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.
I think there is some value in a market test. Giving out green cards purely based on credentials would lead to a Canada like situation where PhDs could be driving a cab because they can't get a job. There are ways to fix the sponsorship issue by streamlining the process for transfer to another employer and by fixing the green card backlog.
Inasmuch as the goal of migration is social mobility and if the PhD makes more money driving a cab than being a PhD wherever he came from, what's the problem with this? Nobody is owed something because of a subjective sense that their worth *should* command this or that price in the market. If you want markets to dictate, let markets dictate. The reality is that there are tons of seemingly low class "break/fix" roles that are in-demand in market terms and PhD having smart guys that are not. Sysadmins make more than a lot of people feel like they should since they are "just" tech plumbers and not engineers. Not every STEM PhD is in high demand. Obviously, some break/fix (like basic computer repair) is not in high enough demand to merit better than fast food worker salaries for it and some PhDs can name their price and work wherever they like.
(I admit both of my comments here are baiting a bit. Anybody who is truly motivated by "let the market decide" should have no issue with the market conferring status to people in ways that run afoul of common sensibilities. They should have no problem with some break/fixers making more than PhDs and some PhDs making fast food worker wages if that's how the market shakes out. The next generation of smart people should get jobs doing that break/fix thing instead of in the not in demand PhD field).
This is a bad argument because PhDs drive technological growth over time in a way that break/fixers do not. Just as targeted tariffs are critical to protect nascent industries from getting "strangled in the crib" it is horrible for society if PhDs are forced by circumstances to work as a janitor or fast food worker instead of working as decently paid researchers who will develop major techological breakthroughs if given a feasible chance.
So, we should just pay anybody with a PhD more money because they have a PhD? Find make-work for them? Forbid PhDs from immigrating here unless we can guarantee they will have jobs "befitting" them?
Cool, different people want different market interventions for different vibes-based reasons. Yours seems to be something about smart people intrinsically deserving more for no reason except being smart independent of what value they actually deliver. Don't complain when rightoids want market interventions for vibes reasons either then.
PhDs driving a cab is only a problem because the Canadian point based system gave that person extra points for being a PhD. You could let someone in who was a cab driver in their home country if that's your goal - to find the best possible cab drivers for the streets of Canada.
The market argument is we need smart people to drive innovation and labor in general to fuel growth. From the first point of view, almost anybody with a PhD is probably somewhat above average and is a better than average gamble even if they do end up driving a cab. From the second point of view, who cares so long as the immigrant is doing something useful?
This is a very good argument: free competition does not depress wages, but sponsorship DOES. It is NOT free competition. Richard should take note here.
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.
Frankly, I think most of the anti-Indians don't want the competition. In my kids honors / IB classes about 3/4 of the class was composed of children of highly educated immigrants from South and East Asia. I told my kids that they had to be better and that they were competing in a global workforce. That clearly meant that they had to be willing to work hard and long.
They rose to the challenge.
In my opinion I had it worse when I was in school. I was competing with the children of the Holacaust survivors.
IMO the strongest argument against H1-B is rooted in the social contract rather than economics. There is something undeniably repugnant about a corporation like Disney firing American workers and obliging them to train their H1-B replacements on the way out. I get that profits went up and value was generated for shareholders, but man does not live on GDP alone.
The debunking of the lump-of-labor theory rests on some far worse assumptions: That new arrivals actually spend their paycheck in the host country's economy instead of sending it home to relatives or building a second house. Instead of trying to find a "fallacy" to try to explain away reality, maybe look at ACTUAL wages for a second. They've been plummeting since globalization.
Just because they send a thousand dollars or so once every month to their parents in India doesn't mean they don't pay into the system. They have families in the US, they raise their children there and send them to school and college. They literally pay 5 to 6 % of the total taxes despite being only 1% of the population. They get jobs, start businesses and contribute immensely, way more per capita than Whites. How much more do they have to pay to be considered worthy according to you? At this point, at least be honest and admit that you simply don't like the way they look instead of shamelessly hiding behind this veil of self righteousness.
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.
