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.
Good take on socialism and racism as applied to H1-B visas.
But your take on Charlie Kirk was tin eared and your defence of it today is tin eared. The fact that your opposition lowered themselves has never really been a good argument for lowering the tone, and you were factually wrong in several places, and then in the comments tried to defend the indefensible.
Charlie Kirk fundamentally believed that the way to change someone’s mind was persuasion, and therefore operated fully within the bounds of civil discourse.
The person who shot him disagreed with that approach. There are a group of people who fundamentally want to persuade us that PERSUASION IS VIOLENCE, which is obviously hypocritical, but not everyone understands that operating with speech is much safer than operating with violence.
While I disagreed with Kirk, we shared the idea that dialogue is the basis for a civil discourse, not riots, not looting, not assassinations.
When someone declares that perhaps being a rage-baiting demagogue is justification for what happened, that person declares themselves to be unfit for our society. They are expressing incivility.
Let us condemn that incivility together, and also acknowledge that the violence is coming more from one side than the other.
If people are using Kirk's death to attack the left, Richard has the right to say that they are wrong. This is simple. If it's in bad faith to use his death in order to score political points, then blame the people using his death to score political points.
>and also acknowledge that the violence is coming more from one side than the other.
Yes, and which side do you think that is? If you immediately assume that it's the left, I challenge you to provide solid statistics showing this to be the case (and I think the statistics might surprise you). If you're wrong, you may have actually fallen to the very post-assassination opportunist demagoguery that Richard was trying to address in his post.
Unironically the anti-Indian sentiments are downstream of the India street food reels on Instagram that pretty much every normie on on this planet was blasted with for a couple of months 3-4 years ago. Right wingers are anti-Indian more openly but leftists and normies also likely dislike Indians more than any other ethnic/racial group. 10 years ago, no one outside of South Asia really thought about Indians. Not the case anymore. Its not even limited to the West. People in East Asia, Africa, regions with minimal Indian immigration also dislike Indians.
Economically I can give credence in only one respect to the desire to moderate immigration rather than have fully open borders: inelasticity of infrastructure and services, which is a failure at State and Municipal level. We don't build enough housing, and policy-makers also drag their feet on improving infrastructure to better get around, for example. I think fixing these bottlenecks first makes perfect sense. We can quibble about how things "ought to be" a certain way, but they're not, we should adjust accordingly.
On the H1Bs, these workers are not negotiating lower wages, they're *assigned* significantly lower wages, 17% to 34% lower (the amazing Indian engineer therefore does not have the opportunity to negotiate a higher wage). The entire point of H1Bs is to fill in a labor shortage; in STEM, there isn't one. The wages create a perverse incentive on the part of employers to *always* claim there is a shortage regardless of the reality. Fair play if permanent immigrants compete and negotiate a lower wage, but this is a parallel system with an exploit.
So far as I can tell, your argument against it is that skin color is “superficial”. But if women discriminate against men based on height (also superficial), you rush to their defense on your steed. Your argument is not coherent; frankly, it’s just thoughtless PC junk (and superficial). Now, if you want to argue that racism (like myriad other views, e.g., socialism) can lead to terrible consequences, that’s true, but it still doesn’t mean that preferring your own kind is “bad”. The solution is property rights in streets, etc. But, ironically, you think the world owns the U.S. streets, roads, etc. (i.e., socialism). I encourage you (again) to stop moralizing against racism and push for libertarianism. (Also, if you think MAGA are stupid, just wait until you have paved the way for many millions of very low-IQ immigrants. When vast swathes of the population are “borderline retards”, Chavism seems like a real possibility to me.)
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.
"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."
Don't worry your little head off....your side has plenty of judges to stand in Trump's way.
Yes, what you write is absolutely correct. But there *is* a lump-of-status, and when you're a American techie angling to maximize his place in the pecking order, there is a serious risk of some unbelievably qualified and hard-working Indian slotting into the totem pole above you.
The suburb north of me is Lexington, Massachusetts. It's maybe 90th percentile on median income for a Boston suburb. It's got Good Schools, Lexington High School is one of the top-ten feeders into Harvard. Lexington has 12,310 housing units (as of 2020) and you wouldn't be surprised to learn that they're not increasing that number very quickly. So if you're a techie aiming for the brass ring for your children, there's a bidding war for those houses, and you don't really want to increase the number of competitors.
