Ethan, there is one aspect that you missed on this subject: DEI.
Much of the eruption from even left leaning tech redditors have been under a slow boil the past 10 years. In the second half of the 2010s there was this cultural corporate push for “women in tech”, where males, mostly white, were disfavoured/passed-over for promotion and hiring.
After George Floyd they pivoted towards more surface racial reconciliations — as seen in the Bloomberg study that shows the amount of white pools Fortune 200 companies hired in its wake, which the only reasoned explanation being unadulterated discrimination. There are now explicit targets for these companies to be more diverse by HR departments, and then proudly celebrate that they are XX% female and XX% minority in corporate reports/year-end reviews. It’s “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”.
I have several personal anecdotes, but I will share one as an IC and one as a manger in a tech company. We were hiring for a junior position where I was the technical interviewer in the ‘Loop’. There was one candidate that was head and shoulders above the rest in technical ability and communication skills, but also happened to be a white male. Despite my vote, the hiring committee selected a South Asian woman with the SVP and HR rep reasoning she attended an elite school. * This ignores the compounding effect of DEI selections in other institutions. I know it would be much easier for her to get into a STEM program at a top school than the other candidate. I couldn’t be 100% certain but I believe it was a demographic driven decision. She was an OK contributor who ended up leaving after 9 months.
As a HM, we were hiring for a new technical role that was classified as “unbudgeted headcount”. I was given nothing but South Asian H1B equivalent candidates to interview. None of them impressed, so I had to go my VP to say that this wasn’t working. We ended up opening the role to remote global position and landed a very smart Brazilian PhD who spoke better English than the previous candidates I interviewed.
Buddy, you started with a value judgment saying that US tech workers aren't able to handle the tech jobs in the US. I would love someone, anyone, to try to substaniate that, as opposed to US workers would expect a level of salary that these tech companies don't want to pay.
The gas station example is from the government's listing of H1-Bs. I don't know, it is possible that it is not accurate, but there isn't any other data source besides them, so I don't know what else to say.
As for the Canadian example, it may be different in specifics (in this particular discussion, university visas is a huge problem in the US too) but not in aggregate. You cannot rapidly change the people of a country without a country's people becoming upset at that.
I think you meant to reply to the old thread. Regardless, US companies are always going to hire foreign talent despite the associated headaches because there is not enough US talent to fill those roles. H-1B has a spotlight on it because of Musk and because some people really hate Indians, but you can look at other visas for similar examples. There are a ton of Canadian corporate lawyers in the US on TN visas, pulling in massive salaries. These people aren't taking some sort of immigrant discount, and their employers aren't hiring them because they love Canada so much.
Firms like Cognizant are case studies in US visa abuse, but that doesn't mean it's the norm whatsoever. There's not enough native-born talent here to fill the most specialized roles. It's not that hard to understand.
And as far as I know, this discussion with Musk and MAGA isn't about changing the country so much as it's about whether we need immigrants to fill US roles. The nativist energy aimed at demographic concerns seems to be about illegal immigration, not the 30k or so Indians who come here each year to work in tech.
Yep, meant to reply to the earlier thread, sorry about that. I don't know if it's me or Substack's app, but I have trouble commenting on these threads.
H1Bs are being talked about because Sacks brought it up, sure, but I don't know if the reaction to it would be any different if it involved another Asian group that had a prominent member of that group (like Vivek) being very vocal on its benefits. People are frustrated that there was an election where immigration was a major reason why Trump won and there is this immediate move to go against the voters inside his coalition. All the UK grooming gang information being talked about at the same time is adding to it, and the New Orleans terror attack will add more to it.
Finally, there are real chain migration concerns around H1Bs, as long as birthright citizenship is a time and the visas are renewable.
Chain migration part is valid. I brought my wife here, and our future children will be American unless they get rid of birthright citizenship.
I take your point that the election was about immigration, but it was relatively recent immigrants (or their kids) who pushed Trump over the edge this year. Surely the Latinos and Asians who voted for him don’t hate all immigration? I know his base mostly does unless it’s from Scandanavia or whatever.
