"Trump’s poor treatment of Indian H-1b workers and Korean construction workers will end up weakening America’s alliances "
Admittedly this is pedantic, but imo calling the Korean Hyundai plant workers construction workers is incorrect. As I understand it, all or nearly all of them worked for companies supplying battery manufacturing equipment being installed at the plant.
This battery making gear is among the most advanced manufacturing technology in the world and there are likely only a few thousand workers on the planet that have the skills these workers have.
The Trump administration chaining and frog marching these elite workers in a ritual of public humiliation was a shocking display of their incompetence.
It is embarrassing and shameful, and the Trump administration wanted to deport these experts and march them to the plane in handcuffs to look tough, but thankfully someone inside realized how bad this would look to Korea and the rest of the world, and that if they deported the experts (who are in short supply) they wouldn’t be allowed in even on work visa for several years, as that is the penalty for being deported, so they let them leave normally.
After shooting yourself in the foot, reloading and shooting the other one is something Trump has done many times, kind of surprising that he didn’t in this case. If the workers couldn’t come back again to get those machines installed, the factory will be an empty shell with no American workers. Of course, even those it’s now possible for them to come back, I would expect that the workers as well as the companies and Korean government may want to just bail out after this treatment.
One aspect of this that I have not seen brought up is that this is also very anti-small business. Large tech companies are not the only ones that hire foreign workers many smaller companies do so as well at is often out of necessity rather than an attempt to hire talent cheaply. We were growing a company in the rust belt that required very intelligent and in some cases very specific skills (foreign language) but generally the smartest MBA’s we could find had no interest in starting their careers in a second tier city in decline. We provided top quality workers with sponsorship up to the green card level. We also found these workers were more loyal than native workers. My grandfather got to emigrate for a similiar reason: nobody wanted to become or had the skills to be a cooper. Well in 1957 how do you think pickles got made without wooden barrels being repaired and replaced.
Trump2/GOP anti-immigrant policies are already doing incalculable damage to our country. Combined with their gutting of scientific research funding, and tariff policies that will kill vastly more jobs than they will create, It's a sad time for America.
"The number of slots for elite politicians, businesspeople, and academics in America is fairly constant, so it does become a zero-sum competition. "
I suppose it depends upon your definition of elite. Yes, the number of professors at Ivy League schools plus the number of US Senators is fairly constant. But the number of elite scientists, business people and professionals like doctors certainly isn't. Stem PhDs went from 90 per million in 1970 to 133 per million today. CEOs of software companies with a market cap of over Ten Billion (1970) Dollars went from 0 in 1970 to 20 today :-)
In general, I don't think the lack of opportunities for elites in this country is a problem.
What's probably more of an issue politically is people in economically declining areas who see the cultural center moving away from their communities. Biden started to try to remedy this, and Trump is doing his best to destroy rural America. But this is all obscured by foolish extremists on both sides who keep politics polarized.
Unfortunately, the worst extremists on the right now control the US government.
The main damage will come from the (correct) perception that the US is now hostile to immigrants. The inevitable outcome is more work being done overseas. Most people think it’s just low-value-add back office stuff, just like we mocked Chinese manufacturing as cheap junk in the 2000s. But there’s an accelerating trend of high value services work being done in foreign offices (‘global capability centers’ in the jargon). Expect that to continue.
This might be good for international development, offering an alternative model to climbing the manufacturing value chain (too hard now due to Chinese competence). MAGA will be unwitting champions of this process, heh.
I lately have been accused of name calling and partisan hyperbole. Then I called a lib or a democrat. As a Reagan Republican I have to chuckle. MAGAnanians are seriously the stupidest people on the planet.
Nativist, bigoted, ignorant and moronic. There is my name calling. The Trump Administration is constantly hurting itself. It may be one the most incompetent authoritarian wannabes in history.