As you say, "most white collar professionals" aren't like this, but then again, most white collar professions don't qualify for H-1b visas; Indians in those fields have to wait for much more limited visa types and Americans in those fields are feeling a lot less heat.
You can' t really analyze a situation without cataloging the incentives that apply to the people whose actions you deplore. And then all you can do is clarify to *everybody else* why they shouldn't support the thing you deplore.
There’s a stronger argument which you didn’t address: the more elite non-white immigrants we draw, the less represented whites are among the elite. If these non-white elites are misaligned with or racist against whites, an eventual largely non-white elite might harm whites.
I don’t entirely buy this argument because non-white elite immigrants rapidly assimilate. Even those who are anti-white (see Zohran Mamdani) are assimilants to elite whites’ wokeness. But I can’t dismiss the risk out of hand, even if it’s outweighed by the benefits of becoming a smarter and larger nation overall.
I think you're slightly wrong: These non-white elites are intrinsically competition for elite whites (and their children). It doesn't matter if they are biased or not. Think in terms of Turchin's "elite overproduction".
Of course, in the long run, all elites in the US assimilate. Indeed, "white" is an artificial ethnicity like "Han Chinese", pretty much defined as "those who people in the elite are allowed to marry". In 1906, Swedes weren't "white", and neither were Jews or Irish. And if you look at the census reports, blacks are starting to intermarry with whites at a significant rate. I do wonder what the elite ethnicity will be called in 100 years...
I mean it's possible but there are just a bunch of examples of worrying that various waves of immigrants won't assimilate or will take over or ruin the culture. And then it turns out fine.
Germans, then Irish, Italians. In recent memory Mexicans, who people were still panicking about what, 10 years ago? But at this point clearly are assimilating, it will be fine. Why would Indians be different? They even speak English already.
What are you talking about? You might have an argument if this was Somali or Tajikistan politics. But US politics is something people around the world dabble in.
If anything this strengthens Hanania's position that he's competing internationally because the old joke on Twitter is that half the accounts commenting on American politics are sitting in India.
He writes with unique insight into America by living here. It’s not the same by any measure. People who write about America from foreign locations tend to do so for their domestic audience.
And yes, Americans should be protected from unfair competition against foreigners in their own country.
IMHO the proper answer to this argument is that it does not matter. It seems likely that Hanania is insulated from foreign competition because of his topic. But critically, immigration restrictions won't benefit him regardless of how much he is or is not intrinsically insulated from foreign competition -- foreigners don't have to immigrate to the US to compete with him.
Note that Hanania says most white collar professions don't moan about Indian immigration. But most white collar professions can't get you an H-1b, so there's a lot less Indian immigration in those fields.
The flip side of foreign competition is more desirable products.
Would Americans be better off if we could only buy cars from Ford, GM and Chrysler? A couple million employees would be, but the other 350 million of us would just pay more for worse cars.
Same for political hot takes. Hanania might be worse off if he had to compete with some smarter Indian, but his readership would have a better blog to read.
I didn’t realize the point of having a state and laws is to ensure consumers get the best quality food for the lowest possible price. Here I thought it was to protect life and property and ensure the general welfare.
there’s obviously a balance between labor and consumers and the pendulum has swung too far in one direction to the detriment of ordinary wolfing Americans.
International trade and domestic labour aren't at odds - at least this is the overwhelming consensus of the economists who actually study these things. Foreign competition doesn't just open up America to international firms - it also opens up America to international markets, employing American workers to produce goods and services that get sold abroad.
And if the argument against immigration is that it takes American jobs, this also really isn't true empirically. Immigrants are vastly more likely to become entrepreneurs - and therefore employ people domestically - than the native-born.
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.
Good take on socialism and racism as applied to H1-B visas.
But your take on Charlie Kirk was tin eared and your defence of it today is tin eared. The fact that your opposition lowered themselves has never really been a good argument for lowering the tone, and you were factually wrong in several places, and then in the comments tried to defend the indefensible.
Charlie Kirk fundamentally believed that the way to change someone’s mind was persuasion, and therefore operated fully within the bounds of civil discourse.