I sincerely thought anti-immigration sentiment was about illegal migration and low-skilled immigrants who, at least according to some, undercut working class wages. Trump has surrounded himself with elite immigrants like Musk, Sacks and Vivek (never mind his wife) who see the value of having more people like themselves here, so his position doesn’t surprise me. I understand that the base feels cheated, though.
The problem is that H1Bs are also seen as undercutting wages. Also, in 2016 Trump said "The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay."
Maybe perception is more important than reality, but I don't think the data supports this either. I may be relying too heavily on the foreign workers I know in the US, including myself, but people on H-1B, O1, TN, and L visas are paid well and often above-market for the explicit purpose of making their visa applications stronger. Maybe the anti-immigration people would be even angrier if they realized that was the case. I don't know.
I'm not really sure how to prove this or disprove it. I do think that graph that Lee referenced in the podcast showing that tech wages have been flat over the last twenty years, even through inflation and having a lot of the economic focus shift to tech, is suggestive that something is keeping tech wages down. That plus the anecdotes of Americans being laid off then forced to train their H1B replacements create an impression that H1Bs lower wages, but that isn't proof.
This had the opportunity to be a very smart/interesting conversation. But Ethan jerks the wheel into “The right is actually racist!!” lane. Forced. Lazy.
A few main thoughts about H1Bs/immigration generally:
1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student at an R1 says there are only two American citizens out of a couple dozen people in his program. IDK this seems like a bad use of our educational resources? Yes I know the foreigners often pay full freight, but they also take a spot.
2) Another guy I know well is on the advisory board for a different engineering Phd. program (same school) and has worked at a big US firm himself for two decades. He says that his employer couldn't function without H1Bs etc. He also said that last Trump Presidency the engineering program he advises saw enrollment fall in half due to the departure of foreign students (I am guessing that is more COVID than Trump, but am not sure the details), he seems to think that this will happen again under Trump.
3) Another guy I know sightly less well is an immigration lawyer for a big national bank, and certainly a lot of the people he brings in are in no way special. Just end up being random personal bankers at branches and stuff. Definitely slotted right into jobs that would in the past have gone into Americans but now go to Nigerians and South Africans and Indians because their English is "good enough" and they are willing to work for $10k-20k less for the same quality employee. Especially since the jobs comes with immigration status. In these type of cases I think there is a crystal clear case this is just straight out harming Americans pretty seriously.
4) Personally I work closely with a tech firm staffed with Indians (and a couple Latinos) that is based in DC, and FWIW their output is hot garbage. Not sure why exactly, but never met a non-Indian or non-Latino working there. I am sure some of them are citizens by now because they have been in the states working for this firm (and/or a couple of its subsidiaries) for over a decade.
But they certainly are not some tiger-children Übermenschen. I mean maybe their employer would be just as much of a mess with more "American" staff, but in this case I am pretty sure it hasn't been a magic ticket to competency. Probably just cheaper. Plus with government contracting you get points for being brown and having brown staff.
The discussion was, uncharacteristically, a bit of a mess.
—The nativists got rolled quickly.
—They got rolled quickly not only because they are the goofier part of the coalition, but because on immigration they were always in the minority. The majority position was that immigration policy was irrationally based on proximity, rewarding gaming or ignoring immigration law, “humanitarian” concerns, and family connections and as a result too many poor and/or poorly educated persons were effectively given priority, which was against (one understanding) of the national interest. And that instead we should reconfigure immigration to recruit highly skilled and educated applicants who would “add more.” See, for example, Trump’s “shithole countries” comment then, and Trump taking Elon’s side now.
— While bigoted assumptions about people based on country of origin exist (again, see “ shithole countries” shorthand), the statement on the pod that it’s racist to prefer immigration to not want the former policy described, in favor of the later, is…debatable.
Re Vivek — it’s harder to make a less persuasive argument. Just one problem with it is that it can be titled “how to raise your son into a man no woman will ever be excited to sleep with”
Disagree with Ethan that Vivek nuked his political career with that tweet. I think he is clearly a savvy political entrepreneur who is willing to learn and adapt. He is young enough too where he can overcome challenges in the long term.