The South Korean arrests did far more harm to Trump than he realizes. First of all the factory was going to employ Americans. Now it is delayed in an environment of falling employment activity. The signal is send us money but don’t use your workers. The moronic part is that we don’t have that many skilled workers. There is a mismatch in geography as well. The Administration deeply harmed itself by chaining up people that were legally here.
As Noah stated, we don’t produce enough babies. We need immigrants. We don’t produce enough STEM graduates. Now we have fewer males going to college. Women who are going to college dont necessarily choose engineering or Physics.
No matter how much bigoted anti immigration white male MAGA types
It won’t change the trajectory of America. We are moving to a majority minority nation fairly quickly. We have 7 or 8 states already and another 9 or so on the cusp. Probably another 10 in 10 years. By 2050 it’s done.
Of course the funny thing is that if their fear is that there won’t be enough white males in power, the white males that preceded them will be leaving a deeply indebted and economically uncompetitive country. So much winning
Well if Trump actually wants both the immigrants and their money flowing into the Treasury, they could replace the H1b lottery with an auction and eliminate the hard cap on the number of applicants, but allow as many as are willing to pay above a reasonable threshold price to apply. But instead they are keeping the cap and putting a fixed price they pulled out of the air – because not only do they lie about wanting more skilled immigration, they are also dumber than a bag of rocks.
I want to thank Trump for making the choices clear for those of us who don’t like either party. Easily the most incompetent and racist administration in the last 25 years.
I have been saying since the days of Bush that the average Republican base voter really does want to clamp down on all immigration. It's just that the party elites suppressed their base, and eventually that led to the tea party revolt, and then the general collapse of the conservative elements of the right for the radical populism that Trump took advantage of ever since. Illegal immigration was just how they got independents to agree to vote for them.
This latest gambit is a Miller directive, and I suspect the timing of it is to deflect from job losses in tech given the rapid adoption of AI. A scapegoat is needed, and why not choose the oldest one in the playbook: those Jews are taking your jobs, except this time it's those brown dirty Indians. Keep those jobs for the average American Joe.
Even with the walk-back, 100k for a visa is prohibitive for a lot of universities and hospitals who rely on H1-B for hiring doctors, professors, scientists, etc. There are two streams in H1-B, the lottery and those exempt from the lottery. People who work in nonprofit sectors like universities are in the latter, and if they are forced to pay this fee, universities and national labs and nonprofit science labs will absolutely struggle to find enough PhD level scientists to fill extremely specialized roles. When I post a specific position in my own group, I often can find 30 applicants, and maybe 3 or 4 have the required skills, and none are citizens. It's just too specialized, we need to draw from the best. That's what makes America great, why would we want to get rid of that?
Yeah, also it looks like that alt-right people on X are looking into the O visa stream, especially O-1 (for people with "extraordinary ability").
If Trump touches this visa type, we can say goodbye to any chance that the US keeps leading the world in AI, to say nothing about other research domains.
(Speaking about your "timing" part, you might want to read subreddits like r/csMajors or r/cscareerquestions to see how CS people feel about this gambit; quite a few people there commented that "this is what I voted for!")
There was an article in the NY times and probably others of how young tech workers are finding it hard to get jobs. I dont know what the unemployment rate of young tech workers is. I do see a lot of layoffs happening at least more than previously.
Given republican are an American First Party, it is highly consistent that this was their policy.
Well, even when considering technology jobs, the H1b visa allows only 65,000 immigrants per year (regardless of area or job type), and US colleges graduate over 700,0000 STEM degrees and certifications each year while there are on the order of 40 million STEM jobs in the US, blaming a few anecdotal instances of people not finding the jobs they want on these immigrants isn’t right.
One angle that isn't getting much play is how this new visa system sets up another Trump corruption play.
Noah retweeted this earlier:
"Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion."
Did I see that Amazon has about 10, 000 of these visas and are they also big on outsourcing . It will be interesting to see 3-5 years down the road how they manage this tension they will inevitably end up with this administration.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon and Microsoft set up new campuses in Vancouver BC and hire immigrants they want from Asia to work for them in Canada and then have the ability to easily collaborate and have in person meetings and not deal with time zone issues. Sort of like high class Canadian tech maquiladoras. Of course Trump, would then probably build a Northern Wall to stop this.
