase productivity, both will have "AGI" at around the same time, you're not going to have some dramatic inflection point, you will not leave them in the dust as a military or economic power, you'll just slow down global economic growth somewhat, and in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market. That's all.

Why do you imagine they would hurt themselves like that?

You'd have to ask Jensen Huang why he's so hungry for demand despite not saturating the domestic market. The traitor, the treasonous little worm, is fighting bills that merely demand he offer the chips to domestic buyers for the same price. His public logic is the same short sighted nonsense of a "toehold" that you propose. This is a man who lies through his teeth at every opportunity. He claims that selling chips to China won't reduce chips available for western markets, this is a lie, in his earning report he very clearly says they already sell out of the chips.

As I've said before, "China" is not omnipotent and cannot create an ecosystem solely through political will and subsidies, they've been trying for decades and it hasn't been working so long as Nvidia was the obvious superior choice. Even now, nobody wants to use CANN if afforded the chance.

China is already exerting the maximum amount of demand and political pressure it can to try and compete on chips. The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold and prop up all the companies making them. Whether or not AI labs can use NVDIA hardware has zero actual influence on the development of their ecosystem. Hardware "lock-in" on these labs is an entirely made up concept.

Can you spell it out?

Specifics could shake out a number of ways depending on where, whether and how you think AI will Plateau. In all cases besides it basically capping out at gpt-5 level dominance in this field is critical. If it is powerful enough to actually do high level engineering work then it instantly obviates China's other major advantage in having a big workforce. If it scales all the way to AGI then forget about it, winning that race is all that matters.

Winner gets to be the center of commerce and yes some latitude that comes along with having the most powerful military. These things come with social and political influence. Social and political influence that I think is better in the hands of democratic powers, as flawed as they are, than the autocratic CCP. We know what PAX Americana looks like and it looks pretty good actually. Billions rising up out of poverty. General spread of democratic institutions. And we know who Xi is allied with, nations like North Korea and Russia.

I'm happy that the Chinese people are prospering. I certainly don't want to take that away from them. But CCP dominance hasn't even been particularly good for them. China is host to the poorest and least prosperous Chinese people in the world. It's not a regime I would like to see replicated and given strength and more than Soviet Russia was a regime I would have liked to see replicated and given strength. surely you understand the "equals across the sea" isn't an option on the table. That isn't what is in store if we give up all our advantages in this sector.

in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market.

China will take the chips, use them to accelerate their position, including in advancing their own semiconductor industry. I don't know how you could actually believe giving them the chips now would actually guarantee a slice of this market. As soon as China has even slightly competitive chips they will crumple up NVDIA and toss it out like so much garbage. It's what happens with every firm that tries to compete in China.

More comments

AFAIK last week or so the homegrown system seems to have taken a leap but I'm not sure if it's huge.

Canada is a US vassal state. We can totally access intellectual capital by just quartering it there.

Large enough US companies will still be able to access intellectual capital by hiring them in Canada and Europe offices instead of bringing them into the US. If you can't import the world's talent, the advantage to doing research and development in the US declines significantly.

This policy change mostly benefits American professionals like doctors who can't do their job remotely. Good for them, I guess.

US doctors are already overpaid, they get all the luck while our NHS doctors languish on ~£50k (only hitting £100k when they become a consultant 10+ years after qualifying). At least UK doctor's aren't hit with 6 figure debt though.

How many of those H1-B applicants are Ramanujan level intellect and how many are ChatGPT3.5? That is the question.

This reasoning applies to some of the other changes. It might even apply to a $100,000 one-time fee. But it doesn't apply to a $600,000 fee; that's high enough to kill the program almost entirely.

(Though it's been reported as a $100,000/year fee, it looks to me like it's a $100,000 per ENTRY fee, which would be less damaging to the program but pretty harsh on the H-1B holders)

If it's a per entry fee it's probably the most retarded policy the US government has had this year, and that's saying something given RFK's antics.

I dunno, it's up against some pretty stiff competition. I think the ChatGPT generated tariffs are still worse.

Didn't you get a 6-month ban for going nuts over a story that was totally made up?

Two months, it was only two months, and it was reported by the Guardian so I believed it, which is seen as a generally trustworthy source here in the UK (other than the FT it is the paper I regularly read).

