If you assume Trump’s goal is to change H1Bs to create growth and improve immigration policy, then I suggest you’re giving the man quite a bit of credit.
If his goal is to put tech companies into very bad positions that only he can save them from - that “leverage” he loves, well, then he’s accomplishing his goal quite well. He’s definitely forcing tech CEOs to beg him to carve out an exception for their particular company in exchange for “favors” from the Don.
Though H-1B provides great economic benefit to the US economy, it's unfortunately tied up public perception as part of the immigration problem. For Trump it's good PR, demonstrating his resolve to fight for the little guy. In this case American don't have the skills to fill all of the high-tech jobs.
Of course! Given your username I'll frame it in great power competition terms. Intellectual capital is likely the most valuable asset a nation can have access to. No other resource compares to rate of innovation for predicting prosperity and future national power. Every nation intent on great power competition wants to accumulate as many of the smartest and most ambitious people on the planet to live in their country as possible. The attractiveness of a nation as a destination of choice for intelligent people is a significant predictor of future success.
If your nation is sufficiently attractive, rather than actively entice these people you can force them to work at substandard wages for years and jump through absurd bureaucratic hoops in order to move to your country! It's a fantastic deal for Americans. You get artificially cheap labour in intellectually demanding tasks from some of the smartest people in the world, and they pay your government taxes! You get economic dynamism, subsidized corporate costs, and at the end of their indentured service - if they're lucky - they get to become permanent residents and continue to pay taxes, often working highly productive innovative jobs and starting successful businesses.
It's quite a power move. Suboptimal in a great power competition, because these barriers reduce the rate at which your nation accumulates that valuable intellectual capital, but a flex when you're the sole superpower in the world. It does potentially add that exclusivity cachet, like a luxury handbag they'll only make a hundred of, but I expect that effect is small.
The Soviets couldn't rely on immigration to accumulate intellectual capital, they had to train up their own people because of their closed system. The Chinese have a similar problem, but a much larger population to draw from. The United States has the unique structural advantage of being able to draw from the entire world - even their enemies! - benefitting from the cultivation, search, and selection process funded by other nations taxpayers. Those who self select to immigrate to the US aren't just the most intelligent, they're also disproportionately the most comfortable with risk and most ambitious of the most intelligent strata of the rest of the world! Quite a coup.
If you continue to pile on bureaucratic hoops and barriers while also making the country a less attractive destination you can of course eliminate this national superpower. It should be a conscious choice to surrender in great power competition, though! Innovators drawn from a population of 300M are unlikely to outcompete population of 1.5B. Drawn from 8B though? 1.5B doesn't stand much chance. Unless AI changes the calculation entirely, of course, but all the more reason to push the accelerator right now!
Your viewpoint is entirely based on seeing America as dependent on mass immigration. Its a terrible, America Last viewpoint and should be classed as treason. American jobs are for Americans. You are in favor of selling out our nation for a GDP increase.
Nonsense. The position that America should be weak and at the mercy of its enemies is treasonous. Anyone who believes America should be poorer and less capable of defending itself, no matter how noble their intentions, is no friend to the American people. Your 'mass immigration' idea is absurd, and shows you aren't arguing with me but with some demon conjured from your imagination. I said nothing about how many people you should admit, I said if you don't recruit the sharpest minds from around the world you'll never be as strong as you were last century when you worked hard to do exactly that. The number of H1B visas issued annually is tiny compared to your population. If you look at a list of the brightest minds and most successful business people in America it's full of both native born and immigrants. This is obvious because smart people are born at approximately equal rates (once we account for nutrition) everywhere. You can choose to have them work to improve America or not.
The entire concept of America was that an American was anyone who wanted to work hard, follow the law, support democracy, and believed in fundamental inalienable human rights. This attempt to redefine 'American' as 'someone born in the US' is absurd and counterproductive. Your own founding fathers disagree with you on this. Eight of them weren't born in the US, and five more who drafted the constitution!
You can absolutely surrender in great power competition, cut yourself off from the world, and descend into blessed isolation. You'll suffer the same fate as Imperial China, Imperial Japan, or the Ottoman Empire when they tried the same, but it's a perfectly valid choice. Don't pretend you're somehow strengthening America when you do it. Hold no illusions about the choice you're making. You will be poorer. You will be smaller. You will have fewer good jobs for your children. You will accomplish less to be proud of as a nation. Do not regret this when it happens, gnash your teeth and claim you were lied to. Being a citizen of a democracy comes with a heavy burden of responsibility to understand, choose, and live with the consequences.
Are you surrendering so quickly? If you have a strong belief you owe it to yourself to formulate equally strong arguments in support of that belief.
It's true I can't vote in US elections, but I have paid my US taxes for a decade (No taxation without representation was more of a loose guideline). I have a vested interest in the success of the country, and also in the idea that being American isn't about noble bloodlines traced back to Heracles or Charlemagne but about fundamental beliefs, as the founders declared. The US government has officially declared my continued presence in the national interest.