The person who shot him disagreed with that approach. There are a group of people who fundamentally want to persuade us that PERSUASION IS VIOLENCE, which is obviously hypocritical, but not everyone understands that operating with speech is much safer than operating with violence.
While I disagreed with Kirk, we shared the idea that dialogue is the basis for a civil discourse, not riots, not looting, not assassinations.
When someone declares that perhaps being a rage-baiting demagogue is justification for what happened, that person declares themselves to be unfit for our society. They are expressing incivility.
Let us condemn that incivility together, and also acknowledge that the violence is coming more from one side than the other.
If people are using Kirk's death to attack the left, Richard has the right to say that they are wrong. This is simple. If it's in bad faith to use his death in order to score political points, then blame the people using his death to score political points.
>and also acknowledge that the violence is coming more from one side than the other.
Yes, and which side do you think that is? If you immediately assume that it's the left, I challenge you to provide solid statistics showing this to be the case (and I think the statistics might surprise you). If you're wrong, you may have actually fallen to the very post-assassination opportunist demagoguery that Richard was trying to address in his post.
> factually wrong in several places, and then in the comments tried to defend the indefensible
This might hit a lot harder had you provided a single example
The worst thing is for my Indian friends on the right. They have to be bedfellows with old-style racists (as opposed to the newer woke-style racists).
But I guess that's politics. Join forces with people whom you dislike to accomplish an outcome nobody wants
I couldn’t agree more. Thank you for this!
Unironically the anti-Indian sentiments are downstream of the India street food reels on Instagram that pretty much every normie on on this planet was blasted with for a couple of months 3-4 years ago. Right wingers are anti-Indian more openly but leftists and normies also likely dislike Indians more than any other ethnic/racial group. 10 years ago, no one outside of South Asia really thought about Indians. Not the case anymore. Its not even limited to the West. People in East Asia, Africa, regions with minimal Indian immigration also dislike Indians.
Economically I can give credence in only one respect to the desire to moderate immigration rather than have fully open borders: inelasticity of infrastructure and services, which is a failure at State and Municipal level. We don't build enough housing, and policy-makers also drag their feet on improving infrastructure to better get around, for example. I think fixing these bottlenecks first makes perfect sense. We can quibble about how things "ought to be" a certain way, but they're not, we should adjust accordingly.
On the H1Bs, these workers are not negotiating lower wages, they're *assigned* significantly lower wages, 17% to 34% lower (the amazing Indian engineer therefore does not have the opportunity to negotiate a higher wage). The entire point of H1Bs is to fill in a labor shortage; in STEM, there isn't one. The wages create a perverse incentive on the part of employers to *always* claim there is a shortage regardless of the reality. Fair play if permanent immigrants compete and negotiate a lower wage, but this is a parallel system with an exploit.
“Racism is bad”
So far as I can tell, your argument against it is that skin color is “superficial”. But if women discriminate against men based on height (also superficial), you rush to their defense on your steed. Your argument is not coherent; frankly, it’s just thoughtless PC junk (and superficial). Now, if you want to argue that racism (like myriad other views, e.g., socialism) can lead to terrible consequences, that’s true, but it still doesn’t mean that preferring your own kind is “bad”. The solution is property rights in streets, etc. But, ironically, you think the world owns the U.S. streets, roads, etc. (i.e., socialism). I encourage you (again) to stop moralizing against racism and push for libertarianism. (Also, if you think MAGA are stupid, just wait until you have paved the way for many millions of very low-IQ immigrants. When vast swathes of the population are “borderline retards”, Chavism seems like a real possibility to me.)
Ah, the elusive avowed liberatarian racist.
Caste discrimination in Silicon Valley. Reported in the WSJ.
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.
"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."
Don't worry your little head off....your side has plenty of judges to stand in Trump's way.
Yes, what you write is absolutely correct. But there *is* a lump-of-status, and when you're a American techie angling to maximize his place in the pecking order, there is a serious risk of some unbelievably qualified and hard-working Indian slotting into the totem pole above you.
