December 28, 2024
More on H1B Visas
Timothy Birdnow
Here is a good reply to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami:
And here is a good overview of the mess that is the H1B visa program. It is little more than corporate welfare.
Read the rest of the Revolver article here.
This touches on many of the points I made in this morning's post about the H1B visa program and why we have a "culture of mediocrity". Nobody has any reason to work hard if you are just going to be passed over for some foreign guy because they know they can pay him less and he'll be content - and because, like white dudes suck and all!
Back in the old days the complaint about black labor was the black workers were lazy and inattentive, but whose fault was that? Why be a good worker when you are just going to get passed over and mistreated? Black folks aren't lazy but it was a rational response to a culture that treated them as worthless and offered them little in the way of opportunity.
Now the white community is larning this same lesson, alas, and our response is much the same. If we needed to offer greater opportunity to black folks shouldn't we offer greater opportunity to white folks too? Now no native born American has the kind of opportunities they should as we import people to take our jobs.
H1B visas are little more than tools to outsource in our own country.
BTW the worship of cheap labor has been a destructive force in America for it's whoel history. Slavery was a prime example, and the places that allowed slavery wound up being economic backwaters and slavery was highly destructive to initiative and economic growth. During the industrial revolution we saw cheap labor squeeze the life out of America's farming industry and kill whole towns. What did we get for our troubles? Several deep economic depressions followed by the Great Depression. The quest for cheap labor, be it skilled or not, inevitably leads to economic malaise.
I made this case at American Thinker a number of years ago, and the blogger Bookworm seconded my post.
(Interesting; I had to search for the article using Yahoo because Google has "disappeared" it.)
While I concentrate on grunt labor it is equally, perhaps even more, true where skilled labor is concerned. And it is a national security issue; we need to be able to do this stuff ourselves. How many Cinese are working in high tech in America, stealing our technology for the Communists?
Unless there is an incentive to hire American and train people corporations will continue to hire foreigners; it's easier and cheaper. Keeping H1B visas is nothing but an incentive to continue marginalizing native born Americans.
Here is a good reply to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami:
Eric S. Raymond:
Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk
and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.
When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.
I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.
It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.
Right now we’re in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren’t getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving.
You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.
Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for "high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.
These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates.
I’m not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide.
But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you’ll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it.
Doesn’t that seem like it’s worth a try?
Today's big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don't want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
To be honest, I think both sides are making some…
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 26, 2024
Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk
and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.
When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.
I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.
It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.
Right now we’re in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren’t getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving.
You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.
Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for "high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.
These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates.
I’m not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide.
But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you’ll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it.
Doesn’t that seem like it’s worth a try?
Today's big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don't want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
To be honest, I think both sides are making some…
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 26, 2024
And here is a good overview of the mess that is the H1B visa program. It is little more than corporate welfare.
Read the rest of the Revolver article here.
This touches on many of the points I made in this morning's post about the H1B visa program and why we have a "culture of mediocrity". Nobody has any reason to work hard if you are just going to be passed over for some foreign guy because they know they can pay him less and he'll be content - and because, like white dudes suck and all!
Back in the old days the complaint about black labor was the black workers were lazy and inattentive, but whose fault was that? Why be a good worker when you are just going to get passed over and mistreated? Black folks aren't lazy but it was a rational response to a culture that treated them as worthless and offered them little in the way of opportunity.
Now the white community is larning this same lesson, alas, and our response is much the same. If we needed to offer greater opportunity to black folks shouldn't we offer greater opportunity to white folks too? Now no native born American has the kind of opportunities they should as we import people to take our jobs.
H1B visas are little more than tools to outsource in our own country.
BTW the worship of cheap labor has been a destructive force in America for it's whoel history. Slavery was a prime example, and the places that allowed slavery wound up being economic backwaters and slavery was highly destructive to initiative and economic growth. During the industrial revolution we saw cheap labor squeeze the life out of America's farming industry and kill whole towns. What did we get for our troubles? Several deep economic depressions followed by the Great Depression. The quest for cheap labor, be it skilled or not, inevitably leads to economic malaise.
I made this case at American Thinker a number of years ago, and the blogger Bookworm seconded my post.
(Interesting; I had to search for the article using Yahoo because Google has "disappeared" it.)
While I concentrate on grunt labor it is equally, perhaps even more, true where skilled labor is concerned. And it is a national security issue; we need to be able to do this stuff ourselves. How many Cinese are working in high tech in America, stealing our technology for the Communists?
Unless there is an incentive to hire American and train people corporations will continue to hire foreigners; it's easier and cheaper. Keeping H1B visas is nothing but an incentive to continue marginalizing native born Americans.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
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