This claim seems nonsensical - you'll have to define how you're calculating this. Are you thinking of a sum of all the scientists and engineers trained in a state over the last hundred years vs India over the last hundred years? That seems less useful than to look at how many are being produced right now.
India produces over 1 million engineers and separately another million scientists every year. The entire US produces 1 million science + engineering graduates every year. The idea that one US state could be producing twice as much as the entire US is absurd. You can't look to the past and stick your head in the sand. You have to look at the reality of today. Great power status demands a clear eyed examination of the facts on the ground and the trends going forward. Great powers that navel gaze and dream about the past won't stay great powers for long.
Overthinking it. The policy will fail for much more prosaic reasons. Its purpose is to play signaling games in the immigration culture wars and it succeeds at that. Success in that domain entails failure in the conventional domain since the very purpose is to turn away immigrants, whatever the wage/skill level.
I’m not sure why the author just takes Trump shenanigans at face value. Remember the wasted episodes and articles focused on DOGE?
Each H1B visa is issued to a specific person filling a specific job opening. In the case of an employee of the outsourcing company, they often don’t know what job they will have even after their plane landed in the US. This is clearly abusing the purpose of the visa
These are not consulting jobs. They’re not working as an employee of A providing services to B. A consultant consulting for B does different things than an employee of B and does not walk the same career path as the latter. These people are, by every realistic definition, an employee of B itself. The nature of the position is wide ranging, from SWE to positions not that different from truck drivers. When they look for a next job, they will say on their resume they worked as SWE/truck drivers instead of consultants for the past few years. What’s scammy is that they don’t tell DOL that the job posting they’re trying to fill is, say, a SWE or a truck driver position.
Yes they are scammy. Businesses hide job postings so Americans can’t apply. Then the business can say “look no one applied, I need an H-1B” then they call an H-1B firm who gets them their H-1B. Once that person is in the door, they only hire other Indians. There are infinite stories of departments and companies becoming wholly Indian in under a few months or years.
They’re a scam because they use fake credentials. Or for example pay to have their applicants published in fly by night “scientific journals” so they can sneak people in through the so called “Einstein visa” meant for highly qualified people.
If Trump fails then it’s much, much worse.
The old ways are best.
This post is like reading the intellectuals of Constantinople debating the gender of angels in 1453.
VR, the Turks.
We’re just outside.
If you assume Trump’s goal is to change H1Bs to create growth and improve immigration policy, then I suggest you’re giving the man quite a bit of credit.
If his goal is to put tech companies into very bad positions that only he can save them from - that “leverage” he loves, well, then he’s accomplishing his goal quite well. He’s definitely forcing tech CEOs to beg him to carve out an exception for their particular company in exchange for “favors” from the Don.
Though H-1B provides great economic benefit to the US economy, it's unfortunately tied up public perception as part of the immigration problem. For Trump it's good PR, demonstrating his resolve to fight for the little guy. In this case American don't have the skills to fill all of the high-tech jobs.
Can you explain what benefit there is to the American economy by Americans being replaced and without a living wage?
Of course! Given your username I'll frame it in great power competition terms. Intellectual capital is likely the most valuable asset a nation can have access to. No other resource compares to rate of innovation for predicting prosperity and future national power. Every nation intent on great power competition wants to accumulate as many of the smartest and most ambitious people on the planet to live in their country as possible. The attractiveness of a nation as a destination of choice for intelligent people is a significant predictor of future success.
If your nation is sufficiently attractive, rather than actively entice these people you can force them to work at substandard wages for years and jump through absurd bureaucratic hoops in order to move to your country! It's a fantastic deal for Americans. You get artificially cheap labour in intellectually demanding tasks from some of the smartest people in the world, and they pay your government taxes! You get economic dynamism, subsidized corporate costs, and at the end of their indentured service - if they're lucky - they get to become permanent residents and continue to pay taxes, often working highly productive innovative jobs and starting successful businesses.
It's quite a power move. Suboptimal in a great power competition, because these barriers reduce the rate at which your nation accumulates that valuable intellectual capital, but a flex when you're the sole superpower in the world. It does potentially add that exclusivity cachet, like a luxury handbag they'll only make a hundred of, but I expect that effect is small.
The Soviets couldn't rely on immigration to accumulate intellectual capital, they had to train up their own people because of their closed system. The Chinese have a similar problem, but a much larger population to draw from. The United States has the unique structural advantage of being able to draw from the entire world - even their enemies! - benefitting from the cultivation, search, and selection process funded by other nations taxpayers. Those who self select to immigrate to the US aren't just the most intelligent, they're also disproportionately the most comfortable with risk and most ambitious of the most intelligent strata of the rest of the world! Quite a coup.