Indian society has enormous wealth inequality and in many ways is “eugenic” through culture - caste system, arraigned marriage. I say this as an “Indian elite” , the chasm between the bottom and top is very large without much of a middle class. This fuels the dichotomy between stupid ugly commoner Indians and Indian CEOs of tech companies. India as a whole will need to figure out a way to make more of their population productive and sophisticated. They have been tackling the worst of poverty (starvation, literacy)
Not at all. Wages are rising fast. In rural areas, it is difficult for farmers to find labor as they are not willing to work cheap. Govt subsidies to the poor has also resulted in laborers shirking work unless well compensated. It all depends on skill sets. Those who are poorly skilled obviously can't demand high wages.
The real problem is that school and college education is not job oriented and lot of Indians don't have sufficient skills to get high paying jobs.
I'm in favor of the government limiting competition in my field of work so I can get paid more. Can you elaborate on why the 'lump-of-labor' is a fallacy? When we're seeing mass layoffs at FAANG companies it certainly seems like there are a limited amount of high paying roles. Also, the more competition there is for a job, the less bargaining power each individual employee has - that's just basic wage economics.
I'll give my own arguments for this, one empirical and one model-based. I'm focusing on the idea that there's a fixed amount of work to do, specifically, such that the addition of productive capacity leads to unemployment for everyone else.
The first is, we have *massively* improved productivity since the start of the industrial revolution. For example, it became possible for one farmer to feed about 100 people. And then the same thing happened for most other kinds of work people could do. Most people were farmers at the time, so if there was a fixed amount of work to do, one would expect that more than 90% of the population to be unemployed now, since the work would already be done. Yet in actual fact unemployment remains low. Evidently, other work showed up.
From a modeling perspective, it's fairly easy to imagine why this would happen. There's almost always a bunch of stuff you'd like to do but don't have the resources to do. I worked in a tech-adjacent role at my previous company. One can imagine various things that we could have done to, say, improve cybersecurity. For example, we sent out communications about how to avoid phishing scams, but much better than that would be to try to generate white-hat "phishing" emails of our own. This would simultaneously allow us to actually assess the risk of employees falling for them, whereas for someone who did fall for one of them, we would be positioned to actually teach them how to improve after proving they needed to (which would be a lot more memorable than a random tech bulletin). But my department was busy trying to expand the database and answer requests for data, and everyone else was struggling to stay caught up on paperwork, so just the standard security education would do. But if everyone became more efficient, there were certainly all kinds of things we could have been doing with our time.
Suppose it takes 100% of the available people to make food, without which everyone would definitely die, and 50% of the available people to make winter clothes, without which there's a 30% chance one person will die. Any rational decision maker will put everyone on food production and skip making the winter clothes. Then suppose something makes the food workers twice as productive. What do you do then?
It's possible to imagine a person would react to this situation by saying, "Cool, we can all work half as long - let's accept the risk of freezing to death and relax." What's much more difficult to imagine is this insanely unambitious person rising to the top of a competitive organization. Rather, one would generally expect top roles to be filled with ambitious people who have a strong tendency to try to figure out how to do more, do better, than they're doing right now. For some people that will mean trying to maximize their cost performance, and they'll lay people off. But somewhere in the economy, there will be someone who sees the potential to produce more, or guard against some risk they previously had to essentially accept. And to them goes the labor.
My dad (extreme progressive liberal, not conservative) often says big tech companies import Indian migrants as indentured servants on H-1B's.
I don't think he believes that there are massive differences in ability between people. We _are_ all replaceable cogs. By the same token, he also bemoans CEOs and corporate execs who write themselves huge bonuses (because why should anybody earn that much). I've tried asking him why boards wouldn't just hire a cheaper CEO, but to him it's all bullshit all the way up. It's all to maintain the illusion that they do anything important.
Nobody should be hating Indians. But it isn't fair to the native working class to turn on the immigration spigot every time wages get too high. Which is what all of this is really about. Which makes it easy to hate the new arrivals, especially when they're nepotist Brahmin.
Every single problem attributed to immigration in canada is just policy failure in other domains. It's just thinly veiled scapegoating.
Canada is still migrant friendly, for the most part. There was an anti immigrant protest in Toronto recently that flopped and got eclipsed in size by a pro migrant counter protest.
It's policy failure, for sure: the policy of letting in way too many immigrants who have little in common with Canadians.
But other than mere numbers, the hostility is seldom aimed at Filipinos, Nigerians or even Chinese. It's Indians who have people talking about them.
