Dumbest Form of Racism, Dumbest Form of Socialism

Why I stand against anti-Indian hate

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.

In other news, I have a prescheduled article in UnHerd about the rise of anti-Indian sentiment on the right.

Yet this particular animus — hostility to Indians and Indian-Americans — isn’t “just” an online shitposting phenomenon. It reflects the Right’s shifting reception of South Asians: from an affluent, hard-working minority to a group that takes your jobs and despoils your neighborhoods.

Conservative influencers and politicians have decided that Indian immigration is a problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to say that too many Indians coming in as H-1Bs is a reason to be against the program. Ingraham herself warns that “any trade deal with India will require us to give them more visas.” Steve Bannon has similarly called for a complete halt to the H-1B program, saying “instead of stapling a green card to their diploma, staple an exit visa.”

This is a strange development. Conservatives have long recited a litany of complaints about immigration, and none of them appears to apply to Indians. Conservatives worry about illegal immigration showing contempt for the law, or low-skilled new arrivals committing crimes or becoming dependent on welfare. There are often complaints about a failure of assimilation or the threat of terrorism from Muslim arrivals. But Indians are among the highest earning ethnic groups in the country. According to one study, they make up less than 2% of the population, but pay 5% to 6% of all federal income taxes. Their crime rate is negligible, and there is no history of them committing terrorist attacks or contributing to anti-Semitism.

This leaves the wages argument, which rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The idea that wages need to be protected from competition rests on what economists call the “lump-of-labor” fallacy, which assumes that there is only a set amount of work to be done. On the contrary, economists have found that new arrivals increase jobs by boosting aggregate demand, and can contribute to the expansion of an industry.

It is common for people to fall for economic fallacies, and this doesn’t always involve them having racist motivations. Yet the way this one is selectively applied to Indians suggests that the roots of such views lie elsewhere. For example, even if conservatives believe in the lump-of-labor fallacy, why do they then spend their time complaining about migrants who don’t work?

Read the whole thing here

I’ve come to realize that the anti-H1B position is at the intersection of most things I hate. Racism is bad and so is socialism. But there are smarter and dumber versions of racism and socialism, and hostility to Indian immigration is the stupidest version of both.

The dumbest form of racism because you can’t actually point to statistical averages or some cultural difference that threatens the country, like you can with migrants from the Middle East and Africa. It basically boils down to the idea that they look different and dress funny. I’ve seen the argument that Indians in America are “clannish,” which has never been supported by any data I’ve seen, and acts as if white people don’t hire or do business with one another based on personal relationships (the free market is the only mechanism you need to discipline this anyway).

Heroes

The dumbest form of socialism because it relies on the “lump of labor” fallacy, as does every policy suggestion premised on the idea of protecting workers from competition. The smart form of socialism is to grow the economy and then redistribute the wealth. The ideology of wage competition says slow down economic growth, hinder technological progress, and make everyone else’s life worse to protect the incomes of a select subset of the population. It’s the exact same reasoning that justifies organized labor, one of the greatest blights on contemporary civilization.

All of this is not just bad economics, but morally repulsive. I have a job where I compete with the entire world. Anyone with an internet connection can start a Substack or go on Twitter. I take pride in my work, and wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I suggested passing laws that said people should not have access to the writings of others in order to protect my income. How do the tech workers who complain about wage competition – nothing indicates that they’re close to a majority – even look at themselves in the mirror? Most white collar professionals are not like this, which is why they are pro-immigration, with those who complain being a small subset of people who are entitled and see themselves as replaceable cogs. No wonder no one wants to hire them! The extreme version of this is the MMA chud who explained to the Washington Post that he is trying to get a job with ICE so he can beat up Indians who keep getting hired over him.

You’ll sometimes hear that “they aren’t better for the job, they only work cheaper.” That’s what being the best person for the job means! It’s the individual who provides the highest value to the employer in a free market system.

Imagine that I demand $10 million a year to bag groceries, and then when a store hires someone at minimum wage, I complain that it’s not fair that they work for less. Even if I was better at bagging groceries, the fact that I demand a wage so high it makes the employer prefer someone else means that I am not the best suited person for the job. If someone can do the thing you can do but for cheaper, you have no right to complain about this. Try finding something of value that you can provide that others can’t instead of being a burden on your fellow humans.

Of course it’s true that the H-1B program could be improved, by for example ranking applicants according to income. We want the most productive people, all else equal. But this is simply an argument to expand the number of high-skilled immigrants. The problem isn’t that we let in mediocre tech workers and engineers. Anyone who is close to being smart enough to be an engineer should be allowed into the country! Improving national IQ benefits society as a whole, and if they’re even slightly smarter than the average American and not a criminal or some kind of national security threat there is no economic argument for keeping them out.

I’m more open to non-economic arguments against immigration. I don’t think they’re very good, but at least they don’t trigger me in the way the wage competition thing does, which misunderstands basic economics and makes a virtue out of parasitism.