I think what you might see is some carry over of the anti Indian narrative into the working practices of these companies - I often hear about the “ Hindi mafia “ inside some of these companies.
Granted this goes a little farther than expected, but all those Silicon Valley Trumpists should have known that Trump was very anti-immigration, was in favor of large and increasing deficits, intended to restrict imports even more than Biden (granted, again, tht the degree of restriction was unexpected). Was being "anti-Woke" and lower marginal tax rates enough? How much is not hearing anti-business rhetoric from Lisa Khan worth?
Do the tax reductions even compensate for the damage to their enterprises from the slower growth these policies bring? [I'm willing to think they had factored the _expected_ immigration and tariff effects on their own enterprises into their political choice.]
It worries me how quickly the discourse has normalized the lawlessness of the regime. This move is, on the face of it, flagrantly illegal, and yet hardly any of the commentary discusses that, let alone foregrounds it.
"Mithas and Lucas (2010) studied compensation of H-1b workers compared to their native-born colleagues, and found that after controlling for observable determinants of skill, the visa holders actually earned more…"
I've lost a bit of respect for your analysis. For a given level of skill they make more? So why wouldn't companies employed cheaper Americans and save money? That makes no sense.
There is a lot of focus on tech but the US also relies on a huge number of immigrants to support healthcare. I had a relative in hospital in Montgomery, Alabama. All their primary doctors were Indian immigrants. Nurses and other caregivers came from a variety of other countries. A friend who is a pediatric cardiologist worked in Wichita after moving here from India. There simply aren't enough doctors willing to work in rural or out of the way areas. I wonder what will happen when Trump voters in deep red counties don't have access to basic healthcare. I guess they can drink raw milk and take horse dewormer ..
"Trump’s poor treatment of Indian H-1b workers and Korean construction workers will end up weakening America’s alliances "
Admittedly this is pedantic, but imo calling the Korean Hyundai plant workers construction workers is incorrect. As I understand it, all or nearly all of them worked for companies supplying battery manufacturing equipment being installed at the plant.
This battery making gear is among the most advanced manufacturing technology in the world and there are likely only a few thousand workers on the planet that have the skills these workers have.
The Trump administration chaining and frog marching these elite workers in a ritual of public humiliation was a shocking display of their incompetence.
It is embarrassing and shameful, and the Trump administration wanted to deport these experts and march them to the plane in handcuffs to look tough, but thankfully someone inside realized how bad this would look to Korea and the rest of the world, and that if they deported the experts (who are in short supply) they wouldn’t be allowed in even on work visa for several years, as that is the penalty for being deported, so they let them leave normally.
And this makes it all better...
After shooting yourself in the foot, reloading and shooting the other one is something Trump has done many times, kind of surprising that he didn’t in this case. If the workers couldn’t come back again to get those machines installed, the factory will be an empty shell with no American workers. Of course, even those it’s now possible for them to come back, I would expect that the workers as well as the companies and Korean government may want to just bail out after this treatment.
One aspect of this that I have not seen brought up is that this is also very anti-small business. Large tech companies are not the only ones that hire foreign workers many smaller companies do so as well at is often out of necessity rather than an attempt to hire talent cheaply. We were growing a company in the rust belt that required very intelligent and in some cases very specific skills (foreign language) but generally the smartest MBA’s we could find had no interest in starting their careers in a second tier city in decline. We provided top quality workers with sponsorship up to the green card level. We also found these workers were more loyal than native workers. My grandfather got to emigrate for a similiar reason: nobody wanted to become or had the skills to be a cooper. Well in 1957 how do you think pickles got made without wooden barrels being repaired and replaced.
Trump2/GOP anti-immigrant policies are already doing incalculable damage to our country. Combined with their gutting of scientific research funding, and tariff policies that will kill vastly more jobs than they will create, It's a sad time for America.