As a foreigner on a high-skilled US visa, this has been so interesting to watch. Elon is right on one thing: America does not have the native-born tech talent to compete globally. Frankly, the talent pool is just too weak. Vivek's rant about culture is also correct: immigrants tend to work harder than the native-born population.
At the same time, Musk is a huge supporter of Germany's far-right anti-immigration AfD, so his advocacy for H-1Bs is purely self-interested, especially since he overstayed his own visa to remain in the US. Look at how Black workers at Tesla factories have been treated, versus his defending mostly Indian engineers: he sees the latter as valuable, so now "racism is bad." It is bad, btw, but this only seems to have occurred to the South African billionaire last week.
At the same time, this "underpaid, exploited Indian" H-1B narrative is extremely overblown, and it seems mostly spouted by jealous, angry Americans. The people coming here on high-skilled visas are overwhelmingly happy to come here with all the associated restrictions because the opportunity is so great. It can be a headache, but for us, it's worth it, especially since we are usually high-paid workers. Critics of the visa sometimes act like we're all being paid below market-rate, but it's just not true. Specific firms do this, but I don't think it's the norm.
I think this perfectly sums up the view of people benefiting from the present situation. What does it mean that the US can't compete globally with our local tech talent? Does it mean that we wouldn't be able to build cheap apps that exploit dopamine to extract money from impatient users? Does it mean we couldn't build AI surveillance tech that tries to manipulate our citizens? What couldn't we do? I ask this because I know several people in tech looking for work right now and they can't find anything. They are having experiences that include 5+ interviews or being asked to write code for the company without pay as part of the hiring process. People who just graduated (with tech-related degrees) can't find anything in the field.
I think the death-knell to this discussion came after two things happened. First, when people started posting examples of what H1-Bs were used for on Twitter. There are a bunch of gas stations in rural Missouri that use H1-Bs for cashiers, there were several internship positions listed, and several entry level accounting postions. These are not positions that require importing "extraordinary" people from other countries to do. Secondly, people pointed out that Canada has basically been importing people at the level Vivik/Elon/Sacks are talking about for the last several years, and they didn't start having a booming, innovative tech center. Even Justin Trudeau is drastically cutting their levels of immigration, because bringing in non-Canadians is so disruptive.
America is a place with a people, and our government needs to set policy that helps its people, not abstract concepts like GPD.
> First, when people started posting examples of what H1-Bs were used for on Twitter. There are a bunch of gas stations in rural Missouri that use H1-Bs for cashiers, there were several internship positions listed, and several entry level accounting postions.
The thing is that what people actually started posting examples of was the database of *H1B applications*, not actually granted H1B visas. So lots of idiots on Twitter started thinking that every screenshot they saw of a $14,000 job was actually granted, not having any clue that the statutory minimum is $60,000.
This is incorrect. First, the $60k amount is only for exempt H1Bs, and even those would not need to pay $60k if the recipient had a master's degree in that field. So someone could claim a masters degree in accounting and still be paid less than 60k even as an exempt H1B.
All of the examples I cite were from the nonexempt H1B list, which has no $60k requirement. They are subject to the H1B lottery, so it is possible they were not chosen via the lottery. (But as someone who has driven through southwest Missouri, I think it is certainly possible they were pulled.) However, they are all definitely valid H1B visa applications, otherwise they wouldn't have been included in the lottery.
You're making value judgements about the kind of tech US companies build. I won't disagree that a lot of it is shit that does nothing good for the populace, but these companies want to build it, and the native-born talent pool alone isn't able to. Visas are expensive and a pain in the ass, companies don't bring in foreign workers just because. Every visa worker knows switching jobs is hard because many companies don't want to sponsor you.
I highly doubt that gas stations workers are brought in on H-1Bs; it's basically the only US work visa with a minimum wage requirement, and many visa give extra points to your application if your pay is higher than the prevailing wage in that job. People say a lot of BS about immigration.