If you continue to pile on bureaucratic hoops and barriers while also making the country a less attractive destination you can of course eliminate this national superpower. It should be a conscious choice to surrender in great power competition, though! Innovators drawn from a population of 300M are unlikely to outcompete population of 1.5B. Drawn from 8B though? 1.5B doesn't stand much chance. Unless AI changes the calculation entirely, of course, but all the more reason to push the accelerator right now!
Your viewpoint is entirely based on seeing America as dependent on mass immigration. Its a terrible, America Last viewpoint and should be classed as treason. American jobs are for Americans. You are in favor of selling out our nation for a GDP increase.
Nonsense. The position that America should be weak and at the mercy of its enemies is treasonous. Anyone who believes America should be poorer and less capable of defending itself, no matter how noble their intentions, is no friend to the American people. Your 'mass immigration' idea is absurd, and shows you aren't arguing with me but with some demon conjured from your imagination. I said nothing about how many people you should admit, I said if you don't recruit the sharpest minds from around the world you'll never be as strong as you were last century when you worked hard to do exactly that. The number of H1B visas issued annually is tiny compared to your population. If you look at a list of the brightest minds and most successful business people in America it's full of both native born and immigrants. This is obvious because smart people are born at approximately equal rates (once we account for nutrition) everywhere. You can choose to have them work to improve America or not.
The entire concept of America was that an American was anyone who wanted to work hard, follow the law, support democracy, and believed in fundamental inalienable human rights. This attempt to redefine 'American' as 'someone born in the US' is absurd and counterproductive. Your own founding fathers disagree with you on this. Eight of them weren't born in the US, and five more who drafted the constitution!
You can absolutely surrender in great power competition, cut yourself off from the world, and descend into blessed isolation. You'll suffer the same fate as Imperial China, Imperial Japan, or the Ottoman Empire when they tried the same, but it's a perfectly valid choice. Don't pretend you're somehow strengthening America when you do it. Hold no illusions about the choice you're making. You will be poorer. You will be smaller. You will have fewer good jobs for your children. You will accomplish less to be proud of as a nation. Do not regret this when it happens, gnash your teeth and claim you were lied to. Being a citizen of a democracy comes with a heavy burden of responsibility to understand, choose, and live with the consequences.
You're not even American, right? Your opinion is trash.
Are you surrendering so quickly? If you have a strong belief you owe it to yourself to formulate equally strong arguments in support of that belief.
It's true I can't vote in US elections, but I have paid my US taxes for a decade (No taxation without representation was more of a loose guideline). I have a vested interest in the success of the country, and also in the idea that being American isn't about noble bloodlines traced back to Heracles or Charlemagne but about fundamental beliefs, as the founders declared. The US government has officially declared my continued presence in the national interest.
Pick any fly over country state and they will have produced more scientists and engineers than India
This claim seems nonsensical - you'll have to define how you're calculating this. Are you thinking of a sum of all the scientists and engineers trained in a state over the last hundred years vs India over the last hundred years? That seems less useful than to look at how many are being produced right now.
India produces over 1 million engineers and separately another million scientists every year. The entire US produces 1 million science + engineering graduates every year. The idea that one US state could be producing twice as much as the entire US is absurd. You can't look to the past and stick your head in the sand. You have to look at the reality of today. Great power status demands a clear eyed examination of the facts on the ground and the trends going forward. Great powers that navel gaze and dream about the past won't stay great powers for long.
workers are also consumers
Well, we all expected it was bad policy, didn't we? But in what way will it 'backfire'?
Overthinking it. The policy will fail for much more prosaic reasons. Its purpose is to play signaling games in the immigration culture wars and it succeeds at that. Success in that domain entails failure in the conventional domain since the very purpose is to turn away immigrants, whatever the wage/skill level.
I’m not sure why the author just takes Trump shenanigans at face value. Remember the wasted episodes and articles focused on DOGE?
Each H1B visa is issued to a specific person filling a specific job opening. In the case of an employee of the outsourcing company, they often don’t know what job they will have even after their plane landed in the US. This is clearly abusing the purpose of the visa
These are not consulting jobs. They’re not working as an employee of A providing services to B. A consultant consulting for B does different things than an employee of B and does not walk the same career path as the latter. These people are, by every realistic definition, an employee of B itself. The nature of the position is wide ranging, from SWE to positions not that different from truck drivers. When they look for a next job, they will say on their resume they worked as SWE/truck drivers instead of consultants for the past few years. What’s scammy is that they don’t tell DOL that the job posting they’re trying to fill is, say, a SWE or a truck driver position.
Yes they are scammy. Businesses hide job postings so Americans can’t apply. Then the business can say “look no one applied, I need an H-1B” then they call an H-1B firm who gets them their H-1B. Once that person is in the door, they only hire other Indians. There are infinite stories of departments and companies becoming wholly Indian in under a few months or years.
They’re a scam because they use fake credentials. Or for example pay to have their applicants published in fly by night “scientific journals” so they can sneak people in through the so called “Einstein visa” meant for highly qualified people.