"The number of slots for elite politicians, businesspeople, and academics in America is fairly constant, so it does become a zero-sum competition. "
I suppose it depends upon your definition of elite. Yes, the number of professors at Ivy League schools plus the number of US Senators is fairly constant. But the number of elite scientists, business people and professionals like doctors certainly isn't. Stem PhDs went from 90 per million in 1970 to 133 per million today. CEOs of software companies with a market cap of over Ten Billion (1970) Dollars went from 0 in 1970 to 20 today :-)
In general, I don't think the lack of opportunities for elites in this country is a problem.
What's probably more of an issue politically is people in economically declining areas who see the cultural center moving away from their communities. Biden started to try to remedy this, and Trump is doing his best to destroy rural America. But this is all obscured by foolish extremists on both sides who keep politics polarized.
Unfortunately, the worst extremists on the right now control the US government.
The main damage will come from the (correct) perception that the US is now hostile to immigrants. The inevitable outcome is more work being done overseas. Most people think it’s just low-value-add back office stuff, just like we mocked Chinese manufacturing as cheap junk in the 2000s. But there’s an accelerating trend of high value services work being done in foreign offices (‘global capability centers’ in the jargon). Expect that to continue.
This might be good for international development, offering an alternative model to climbing the manufacturing value chain (too hard now due to Chinese competence). MAGA will be unwitting champions of this process, heh.
I lately have been accused of name calling and partisan hyperbole. Then I called a lib or a democrat. As a Reagan Republican I have to chuckle. MAGAnanians are seriously the stupidest people on the planet.
Nativist, bigoted, ignorant and moronic. There is my name calling. The Trump Administration is constantly hurting itself. It may be one the most incompetent authoritarian wannabes in history.
The South Korean arrests did far more harm to Trump than he realizes. First of all the factory was going to employ Americans. Now it is delayed in an environment of falling employment activity. The signal is send us money but don’t use your workers. The moronic part is that we don’t have that many skilled workers. There is a mismatch in geography as well. The Administration deeply harmed itself by chaining up people that were legally here.
As Noah stated, we don’t produce enough babies. We need immigrants. We don’t produce enough STEM graduates. Now we have fewer males going to college. Women who are going to college dont necessarily choose engineering or Physics.
No matter how much bigoted anti immigration white male MAGA types
It won’t change the trajectory of America. We are moving to a majority minority nation fairly quickly. We have 7 or 8 states already and another 9 or so on the cusp. Probably another 10 in 10 years. By 2050 it’s done.
Of course the funny thing is that if their fear is that there won’t be enough white males in power, the white males that preceded them will be leaving a deeply indebted and economically uncompetitive country. So much winning
Excellent post. Has anyone gamed out allocating H1-Bs via auction?
Well if Trump actually wants both the immigrants and their money flowing into the Treasury, they could replace the H1b lottery with an auction and eliminate the hard cap on the number of applicants, but allow as many as are willing to pay above a reasonable threshold price to apply. But instead they are keeping the cap and putting a fixed price they pulled out of the air – because not only do they lie about wanting more skilled immigration, they are also dumber than a bag of rocks.
I want to thank Trump for making the choices clear for those of us who don’t like either party. Easily the most incompetent and racist administration in the last 25 years.
I have been saying since the days of Bush that the average Republican base voter really does want to clamp down on all immigration. It's just that the party elites suppressed their base, and eventually that led to the tea party revolt, and then the general collapse of the conservative elements of the right for the radical populism that Trump took advantage of ever since. Illegal immigration was just how they got independents to agree to vote for them.
This latest gambit is a Miller directive, and I suspect the timing of it is to deflect from job losses in tech given the rapid adoption of AI. A scapegoat is needed, and why not choose the oldest one in the playbook: those Jews are taking your jobs, except this time it's those brown dirty Indians. Keep those jobs for the average American Joe.