And as someone from Canada, these situations are quite different. The backlash is also targeted at Indian immigrants, which makes me sad as a non-Indian with a lot of desi friends. But the "importing" has really come from universities and colleges, regulated provincially, bringing in a lot of international students who pay higher tuition fees than native-born Canadians. Those kids are being exploited by shady immigration agents who sell a dream to the students' families, who sometimes use their life savings to send their kid to a shitty for-profit college.
Trudeau has raised immigration targets since his election, but we have a points system that prioritizes high-skilled immigrants. Canadians have been very pro-immigration until very recently. What pushed things over the edge is an influx of young students who have not integrated well. They're not on high-skill visas.
You also aren't going to create more local talent if you are depressing wages and making the local engineers unemployed. My informal canvassing of things like this is that something like half the time programs like this are used as they should be and beneficially, and half the time it is just about cutting costs and has zero to do with "not finding talent".
I posted my limited experiences elsewhere in this thread, but my gut is I think the people talking about one extreme or the other are likely to be wrong on this issue.
Generally yes we want to take driven competent people who have jobs waiting for them. At the same time you want to be careful you aren't harming your own populace to much with that policy because it is a BIG world.
I agree that both extremes paint an inaccurate picture, but at the end of the day, these isn’t a zero-sum situation. H-1B is a dual intent visa, and many of these workers will become citizens one day and hire talented Americans. Immigrants tend to like entrepreneurship!
My intent here was to say it is a big world, and high-end talent is not going to be concentrated in one country. Foreign talent is always going to play a key role in building the US economy.
Does anyone have numbers on how many IT jobs are outsourced to India and/or China? Software dev, IT helpdesk, global support centers, engineering and configuring, manufacturing, etc. That number has to dwarf HB-1 visas.
One other thing. Although I also get annoyed at Rick Perlstein 2.0. It does seem that you and Lee are pointing towards the space Rick is already occupying: In politics, find out what people really want but might not even be able to express and promise it to them: https://x.com/rickperlstein/status/1867614983192019090
Seemingly, the actor who played Urkel took a course while in college on TV where the instructor classified Urkel as an Uncle Tom. Cunningham interjects that this actor couldn’t see himself clearly (agreeing with this “Tom” assessment, it seems)
Regarding nerd culture writ large, there’s been a “Humanities Turn” with the Great Awokening that has deemphasized pure math and science, but the breadth of programming for kids is just so vast now that you can still find more “hard science” than ever before, just not centralized on PBS as it used to be. I’m around Musk’s age, and the excitement over space exploration (even its darker side; as in Alien) was just everywhere in the ‘70s, going into the early ‘80s (sometimes called “The Long Seventies”, which is also an excellent podcast). That sort of “zeitgeist” isn’t there anymore. I felt it most in 2019, when there didn’t seem to be much hoopla over the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, and now we have people on the left making it their identity to deride anything to do with rockets, because Musk cooties. I wouldn’t mind some more “rockets are cool!” programming reach the public consciousness, and the pendulum will probably swing back anyway.
The main missing argument here is if they don’t allow H1-b these jobs will move offshore where those intelligent immigrants would be living. Especially for the international companies.
Like union workers protesting before the factory closes.
Is it not business owners' prerogative to drive costs down? So why is it not beneficial for consumers and 'native' workers in tech if their employers try to drive down costs of complicated tech rolls by bringing in cheaper labor?
People focusing on the DEI aspect of this have it wrong. It's a labor issue. To me, this says more about how weak of a coalition Trump has built. The splintering is already happening and he's not even in office yet. How has this gotten twisted into a DEI/meritocracy issue?
Ethan, there is one aspect that you missed on this subject: DEI.
Much of the eruption from even left leaning tech redditors have been under a slow boil the past 10 years. In the second half of the 2010s there was this cultural corporate push for “women in tech”, where males, mostly white, were disfavoured/passed-over for promotion and hiring.