And yeah, an anti-immigration protest in a city with millions of them might not go well. However, it still happened and more of them will happen until there is a drastic immigration reduction.
It is a failure. We bring in countless people from all over the world for their expertise only for their credentials to be invalid, so we have doctors driving cabs and engineers working customer service.
Our economy is lousy and immigration has not helped at all. Not only that, but it's making homes more expensive, delaying family formation by Canadians and thus, reducing birthrates.
I know those other groups have little in common with Anglo Saxons, however, their English skills are often better than those of Indians, their numbers are lower and they aren't overrepresented in customer-facing jobs. So, Canadians have a lot of experience with Indians, especially over the last 10 years.
If anyone here needs to cope it's you. You need to cope with the fact that Indians have a poor reputation in North America.
Migrants who drive cabs or work low skill job predominantly are students or people waiting for a permit to work in their field. Neither are permanent cases of underemployment.
The canadian economy is "lousy" independent of immigration. High house prices are the result of market failure caused by overregulation and nimbyism. Birth rates are also low due to reasons independent of migration.
Indians are on average more proficient at english than all of those groups.
Nope. I'm in Canada. Indian English is lousy here, at least for the newest arrivals. Cab drivers aren't young. Most are middle-aged Punjabis.
Overregulation is not the problem. Vancouver and Toronto only have so much area for suburban expansion. Increasing the population through excess immigration doesn't help.
I still think this whole debate boils down to this response I saw to Elon's H1B argument: you can tell that he's never had an Indian boss.
Maybe we haven't all had Indian bosses, but we've all interacted with an Indian call center. To act like the concern is just 'racism' means you're either an idiot or being deliberately obtuse. Numbers like IQ and salary are great for making spreadsheet decisions, but they don't capture what it actually means to replace a significant chunk of your workforce with people from a radically diferent culture.
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.
Regarding "clannishness," at least in the case of blacks and whites, friendship-diversity is highly predictive of intermarriage. Since Indian Americans have one of the lowest rates of intermarriage, it suggests that their friendship-diversity is low.
The free market "disciplines" this behavior, because it is not optimal in the long-run, but sometimes people choose their values over profit. In theory, the harm done to whites from Indian nepotism would be of the same quality as the harm done to Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century. Discrimination hurts, at least emotionally, even if there are net economic benefits.
Jews did immigrate to America in spite of the discrimination because the net gains were large. But there was resulting political tension that was resolved through Civil Rights -- a hairy solution. You only need 2% of the population to create large effects, in coalition with other groups. I think the example of Jews shows how this nepotism can eventually be overcome, but it did involve a period of pain.
The flaw in this argument is that 56% of Indian Americans arrived after 2000. Intermarriage rates for Indian Americans born in the US is 32%, which is lower than Asian Americans (55%) but it should only go up with each generation.
Even when you control for immigration year, Indian Americans still practice more endogamy than all other groups. It's not something that I think is evil but it is a real phenomenon that becomes a stereotype.
Comparing whites to Indians isn't a fair comparison because larger groups always have lower rates of outmarriage due to the effects of randomized exposure.
Here's what I'm looking at, feel free to show me some data:
"The statistics are generated from subsamples of the Census. I would be a bit cautious on outmarriage rates for groups like Asian Indians and Koreans where in 2010 the number of those born or raised in the USA was still rather small compared to the foreign-born/raised population. One reason Indian Americans showed extremely low outmarriage rates in the early 2000 Census results is that there was a massive swell of immigration in the Clinton era from Indians, so the foreign-born immigrants overwhelmed the signal."
Once you consider only raised in the US, the differences are much smaller. Vietnamese American men, a community that had arrived in big numbers in the 70s and 80s are not far from Indian American men.
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.
I think there is some value in a market test. Giving out green cards purely based on credentials would lead to a Canada like situation where PhDs could be driving a cab because they can't get a job. There are ways to fix the sponsorship issue by streamlining the process for transfer to another employer and by fixing the green card backlog.
Inasmuch as the goal of migration is social mobility and if the PhD makes more money driving a cab than being a PhD wherever he came from, what's the problem with this? Nobody is owed something because of a subjective sense that their worth *should* command this or that price in the market. If you want markets to dictate, let markets dictate. The reality is that there are tons of seemingly low class "break/fix" roles that are in-demand in market terms and PhD having smart guys that are not. Sysadmins make more than a lot of people feel like they should since they are "just" tech plumbers and not engineers. Not every STEM PhD is in high demand. Obviously, some break/fix (like basic computer repair) is not in high enough demand to merit better than fast food worker salaries for it and some PhDs can name their price and work wherever they like.