Even with the walk-back, 100k for a visa is prohibitive for a lot of universities and hospitals who rely on H1-B for hiring doctors, professors, scientists, etc. There are two streams in H1-B, the lottery and those exempt from the lottery. People who work in nonprofit sectors like universities are in the latter, and if they are forced to pay this fee, universities and national labs and nonprofit science labs will absolutely struggle to find enough PhD level scientists to fill extremely specialized roles. When I post a specific position in my own group, I often can find 30 applicants, and maybe 3 or 4 have the required skills, and none are citizens. It's just too specialized, we need to draw from the best. That's what makes America great, why would we want to get rid of that?
Yeah, also it looks like that alt-right people on X are looking into the O visa stream, especially O-1 (for people with "extraordinary ability").
If Trump touches this visa type, we can say goodbye to any chance that the US keeps leading the world in AI, to say nothing about other research domains.
(Speaking about your "timing" part, you might want to read subreddits like r/csMajors or r/cscareerquestions to see how CS people feel about this gambit; quite a few people there commented that "this is what I voted for!")
There was an article in the NY times and probably others of how young tech workers are finding it hard to get jobs. I dont know what the unemployment rate of young tech workers is. I do see a lot of layoffs happening at least more than previously.
Given republican are an American First Party, it is highly consistent that this was their policy.
Well, even when considering technology jobs, the H1b visa allows only 65,000 immigrants per year (regardless of area or job type), and US colleges graduate over 700,0000 STEM degrees and certifications each year while there are on the order of 40 million STEM jobs in the US, blaming a few anecdotal instances of people not finding the jobs they want on these immigrants isn’t right.
One angle that isn't getting much play is how this new visa system sets up another Trump corruption play.
Noah retweeted this earlier:
"Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion."
https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1969404286741463480
Did I see that Amazon has about 10, 000 of these visas and are they also big on outsourcing . It will be interesting to see 3-5 years down the road how they manage this tension they will inevitably end up with this administration.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon and Microsoft set up new campuses in Vancouver BC and hire immigrants they want from Asia to work for them in Canada and then have the ability to easily collaborate and have in person meetings and not deal with time zone issues. Sort of like high class Canadian tech maquiladoras. Of course Trump, would then probably build a Northern Wall to stop this.
I think what you might see is some carry over of the anti Indian narrative into the working practices of these companies - I often hear about the “ Hindi mafia “ inside some of these companies.
Granted this goes a little farther than expected, but all those Silicon Valley Trumpists should have known that Trump was very anti-immigration, was in favor of large and increasing deficits, intended to restrict imports even more than Biden (granted, again, tht the degree of restriction was unexpected). Was being "anti-Woke" and lower marginal tax rates enough? How much is not hearing anti-business rhetoric from Lisa Khan worth?
Do the tax reductions even compensate for the damage to their enterprises from the slower growth these policies bring? [I'm willing to think they had factored the _expected_ immigration and tariff effects on their own enterprises into their political choice.]
It worries me how quickly the discourse has normalized the lawlessness of the regime. This move is, on the face of it, flagrantly illegal, and yet hardly any of the commentary discusses that, let alone foregrounds it.
"Mithas and Lucas (2010) studied compensation of H-1b workers compared to their native-born colleagues, and found that after controlling for observable determinants of skill, the visa holders actually earned more…"
I've lost a bit of respect for your analysis. For a given level of skill they make more? So why wouldn't companies employed cheaper Americans and save money? That makes no sense.
There is a lot of focus on tech but the US also relies on a huge number of immigrants to support healthcare. I had a relative in hospital in Montgomery, Alabama. All their primary doctors were Indian immigrants. Nurses and other caregivers came from a variety of other countries. A friend who is a pediatric cardiologist worked in Wichita after moving here from India. There simply aren't enough doctors willing to work in rural or out of the way areas. I wonder what will happen when Trump voters in deep red counties don't have access to basic healthcare. I guess they can drink raw milk and take horse dewormer ..