After George Floyd they pivoted towards more surface racial reconciliations — as seen in the Bloomberg study that shows the amount of white pools Fortune 200 companies hired in its wake, which the only reasoned explanation being unadulterated discrimination. There are now explicit targets for these companies to be more diverse by HR departments, and then proudly celebrate that they are XX% female and XX% minority in corporate reports/year-end reviews. It’s “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”.
I have several personal anecdotes, but I will share one as an IC and one as a manger in a tech company. We were hiring for a junior position where I was the technical interviewer in the ‘Loop’. There was one candidate that was head and shoulders above the rest in technical ability and communication skills, but also happened to be a white male. Despite my vote, the hiring committee selected a South Asian woman with the SVP and HR rep reasoning she attended an elite school. * This ignores the compounding effect of DEI selections in other institutions. I know it would be much easier for her to get into a STEM program at a top school than the other candidate. I couldn’t be 100% certain but I believe it was a demographic driven decision. She was an OK contributor who ended up leaving after 9 months.
As a HM, we were hiring for a new technical role that was classified as “unbudgeted headcount”. I was given nothing but South Asian H1B equivalent candidates to interview. None of them impressed, so I had to go my VP to say that this wasn’t working. We ended up opening the role to remote global position and landed a very smart Brazilian PhD who spoke better English than the previous candidates I interviewed.
Buddy, you started with a value judgment saying that US tech workers aren't able to handle the tech jobs in the US. I would love someone, anyone, to try to substaniate that, as opposed to US workers would expect a level of salary that these tech companies don't want to pay.
The gas station example is from the government's listing of H1-Bs. I don't know, it is possible that it is not accurate, but there isn't any other data source besides them, so I don't know what else to say.
As for the Canadian example, it may be different in specifics (in this particular discussion, university visas is a huge problem in the US too) but not in aggregate. You cannot rapidly change the people of a country without a country's people becoming upset at that.
I think you meant to reply to the old thread. Regardless, US companies are always going to hire foreign talent despite the associated headaches because there is not enough US talent to fill those roles. H-1B has a spotlight on it because of Musk and because some people really hate Indians, but you can look at other visas for similar examples. There are a ton of Canadian corporate lawyers in the US on TN visas, pulling in massive salaries. These people aren't taking some sort of immigrant discount, and their employers aren't hiring them because they love Canada so much.
Firms like Cognizant are case studies in US visa abuse, but that doesn't mean it's the norm whatsoever. There's not enough native-born talent here to fill the most specialized roles. It's not that hard to understand.
And as far as I know, this discussion with Musk and MAGA isn't about changing the country so much as it's about whether we need immigrants to fill US roles. The nativist energy aimed at demographic concerns seems to be about illegal immigration, not the 30k or so Indians who come here each year to work in tech.
Yep, meant to reply to the earlier thread, sorry about that. I don't know if it's me or Substack's app, but I have trouble commenting on these threads.
H1Bs are being talked about because Sacks brought it up, sure, but I don't know if the reaction to it would be any different if it involved another Asian group that had a prominent member of that group (like Vivek) being very vocal on its benefits. People are frustrated that there was an election where immigration was a major reason why Trump won and there is this immediate move to go against the voters inside his coalition. All the UK grooming gang information being talked about at the same time is adding to it, and the New Orleans terror attack will add more to it.
Finally, there are real chain migration concerns around H1Bs, as long as birthright citizenship is a time and the visas are renewable.
Chain migration part is valid. I brought my wife here, and our future children will be American unless they get rid of birthright citizenship.
I take your point that the election was about immigration, but it was relatively recent immigrants (or their kids) who pushed Trump over the edge this year. Surely the Latinos and Asians who voted for him don’t hate all immigration? I know his base mostly does unless it’s from Scandanavia or whatever.
I sincerely thought anti-immigration sentiment was about illegal migration and low-skilled immigrants who, at least according to some, undercut working class wages. Trump has surrounded himself with elite immigrants like Musk, Sacks and Vivek (never mind his wife) who see the value of having more people like themselves here, so his position doesn’t surprise me. I understand that the base feels cheated, though.