(I admit both of my comments here are baiting a bit. Anybody who is truly motivated by "let the market decide" should have no issue with the market conferring status to people in ways that run afoul of common sensibilities. They should have no problem with some break/fixers making more than PhDs and some PhDs making fast food worker wages if that's how the market shakes out. The next generation of smart people should get jobs doing that break/fix thing instead of in the not in demand PhD field).
This is a bad argument because PhDs drive technological growth over time in a way that break/fixers do not. Just as targeted tariffs are critical to protect nascent industries from getting "strangled in the crib" it is horrible for society if PhDs are forced by circumstances to work as a janitor or fast food worker instead of working as decently paid researchers who will develop major techological breakthroughs if given a feasible chance.
So, we should just pay anybody with a PhD more money because they have a PhD? Find make-work for them? Forbid PhDs from immigrating here unless we can guarantee they will have jobs "befitting" them?
Yes. Yes we should. We should subsidize early career PhDs to incentivize long term innovation.
Cool, different people want different market interventions for different vibes-based reasons. Yours seems to be something about smart people intrinsically deserving more for no reason except being smart independent of what value they actually deliver. Don't complain when rightoids want market interventions for vibes reasons either then.
PhDs driving a cab is only a problem because the Canadian point based system gave that person extra points for being a PhD. You could let someone in who was a cab driver in their home country if that's your goal - to find the best possible cab drivers for the streets of Canada.
The market argument is we need smart people to drive innovation and labor in general to fuel growth. From the first point of view, almost anybody with a PhD is probably somewhat above average and is a better than average gamble even if they do end up driving a cab. From the second point of view, who cares so long as the immigrant is doing something useful?
Where is proof that PhDs make better cab drivers?
The market in Canada apparently or so the cab company thought anyway.
This is a very good argument: free competition does not depress wages, but sponsorship DOES. It is NOT free competition. Richard should take note here.
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.
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
Frankly, I think most of the anti-Indians don't want the competition. In my kids honors / IB classes about 3/4 of the class was composed of children of highly educated immigrants from South and East Asia. I told my kids that they had to be better and that they were competing in a global workforce. That clearly meant that they had to be willing to work hard and long.
They rose to the challenge.
In my opinion I had it worse when I was in school. I was competing with the children of the Holacaust survivors.
It’s jealousy. The success of Indian Americans makes them feel bad.
IMO the strongest argument against H1-B is rooted in the social contract rather than economics. There is something undeniably repugnant about a corporation like Disney firing American workers and obliging them to train their H1-B replacements on the way out. I get that profits went up and value was generated for shareholders, but man does not live on GDP alone.
Undoubtedly. Capitalism is a bitch when it happens to you.
The debunking of the lump-of-labor theory rests on some far worse assumptions: That new arrivals actually spend their paycheck in the host country's economy instead of sending it home to relatives or building a second house. Instead of trying to find a "fallacy" to try to explain away reality, maybe look at ACTUAL wages for a second. They've been plummeting since globalization.
Just because they send a thousand dollars or so once every month to their parents in India doesn't mean they don't pay into the system. They have families in the US, they raise their children there and send them to school and college. They literally pay 5 to 6 % of the total taxes despite being only 1% of the population. They get jobs, start businesses and contribute immensely, way more per capita than Whites. How much more do they have to pay to be considered worthy according to you? At this point, at least be honest and admit that you simply don't like the way they look instead of shamelessly hiding behind this veil of self righteousness.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying MATH.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
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.
Indian society has enormous wealth inequality and in many ways is “eugenic” through culture - caste system, arraigned marriage. I say this as an “Indian elite” , the chasm between the bottom and top is very large without much of a middle class. This fuels the dichotomy between stupid ugly commoner Indians and Indian CEOs of tech companies. India as a whole will need to figure out a way to make more of their population productive and sophisticated. They have been tackling the worst of poverty (starvation, literacy)
Absolute nonsense. India's middle class is 430 million strong which is more than entire population of US. You
You don’t think there is massive wealth inequality and structural issues for the middle class in India ?
