My article yesterday on the reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination has been getting a lot of attention. Gained and lost many subscribers. I will say one thing that annoys me is people saying that it’s in bad taste to make such arguments so soon after he was killed. Trump and Elon Musk are out there placing blame on half the country for what happened, and conservative influencers are calling for mass arrests and war on the left. They don’t even wait to see who the shooter was before doing this, and unlike them my opinion doesn’t depend on that individual’s identity. The idea that I can’t argue against them is ridiculous and would cede the floor to the craziest people in public life. Moreover, this administration has shown that it is prone toward abusing its power, and we need to be worried about what they might do in response to this tragedy.
This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.
I'll say what I have said about this before. Remove the need for sponsorship from the H-1B and I have no more issues with it. That's the maximum individual liberty preserving choice anyway. If somebody wants to hire some amazing Indian software engineer, fine, let them do it. Also, if he can make more money leaving that company two weeks after he got here and going to another (with no need to convince them to sponsor him), let him do that. My personal bet is that something like 1/3 of these visa requests will mysteriously vanish overnight if you do this because if you dig into the data around 1/3 are not requests for amazing software developers but for boring roles like "sysadmin" that some company wants to pay 60k for instead of 80-100k for which is the going rate for a competent, experienced sysadmin. The reason for this is that sysadmins are not revenue generators. They are like tech plumbers - necessary to make preexisting stuff keep working but not necessarily driving innovation or research. They are expensive because it's a role that requires a lot of technical expertise and companies want to get rid of them or make them cheaper. Any such competent Indian sysadmins employed on these terms will promptly skedaddle to get market rate pay if you remove the need for sponsorship from their heads. It would also gut most of the nepotism stuff people don't like.
Keeping the sponsorship requirement is itself anti-market. If you want to unendingly build out datacenters and such, the need for tech plumbers with expensive to acquire expertise isn't going anywhere. The market rate for a sysadmin is around 80-100k. Deal with it or invent tech to replace them like innovation is supposed to do.
It comes down to aesthetic preferences. Indian immigrants are by all metrics one of the (if note *the*) most successful groups in America. They do everything immigrants are supposed to - they work hard, the innovate, they follow the law, they achieve in both academia and business. If you were to ban all immigration from all except one country, that country should probably be India.
None of the "smarter racisms" apply to the revulsion towards Indians. It is in truth, and quite outwardly, not motivated by any real economic or political concern. It is because they think Indians are brown and gross and their food is smelly. They don't fit into the idealised picture of the America of Yesteryear (typically placed somewhere around the 1950s) that is in fact the primary driving force behind the current mainstream of American conservatism. In the idyllic archetype of the Idealised Suburban America the grass is green, the sky is blue, and approximately 87% of the people are white. The Indians do not fit into the picture. Yet they are out of the rationalizations that are normally used to argue against immigration - literally *none* of them apply to Indians - so they just start making shit up instead, even embracing protectionism if it helps the cause. They'll stunt American industry in the name of aesthetics.