Good boon for the UK/Canada though as it means that instead of American companies hiring in the US they'll instead offshore the jobs and hire here instead.

"We need to outcompete China in tech, how do we do it?"

"Import 10 million Indians?"

"The UK and Canada are already doing that, is their tech sector doing really well compared to ours?"

"Uh, not really."

"What about China, are they importing tons of Indians to compete better against us?

"No, not really.

"Got it, import 10 million Indians"

Especially when vast reams of the service economy can be credibly accused of not actually 'doing anything' so this immigration is mostly taking over do-nothing dotages better reserved for natives than for people from overseas incentivized and equipped to be the ultimate Immigration KPI maximizers.

Any reason this is a boon for the UK and Canada instead of the Indian domestic economy? Surely these geniuses will flourish when given an opportunity and motivation to build domestically.

Have you seen subcontinental domestic economies? If these people were actually given they full opportunities they deserve and are capable of actualizing then the subcontinent would be at least China level today, instead [redacted because I don't want to get banned immediately after coming back].

  • -13

Failing to build in your own backyard and then bailing to go and snipe make work rentseeking fake jobs in the West is not good praxis.

Plus what is 'deserve' in this statement.

The reality is that India is fundamentally broken, in thrall to a legitimate but dysfunctional democracy that serves the interests of the agricultural peasant class, lower and backward castes, tribal people and resentful minorities over the middle and upper classes, who are a small minority.

I don’t believe truly universal suffrage is viable in a country where almost 50% of the population still work in agriculture. Until 1900 fewer than 20% of the total American population voted in presidential elections, in part because even many who could vote didn’t. In India it’s around 45-50% iirc, similar to Western countries. (Around 650-700 million votes cast in the last election).

The problem with India is that emigration acts as a pressure valve on the domestic middle and upper classes. They leave instead of overthrowing the system. To save India, they must overthrow democracy, re-assert the whip hand over the peasants, abolish the perverse system of reservation, abolish price floors in agriculture, consolidate small holding farms (brutalizing any peasant farmer resistance, which they have caved to every time so far) and embark on the kind of infrastructure development projects China did two generations ago.

But that seems like a lot of work when you can just go to America and be a doctor or engineer and have a nice comfortable life. India is probably the biggest example of the failure of democracy in human history.

Well just due to population size India is the largest example of lots of things.

Argentina is possibly a more cartoonish example of democracy failing. Maybe south africa too.

Argentina had as many problems as a dictatorship, I think the cause is the urban-rural setup, the first period of deglobalization after 1914, the constitutional structure in terms of regional/state authority and some cultural issues, plus some other things.

South Africa worked quite well as democracy prior to 1994

The democratic victory of the national party in South Africa after the depression arguably led inexorably to its state failure decades later.

Even under apartheid, SA was not a particularly well run state, with significant corruption issues and lack of full control over large portions of its territory.

I'm gonna bet that if the fee survives the courts, all 85k h1b slots are still going to be filled even with the 100k fee. Just that those spots will go to the best and not to the slop.

s going to destroy the US international student college market

Good riddance. Tuition is insane as it is, and maybe supply and demand will kick in and reduce prices for Americans since demand is down.

I'm gonna bet that if the fee survives the courts, all 85k h1b slots are still going to be filled even with the 100k fee. Just that those spots will go to the best and not to the slop.

It seems to be a 100k annual fee - some of the slots will be filled, but it seems kinda doubtful that all 85k of them will be. I'll take the flip side of your bet.

Even odds, $100 goes from loser to charity of opponent's choice, bet conditional on h1b fee actually happening for a full year and at least 60k of those 85k visas actually paying the fee? i.e. if there's a "$100k fee except for this category of applicants where the fee is waived" and 90% of the visas go to people in the waived category nobody pays, if courts strike down visa fee nobody pays, if visa fee is live for 2 weeks then walked back nobody pays (unless 60k people pay the fee during those two weeks in which case I pay).

Sure, those terms seem fair

Alright, reminder set

I think you have that backwards. International students are subsidising native students. For cost to come down other things need to happen. University services, wages and administrative bloat needs to be reduced.

One might still believe you have little to gain from them and that they might be bad in some other way (culturally or a security threat).

I know universities themselves claim otherwise, but it's absolutely absurd to believe that native students cost the school more than the tuition they bring in.