Not at all. Wages are rising fast. In rural areas, it is difficult for farmers to find labor as they are not willing to work cheap. Govt subsidies to the poor has also resulted in laborers shirking work unless well compensated. It all depends on skill sets. Those who are poorly skilled obviously can't demand high wages.
The real problem is that school and college education is not job oriented and lot of Indians don't have sufficient skills to get high paying jobs.
I'm in favor of the government limiting competition in my field of work so I can get paid more. Can you elaborate on why the 'lump-of-labor' is a fallacy? When we're seeing mass layoffs at FAANG companies it certainly seems like there are a limited amount of high paying roles. Also, the more competition there is for a job, the less bargaining power each individual employee has - that's just basic wage economics.
I'll give my own arguments for this, one empirical and one model-based. I'm focusing on the idea that there's a fixed amount of work to do, specifically, such that the addition of productive capacity leads to unemployment for everyone else.
The first is, we have *massively* improved productivity since the start of the industrial revolution. For example, it became possible for one farmer to feed about 100 people. And then the same thing happened for most other kinds of work people could do. Most people were farmers at the time, so if there was a fixed amount of work to do, one would expect that more than 90% of the population to be unemployed now, since the work would already be done. Yet in actual fact unemployment remains low. Evidently, other work showed up.
From a modeling perspective, it's fairly easy to imagine why this would happen. There's almost always a bunch of stuff you'd like to do but don't have the resources to do. I worked in a tech-adjacent role at my previous company. One can imagine various things that we could have done to, say, improve cybersecurity. For example, we sent out communications about how to avoid phishing scams, but much better than that would be to try to generate white-hat "phishing" emails of our own. This would simultaneously allow us to actually assess the risk of employees falling for them, whereas for someone who did fall for one of them, we would be positioned to actually teach them how to improve after proving they needed to (which would be a lot more memorable than a random tech bulletin). But my department was busy trying to expand the database and answer requests for data, and everyone else was struggling to stay caught up on paperwork, so just the standard security education would do. But if everyone became more efficient, there were certainly all kinds of things we could have been doing with our time.
Suppose it takes 100% of the available people to make food, without which everyone would definitely die, and 50% of the available people to make winter clothes, without which there's a 30% chance one person will die. Any rational decision maker will put everyone on food production and skip making the winter clothes. Then suppose something makes the food workers twice as productive. What do you do then?
It's possible to imagine a person would react to this situation by saying, "Cool, we can all work half as long - let's accept the risk of freezing to death and relax." What's much more difficult to imagine is this insanely unambitious person rising to the top of a competitive organization. Rather, one would generally expect top roles to be filled with ambitious people who have a strong tendency to try to figure out how to do more, do better, than they're doing right now. For some people that will mean trying to maximize their cost performance, and they'll lay people off. But somewhere in the economy, there will be someone who sees the potential to produce more, or guard against some risk they previously had to essentially accept. And to them goes the labor.
My dad (extreme progressive liberal, not conservative) often says big tech companies import Indian migrants as indentured servants on H-1B's.
I don't think he believes that there are massive differences in ability between people. We _are_ all replaceable cogs. By the same token, he also bemoans CEOs and corporate execs who write themselves huge bonuses (because why should anybody earn that much). I've tried asking him why boards wouldn't just hire a cheaper CEO, but to him it's all bullshit all the way up. It's all to maintain the illusion that they do anything important.
Nobody should be hating Indians. But it isn't fair to the native working class to turn on the immigration spigot every time wages get too high. Which is what all of this is really about. Which makes it easy to hate the new arrivals, especially when they're nepotist Brahmin.
The best argument against Indian immigration is to see how it turned the most migrant-friendly nation in the world (Canada) against immigration.
Every single problem attributed to immigration in canada is just policy failure in other domains. It's just thinly veiled scapegoating.
Canada is still migrant friendly, for the most part. There was an anti immigrant protest in Toronto recently that flopped and got eclipsed in size by a pro migrant counter protest.
It's policy failure, for sure: the policy of letting in way too many immigrants who have little in common with Canadians.
But other than mere numbers, the hostility is seldom aimed at Filipinos, Nigerians or even Chinese. It's Indians who have people talking about them.