The problem is that H1Bs are also seen as undercutting wages. Also, in 2016 Trump said "The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay."
Maybe perception is more important than reality, but I don't think the data supports this either. I may be relying too heavily on the foreign workers I know in the US, including myself, but people on H-1B, O1, TN, and L visas are paid well and often above-market for the explicit purpose of making their visa applications stronger. Maybe the anti-immigration people would be even angrier if they realized that was the case. I don't know.
I'm not really sure how to prove this or disprove it. I do think that graph that Lee referenced in the podcast showing that tech wages have been flat over the last twenty years, even through inflation and having a lot of the economic focus shift to tech, is suggestive that something is keeping tech wages down. That plus the anecdotes of Americans being laid off then forced to train their H1B replacements create an impression that H1Bs lower wages, but that isn't proof.
Great podcast, I laughed out loud when Ethan was describing Lee's reaction when he started talking about the Holocaust class he took in college.
This had the opportunity to be a very smart/interesting conversation. But Ethan jerks the wheel into “The right is actually racist!!” lane. Forced. Lazy.
A few main thoughts about H1Bs/immigration generally:
1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student at an R1 says there are only two American citizens out of a couple dozen people in his program. IDK this seems like a bad use of our educational resources? Yes I know the foreigners often pay full freight, but they also take a spot.
2) Another guy I know well is on the advisory board for a different engineering Phd. program (same school) and has worked at a big US firm himself for two decades. He says that his employer couldn't function without H1Bs etc. He also said that last Trump Presidency the engineering program he advises saw enrollment fall in half due to the departure of foreign students (I am guessing that is more COVID than Trump, but am not sure the details), he seems to think that this will happen again under Trump.
3) Another guy I know sightly less well is an immigration lawyer for a big national bank, and certainly a lot of the people he brings in are in no way special. Just end up being random personal bankers at branches and stuff. Definitely slotted right into jobs that would in the past have gone into Americans but now go to Nigerians and South Africans and Indians because their English is "good enough" and they are willing to work for $10k-20k less for the same quality employee. Especially since the jobs comes with immigration status. In these type of cases I think there is a crystal clear case this is just straight out harming Americans pretty seriously.
4) Personally I work closely with a tech firm staffed with Indians (and a couple Latinos) that is based in DC, and FWIW their output is hot garbage. Not sure why exactly, but never met a non-Indian or non-Latino working there. I am sure some of them are citizens by now because they have been in the states working for this firm (and/or a couple of its subsidiaries) for over a decade.
But they certainly are not some tiger-children Übermenschen. I mean maybe their employer would be just as much of a mess with more "American" staff, but in this case I am pretty sure it hasn't been a magic ticket to competency. Probably just cheaper. Plus with government contracting you get points for being brown and having brown staff.
Really great pod Ethan. Well done, many laughs were had, and insights abound. Cheers
The discussion was, uncharacteristically, a bit of a mess.
—The nativists got rolled quickly.
—They got rolled quickly not only because they are the goofier part of the coalition, but because on immigration they were always in the minority. The majority position was that immigration policy was irrationally based on proximity, rewarding gaming or ignoring immigration law, “humanitarian” concerns, and family connections and as a result too many poor and/or poorly educated persons were effectively given priority, which was against (one understanding) of the national interest. And that instead we should reconfigure immigration to recruit highly skilled and educated applicants who would “add more.” See, for example, Trump’s “shithole countries” comment then, and Trump taking Elon’s side now.
— While bigoted assumptions about people based on country of origin exist (again, see “ shithole countries” shorthand), the statement on the pod that it’s racist to prefer immigration to not want the former policy described, in favor of the later, is…debatable.
Re Vivek — it’s harder to make a less persuasive argument. Just one problem with it is that it can be titled “how to raise your son into a man no woman will ever be excited to sleep with”
Disagree with Ethan that Vivek nuked his political career with that tweet. I think he is clearly a savvy political entrepreneur who is willing to learn and adapt. He is young enough too where he can overcome challenges in the long term.