The suburb north of me is Lexington, Massachusetts. It's maybe 90th percentile on median income for a Boston suburb. It's got Good Schools, Lexington High School is one of the top-ten feeders into Harvard. Lexington has 12,310 housing units (as of 2020) and you wouldn't be surprised to learn that they're not increasing that number very quickly. So if you're a techie aiming for the brass ring for your children, there's a bidding war for those houses, and you don't really want to increase the number of competitors.
As you say, "most white collar professionals" aren't like this, but then again, most white collar professions don't qualify for H-1b visas; Indians in those fields have to wait for much more limited visa types and Americans in those fields are feeling a lot less heat.
You can' t really analyze a situation without cataloging the incentives that apply to the people whose actions you deplore. And then all you can do is clarify to *everybody else* why they shouldn't support the thing you deplore.
There’s a stronger argument which you didn’t address: the more elite non-white immigrants we draw, the less represented whites are among the elite. If these non-white elites are misaligned with or racist against whites, an eventual largely non-white elite might harm whites.
I don’t entirely buy this argument because non-white elite immigrants rapidly assimilate. Even those who are anti-white (see Zohran Mamdani) are assimilants to elite whites’ wokeness. But I can’t dismiss the risk out of hand, even if it’s outweighed by the benefits of becoming a smarter and larger nation overall.
I think you're slightly wrong: These non-white elites are intrinsically competition for elite whites (and their children). It doesn't matter if they are biased or not. Think in terms of Turchin's "elite overproduction".
Of course, in the long run, all elites in the US assimilate. Indeed, "white" is an artificial ethnicity like "Han Chinese", pretty much defined as "those who people in the elite are allowed to marry". In 1906, Swedes weren't "white", and neither were Jews or Irish. And if you look at the census reports, blacks are starting to intermarry with whites at a significant rate. I do wonder what the elite ethnicity will be called in 100 years...
I mean it's possible but there are just a bunch of examples of worrying that various waves of immigrants won't assimilate or will take over or ruin the culture. And then it turns out fine.
Germans, then Irish, Italians. In recent memory Mexicans, who people were still panicking about what, 10 years ago? But at this point clearly are assimilating, it will be fine. Why would Indians be different? They even speak English already.
There’s less foreign competition for you because you write about US politics and culture. You are insulated by the very topics you write about.
We have a fee market system within national borders. You ignore the border part because you believe they are unimportant and racist.
What are you talking about? You might have an argument if this was Somali or Tajikistan politics. But US politics is something people around the world dabble in.
If anything this strengthens Hanania's position that he's competing internationally because the old joke on Twitter is that half the accounts commenting on American politics are sitting in India.
He writes with unique insight into America by living here. It’s not the same by any measure. People who write about America from foreign locations tend to do so for their domestic audience.
And yes, Americans should be protected from unfair competition against foreigners in their own country.
IMHO the proper answer to this argument is that it does not matter. It seems likely that Hanania is insulated from foreign competition because of his topic. But critically, immigration restrictions won't benefit him regardless of how much he is or is not intrinsically insulated from foreign competition -- foreigners don't have to immigrate to the US to compete with him.
Note that Hanania says most white collar professions don't moan about Indian immigration. But most white collar professions can't get you an H-1b, so there's a lot less Indian immigration in those fields.
The flip side of foreign competition is more desirable products.
Would Americans be better off if we could only buy cars from Ford, GM and Chrysler? A couple million employees would be, but the other 350 million of us would just pay more for worse cars.
Same for political hot takes. Hanania might be worse off if he had to compete with some smarter Indian, but his readership would have a better blog to read.
I didn’t realize the point of having a state and laws is to ensure consumers get the best quality food for the lowest possible price. Here I thought it was to protect life and property and ensure the general welfare.
there’s obviously a balance between labor and consumers and the pendulum has swung too far in one direction to the detriment of ordinary wolfing Americans.
International trade and domestic labour aren't at odds - at least this is the overwhelming consensus of the economists who actually study these things. Foreign competition doesn't just open up America to international firms - it also opens up America to international markets, employing American workers to produce goods and services that get sold abroad.
And if the argument against immigration is that it takes American jobs, this also really isn't true empirically. Immigrants are vastly more likely to become entrepreneurs - and therefore employ people domestically - than the native-born.
Early version accidentally said capitalism instead of racism, very telling as my leftist brother would say haha