And yeah, an anti-immigration protest in a city with millions of them might not go well. However, it still happened and more of them will happen until there is a drastic immigration reduction.
Canada's immigration system isnt policy failure. You can cope on that all you want. It's merely an indication of your economic illiteracy.
Do filipinos, nigerians and the chinese have a lot in common with anglo saxons?
The rest of this is just more cope bereft of real argumentation.
It is a failure. We bring in countless people from all over the world for their expertise only for their credentials to be invalid, so we have doctors driving cabs and engineers working customer service.
Our economy is lousy and immigration has not helped at all. Not only that, but it's making homes more expensive, delaying family formation by Canadians and thus, reducing birthrates.
I know those other groups have little in common with Anglo Saxons, however, their English skills are often better than those of Indians, their numbers are lower and they aren't overrepresented in customer-facing jobs. So, Canadians have a lot of experience with Indians, especially over the last 10 years.
If anyone here needs to cope it's you. You need to cope with the fact that Indians have a poor reputation in North America.
Migrants who drive cabs or work low skill job predominantly are students or people waiting for a permit to work in their field. Neither are permanent cases of underemployment.
The canadian economy is "lousy" independent of immigration. High house prices are the result of market failure caused by overregulation and nimbyism. Birth rates are also low due to reasons independent of migration.
Indians are on average more proficient at english than all of those groups.
This isnt just cope. It's retarded cope.
Nope. I'm in Canada. Indian English is lousy here, at least for the newest arrivals. Cab drivers aren't young. Most are middle-aged Punjabis.
Overregulation is not the problem. Vancouver and Toronto only have so much area for suburban expansion. Increasing the population through excess immigration doesn't help.
https://www.takimag.com/article/america-jr/
I still think this whole debate boils down to this response I saw to Elon's H1B argument: you can tell that he's never had an Indian boss.
Maybe we haven't all had Indian bosses, but we've all interacted with an Indian call center. To act like the concern is just 'racism' means you're either an idiot or being deliberately obtuse. Numbers like IQ and salary are great for making spreadsheet decisions, but they don't capture what it actually means to replace a significant chunk of your workforce with people from a radically diferent culture.
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.
Groyper types seem to be overly represented among the online right. And they bring the stupid good and hard.
Regarding "clannishness," at least in the case of blacks and whites, friendship-diversity is highly predictive of intermarriage. Since Indian Americans have one of the lowest rates of intermarriage, it suggests that their friendship-diversity is low.
The free market "disciplines" this behavior, because it is not optimal in the long-run, but sometimes people choose their values over profit. In theory, the harm done to whites from Indian nepotism would be of the same quality as the harm done to Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century. Discrimination hurts, at least emotionally, even if there are net economic benefits.
Jews did immigrate to America in spite of the discrimination because the net gains were large. But there was resulting political tension that was resolved through Civil Rights -- a hairy solution. You only need 2% of the population to create large effects, in coalition with other groups. I think the example of Jews shows how this nepotism can eventually be overcome, but it did involve a period of pain.
The flaw in this argument is that 56% of Indian Americans arrived after 2000. Intermarriage rates for Indian Americans born in the US is 32%, which is lower than Asian Americans (55%) but it should only go up with each generation.
Just for context, intermarriage rates of white Americans is around 10-12%.
Even when you control for immigration year, Indian Americans still practice more endogamy than all other groups. It's not something that I think is evil but it is a real phenomenon that becomes a stereotype.
Comparing whites to Indians isn't a fair comparison because larger groups always have lower rates of outmarriage due to the effects of randomized exposure.
Here's what I'm looking at, feel free to show me some data:
https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/05/03/statistics-on-asian-american-interracial-marriage-statistics/
Share a link to argue but don't read it.
"The statistics are generated from subsamples of the Census. I would be a bit cautious on outmarriage rates for groups like Asian Indians and Koreans where in 2010 the number of those born or raised in the USA was still rather small compared to the foreign-born/raised population. One reason Indian Americans showed extremely low outmarriage rates in the early 2000 Census results is that there was a massive swell of immigration in the Clinton era from Indians, so the foreign-born immigrants overwhelmed the signal."
I am not disagreeing on the why, but simply stating the what.
Once you consider only raised in the US, the differences are much smaller. Vietnamese American men, a community that had arrived in big numbers in the 70s and 80s are not far from Indian American men.