As a foreigner on a high-skilled US visa, this has been so interesting to watch. Elon is right on one thing: America does not have the native-born tech talent to compete globally. Frankly, the talent pool is just too weak. Vivek's rant about culture is also correct: immigrants tend to work harder than the native-born population.
At the same time, Musk is a huge supporter of Germany's far-right anti-immigration AfD, so his advocacy for H-1Bs is purely self-interested, especially since he overstayed his own visa to remain in the US. Look at how Black workers at Tesla factories have been treated, versus his defending mostly Indian engineers: he sees the latter as valuable, so now "racism is bad." It is bad, btw, but this only seems to have occurred to the South African billionaire last week.
At the same time, this "underpaid, exploited Indian" H-1B narrative is extremely overblown, and it seems mostly spouted by jealous, angry Americans. The people coming here on high-skilled visas are overwhelmingly happy to come here with all the associated restrictions because the opportunity is so great. It can be a headache, but for us, it's worth it, especially since we are usually high-paid workers. Critics of the visa sometimes act like we're all being paid below market-rate, but it's just not true. Specific firms do this, but I don't think it's the norm.
I think this perfectly sums up the view of people benefiting from the present situation. What does it mean that the US can't compete globally with our local tech talent? Does it mean that we wouldn't be able to build cheap apps that exploit dopamine to extract money from impatient users? Does it mean we couldn't build AI surveillance tech that tries to manipulate our citizens? What couldn't we do? I ask this because I know several people in tech looking for work right now and they can't find anything. They are having experiences that include 5+ interviews or being asked to write code for the company without pay as part of the hiring process. People who just graduated (with tech-related degrees) can't find anything in the field.
I think the death-knell to this discussion came after two things happened. First, when people started posting examples of what H1-Bs were used for on Twitter. There are a bunch of gas stations in rural Missouri that use H1-Bs for cashiers, there were several internship positions listed, and several entry level accounting postions. These are not positions that require importing "extraordinary" people from other countries to do. Secondly, people pointed out that Canada has basically been importing people at the level Vivik/Elon/Sacks are talking about for the last several years, and they didn't start having a booming, innovative tech center. Even Justin Trudeau is drastically cutting their levels of immigration, because bringing in non-Canadians is so disruptive.
America is a place with a people, and our government needs to set policy that helps its people, not abstract concepts like GPD.
> First, when people started posting examples of what H1-Bs were used for on Twitter. There are a bunch of gas stations in rural Missouri that use H1-Bs for cashiers, there were several internship positions listed, and several entry level accounting postions.
The thing is that what people actually started posting examples of was the database of *H1B applications*, not actually granted H1B visas. So lots of idiots on Twitter started thinking that every screenshot they saw of a $14,000 job was actually granted, not having any clue that the statutory minimum is $60,000.
Thanks for explaining this. I’m not on social media anymore so didn’t see this play out. I’m not surprised at this kind of error.
This is incorrect. First, the $60k amount is only for exempt H1Bs, and even those would not need to pay $60k if the recipient had a master's degree in that field. So someone could claim a masters degree in accounting and still be paid less than 60k even as an exempt H1B.
All of the examples I cite were from the nonexempt H1B list, which has no $60k requirement. They are subject to the H1B lottery, so it is possible they were not chosen via the lottery. (But as someone who has driven through southwest Missouri, I think it is certainly possible they were pulled.) However, they are all definitely valid H1B visa applications, otherwise they wouldn't have been included in the lottery.
You're making value judgements about the kind of tech US companies build. I won't disagree that a lot of it is shit that does nothing good for the populace, but these companies want to build it, and the native-born talent pool alone isn't able to. Visas are expensive and a pain in the ass, companies don't bring in foreign workers just because. Every visa worker knows switching jobs is hard because many companies don't want to sponsor you.
I highly doubt that gas stations workers are brought in on H-1Bs; it's basically the only US work visa with a minimum wage requirement, and many visa give extra points to your application if your pay is higher than the prevailing wage in that job. People say a lot of BS about immigration.
