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Revisiting Vivek Ramaswamy's Christmas Rant: One Year Later
The tome in question, in case you need to refresh your memory. One hundred and twenty five million views. This single tweet tore open a gash in the Republican coalition that has yet to heal (though I don't want to overstate the counterfactual impact here, this particular fault-line was inevitable).
Looking back, it is clear now that the controversy was never just racist shit-flinging. There is a real philosophical conflict underlying the backlash. It is perhaps most elegantly stated as a variant of the Euthyphro dilemma; is our culture good because it is American, or is it American because it is good? Vivek is a functionalist. If an aspect of American culture is non-functional, then it should be replaced. His opponents in the comments are overwhelmingly essentialists. Americanness is an ontological property that is good because of it's essential nature as American. In this context, the idea that someone might choose to discard prom queens or jock sports fandom is a threat to America itself. Of course, this begs the question, who counts as American? And we end up with the "Heritage American" discourse that has been popping up lately.
Ramaswamy is doing some motte-and-bailey nonsense here, pointing out a few flaws in American culture, but then using that as a non-sequitur to justify his ridiculous immigration views. The simple fact is that the H1B system is used to undercut American wages. While ostensibly only permitting "foreign experts", companies game the system by allowing diploma mill bachelor's degrees in India to be valid, and then pay them garbage salaries. An easy solution would be to just require anyone hired on an H1B visa to have high relative wages. Basically everyone agrees this would fix the problem, but nobody makes the change because they actually want to use it H1B's as a cynical vehicle for mass-migration.
I think it’s important to note that striver Vivek does not work in an industry where striving is necessary. He’s literally a politician. He’s not an engineer or Doctor. Being good at problem sets has very little to do with the skills you need as a politician. Most people end up in careers that striving doesn’t produce any tangible value.
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There were some big changes to the H1B program announced this month, https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-changes-process-for-awarding-h-1b-work-visas-to-better-protect-american-workers
Applicants will have their applications weighted based on salary for the job occupation code and location. Devil is in the details, but they are trying to change things.
Amusingly, this will only make it easier for smart Indians to import their countrymen. It’s just that instead of Infosys it will be some motel owner in Iowa who figures out that there’s a local shortage of massage therapists or health administrators or insurance salesmen or machinery operators or vegetable traders or whatever is both in demand and locally deemed hard to hire for and sets up a business that brings over people who did a bullshit 3 month fake degree in whatever it is from an amendable university in his hometown.
The only thing that would really fix the program (other than scrapping it) is to limit no more than 10% of visas to a single country.
I'm of the opinion that the best way to stop these sort of games is to do random audits and fine the companies violating it 10x the amount of money they saved.
Random audits? You don't even need an advanced AI to simply produce a table showing every single H1-B employee and how much they're getting paid. If I had access to government systems I'd be able to put out a list of every single H-1B getting paid below market rate for their job in five minutes. After that you'd want to go target all the ones working in positions that weren't really advertised to Americans in good faith - the ones that appear on sites like jobs.now. This isn't exactly a hard problem to solve - the actual issue is that the government is corrupt, and everyone in a position to do something about this problem is profiting off of it instead.
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Very much so, same with other forms of illegal immigration. It's infuriating that it hasn't been done already, it's pretty much the only way to seriously disincentivize abusing immigration loopholes.
Indirect solutions like this always sound good but in practice end up as anarcho-tyranny -- people end up having to do a LOT of work to prove their workforces are legal (some of which work may itself be illegal according to other laws), if they screw up they get nailed to the wall, and meanwhile someone else who operates completely unlawfully gets away with everything.
Keep it simple, reduce collateral damage, if you want to stop illegal immigration, go after illegal immigrants.
I mean if you want to keep it even simpler- the wage premium for legal workers is actually pretty small, the lack of healthcare/hr overhead is what makes illegals so attractive. Just remove employment regulations. Prevailing wages and working conditions in the vast majority of the USA are already governed more by supply and demand than by regulation, you're mostly cutting red tape.
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Indeed, only the jobs they're taking are as you note, degreed jobs. Gated sinecures reserved for the aristocracy, or at least the striving class being told they're the aristocracy. The "white collar" college jobs have been using anti-white racism to justify the wholesale displacement and attempted replacement of the working class (previously white catholic ethnics and black people) with more tractable hispanics. Now they find out their precious college degree-gated industries aren't safe from a billion indians, and the actual ruling class finds them as disposable as they found the Poles or Guatemalans.
The H1B program has been going on for 35 years, so I don't know what the "now" is referring to.
And why are you lumping together all "white collar" jobs, as if software engineers agree with the nonsense coming out of HR?
Software is special because the previous wave of applicants didn’t just need the H1B, they also needed whatever local cartel was required. The bar and going to law school in America and the fact the law is a verbal heavy field strongly preference native speakers raised in the US. The AMA locks foreign doctors out of any desirable residency places (which it mandates for almost all foreign doctors). Engineering has various local licensing requirements, and a lot of federal stuff requires you to be a citizen anyway. Meanwhile, sales, consulting, finance and a lot of other professional service jobs have a strong sales/relationship component which again makes it harder for Indians and Chinese applying from overseas.
Software engineering was unique in that it didn’t really require social skills, doesn’t usually require client interaction, paid well enough to get the visa, didn’t have a domestic licensing cartel and could be taught as a technical skill in foreign universities and schools.
Yep, I agree with all of this. Software engineers really should do what other engineering fields have done and set up that rent-seeking licensing cartel. It's bad for society overall, but most other fields do something like that, so why not us?
Oh, kick me out of the one field that pays me well despite the lack of credentials, why don't you?
You could just... get the new credentials? Plus, this would likely cut down on the impetus for nearly every shop to do Leetcode style interviews, so you'd be just exchanging one set of nonsense for another.
Yes, going back to school for 3 years (to learn things I already know, mind you) is just what I want to do when I'm 40.
Hearing Americans talk about Leetcode is one of those things that makes me go "wait what?". Every job I had over the past decade just handed out an assignment to be completed over a couple hours / a day, and they judged based on that.
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Right. However bad infinite Indians are, the "real engineering" gerontocracy is far worse.
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Hasn't the scale of the phenomenon changed over the years?
I'm sure its waxed and waned, but SWEs have been complaining about H1B's since at least the Dotcom boom in the 90s.
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