Their books are open, right? What is there to disagree about here?

International students are subsidizing (superfluous) university services, wages and administrative bloat. I don't think native students see much benefit from the money at all.

So you think that, in a budget crunch scenario, the administrators are going to fire their fellow administrators (or, even more risible, their reports that give them clout in the organization) rather than doubling down on the existing sliding scale of tuition and soaking the families at the top even more?

No? I don't think I said that? I'm sure the admins, like all useless bureaucrats, will cling to their gibs until the bitter end, even if it means completely hollowing out the educational mission of the university.

Uh, native students are the ones mostly demanding the better food, fitness facilities, nicer dorms, DEI offices, etc.

Tell me more about that, because when I was in college I didn't demand any of that. I wanted cheaper textbooks and affordable housing close to campus. I went to local restaurants or cooked at home. Our gym was a little old, but it was fine. I don't recall any student protests demanding fancies facilities. Maybe that's a common thing at other universities that I'm just not aware of?

They're not "demanding" it by protesting, they're demanding it by choosing to attend one university over another and therefore sending tuition dollars to one university instead of the other one. It's demand in the economic sense, not the political sense.

Okay, that's fair. I suppose I might be typical minding. I think I am considerably less nerdy/autistic than many users here (no offense meant, I just mean that I'm a socially integrated normalfag) and even I based my choice of college mainly on (1) the fact that it had the field I was interested in, (2) that it wasn't located in an inner city shithole, and (3) that they gave me a fat scholarship.

I've often heard hat new stadiums/cafeterias/fancy dorms are built to "attract students" but I do not personally know anyone who compared universities in this way. Even the 100 IQ normies at my HS who you would expect might care about that stuff were much more interested in whether a particular school had a good "party school" rep, whether their bf/gf was going there, or whether it was the "correct" school for their family sports fan dynasty (I lived in the southeast). I do not recall once ever hearing about the quality of the dorms or gyms.

However! If I were an unscrupulous admin trying to expand my bureaucratic power, this seems like a really convenient argument to make. "We need 50 million dollars for a new gym to attract students to Foobar State! If we don't build it, students will choose University of Foobar instead! We can't fall behind!" And all the other admins have grifts of their own and know how to play the game, so I doubt anyone would stand in the way except to try to grab those funds for their own power expansion ("We don't need a gym, we need to expand and renovate student housing!")

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Superfluous university services etc. that I strongly suspect are mostly demanded by native students. I almost never saw the sort of full-paying Chinese MA students we are presumably talking about use the Disabilities Office, array of mental health and well-being counselors, glitzy sporting facilities or even useless subjects (as they generally come in to get CS and engineering degrees rather than Africana Studies).

You might entertain some hope that the whole system will collapse without their money or native students will be less likely to study useless things if it gets even more expensive, but something something the system staying irrational for longer than you stay solvent. I think ballooning college costs in the US would drive down the birthrate/make reproduction more dysgenic (as more parents decide that they couldn't afford to send a(nother) kid to college and the status drop for themselves and the putative kid is unconscionable if they don't, plus higher college debts delaying ability to settle down) sooner than they would actually drive down college enrollment.

I didn't say international students were demanding shiny facilities and more administrators, I'm just saying that the money from international students most likely goes towards increasing bloat and add more irrelevant facilities. Does a university actually NEED a state of the art massive gym complex or sprawling student union center? These always seemed like make-work bureaucracy expansion projects to me. More facilities = more employees = more admin. At least football can be justified as pulling donations from alumni. Certainly none of the money goes to making education cheaper or better (cheaper books, higher prof salaries, more profs to decrease class sizes, etc).

are presumably talking about use the Disabilities Office

At my local university, they are absolutely taking advantage of this particular office, to the point where its staff members regularly call it "abuse" when they think they're talking to a crowd who won't turn around and try to get them fired for saying it.

I've come from the Australian education system which has similar (arguably greater) international student spending/participation, and yet doesn't really have the same cultures of vast Collegiate stadiums or students residing onsite since most Universities are just smackbang in the middle of the major cities.

Yeah, most of the huge additional admin spend went on sports, facilities, mental health, nicer dorms etc to compete with other colleges.

H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa)

AP says it's annual, though IMO the text is not so clear. Note that the proclamation expires after one year anyway.

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