And as someone from Canada, these situations are quite different. The backlash is also targeted at Indian immigrants, which makes me sad as a non-Indian with a lot of desi friends. But the "importing" has really come from universities and colleges, regulated provincially, bringing in a lot of international students who pay higher tuition fees than native-born Canadians. Those kids are being exploited by shady immigration agents who sell a dream to the students' families, who sometimes use their life savings to send their kid to a shitty for-profit college.
Trudeau has raised immigration targets since his election, but we have a points system that prioritizes high-skilled immigrants. Canadians have been very pro-immigration until very recently. What pushed things over the edge is an influx of young students who have not integrated well. They're not on high-skill visas.
You also aren't going to create more local talent if you are depressing wages and making the local engineers unemployed. My informal canvassing of things like this is that something like half the time programs like this are used as they should be and beneficially, and half the time it is just about cutting costs and has zero to do with "not finding talent".
I posted my limited experiences elsewhere in this thread, but my gut is I think the people talking about one extreme or the other are likely to be wrong on this issue.
Generally yes we want to take driven competent people who have jobs waiting for them. At the same time you want to be careful you aren't harming your own populace to much with that policy because it is a BIG world.
I agree that both extremes paint an inaccurate picture, but at the end of the day, these isn’t a zero-sum situation. H-1B is a dual intent visa, and many of these workers will become citizens one day and hire talented Americans. Immigrants tend to like entrepreneurship!
My intent here was to say it is a big world, and high-end talent is not going to be concentrated in one country. Foreign talent is always going to play a key role in building the US economy.
Does anyone have numbers on how many IT jobs are outsourced to India and/or China? Software dev, IT helpdesk, global support centers, engineering and configuring, manufacturing, etc. That number has to dwarf HB-1 visas.
For sure.
One other thing. Although I also get annoyed at Rick Perlstein 2.0. It does seem that you and Lee are pointing towards the space Rick is already occupying: In politics, find out what people really want but might not even be able to express and promise it to them: https://x.com/rickperlstein/status/1867614983192019090
Stuyvesant? This Hunterite sneers at your reference (but not in a clueless Vivek way. Just making sure you understand that).
The Urkel references made me think of Vinson Cunningham’s piece that just ran in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/23/up-from-urkel-world-famous-nerd
Seemingly, the actor who played Urkel took a course while in college on TV where the instructor classified Urkel as an Uncle Tom. Cunningham interjects that this actor couldn’t see himself clearly (agreeing with this “Tom” assessment, it seems)
Regarding nerd culture writ large, there’s been a “Humanities Turn” with the Great Awokening that has deemphasized pure math and science, but the breadth of programming for kids is just so vast now that you can still find more “hard science” than ever before, just not centralized on PBS as it used to be. I’m around Musk’s age, and the excitement over space exploration (even its darker side; as in Alien) was just everywhere in the ‘70s, going into the early ‘80s (sometimes called “The Long Seventies”, which is also an excellent podcast). That sort of “zeitgeist” isn’t there anymore. I felt it most in 2019, when there didn’t seem to be much hoopla over the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, and now we have people on the left making it their identity to deride anything to do with rockets, because Musk cooties. I wouldn’t mind some more “rockets are cool!” programming reach the public consciousness, and the pendulum will probably swing back anyway.
I’m beyond left wing. I love Lee and Greenwald. I also openly vote D. Love the fact that people hide their names
The main missing argument here is if they don’t allow H1-b these jobs will move offshore where those intelligent immigrants would be living. Especially for the international companies.
Like union workers protesting before the factory closes.
Really enjoyed the close reading of the Vivek tweet. I had not been closely following this over holidays and appreciate the thoughtful breakdown.
Is it not business owners' prerogative to drive costs down? So why is it not beneficial for consumers and 'native' workers in tech if their employers try to drive down costs of complicated tech rolls by bringing in cheaper labor?
People focusing on the DEI aspect of this have it wrong. It's a labor issue. To me, this says more about how weak of a coalition Trump has built. The splintering is already happening and he's not even in office yet. How has this gotten twisted into a DEI/meritocracy issue?