site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34260 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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

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.

More comments

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.

More comments

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats