"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.
And moreover, net net, STEM talent is fungible. But this is a concept that requires understanding, not impulse and so...the ridiculous H-1B Visa fee fiasco.
This mis-administration is irreparably clueless about how the real world and our economy actually works and addicted to gauging their standing by social media algorithms.
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.
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
"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.
I was rather shocked to read his defense of replacement theory. Most white people don't think of themselves as "White" and don't see other white people having a seat at the table as a reflection on our status within the country. From what I've seen, the only ones that are anxious about this are the racist ones...
I wouldn't really call Noah's statement about whites being crowded out of elite positions a defense of replacement theory. I do think he's too restrictive about defining 'elite' spaces -- the status one gets from being a top engineer, medical researcher or business person is elite enough by my lights, and those positions are simply not a fixed resource to be fought over.
That being said, it does seem like human nature to stereotype people by random groupings. I've seen this more by university than ethnicity in my career -- being an MIT alum probably unfairly helped me get funding from an MIT educated VC at one point, and it wouldn't blow my mind if I learned that some IIT alum thought inordinately highly of other IIT grads. That's always going to happen, whether the elite are whites talking about whose ancestors were 'real' Americans who came over pre-1776, or someone talking about who went to Harvard.
But Noah made is pretty clear what he thought would happen to a country with 4% of the world's population if they try to keep the most talented immigrants out: nothing good.
People are tribal, no doubt about it. I just don't think "White" is a tribe to anyone but people who care a lot about being white. Someone whose family came to the US during the colonial era and someone whose parents immigrated from Europe will have vastly different experiences and values despite sharing a skin color.
As for the first, just read it again, it's hard for me not to see it as an apology for the claim that immigrants will replace "us":
"I’m actually slightly sympathetic to the fear of a demographic turnover among the elite. The number of slots for elite politicians, businesspeople, and academics in America is fairly constant, so it does become a zero-sum competition. It’s natural to be afraid of getting pushed out of that elite by hard-charging immigrants who were selected for their genius — and also by ethnic cartelization to monopolize the elite."
I basically agree, and indeed have gotten into arguments with people who talk about white as an identity. I don't know a single person who answers a question about their ethnicity with 'white.' It's usually a mix of several European or Middle Eastern countries.
I also haven't met anyone who is concerned about being pushed out of the 'elite' circle because of being white, but I've basically been in CS-associated industry since the mid 1980s. I've worked for WASPs, Jews, Indian immigrants, Russian immigrants, Israelis and Italian Catholics, and it never seemed to matter a bit. I did know someone who liked to hire Harvard grads, but that was self-correcting :-)
Universities, of course, aren't really growing, and people there do pay attention to ethnicity to an (IMHO) unhealthy degree, so maybe that explains some of Noah's viewpoint.
And many MAGA people actually don't want even white immigrants, even successful ones to come to the US; you can see comments on this Twitter post (from a German-born startup founder who got O-1 visa to come to the US!)
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 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!")
Reading some of the Reddit threads on this topic make me feel like I'm being gaslit, with how normalized such abhorrent takes are in an otherwise very liberal place. "But the job market is so tough," ok then, in that case maybe we should go further and ban all women from working in tech too. Less competition for jobs, then!
And also, leftists in the past (or more specifically, economic leftists) were anti-immigrants, lol.
To take Australia as an example, trade unionists there in the 1890s-1900s wanted to build a "workers' paradise", since the wage was so much higher than in Britain, but only for white people; and thus one of the first acts by Australian parliament was the White Australia Policy, which restricted immigration for only British and Irish people!
(You might see what happens even now with old leftists like Bernie Sanders though).
Well, people would only care for others when their material interests are not menaced though.
As with your takes about women, Grace Hopper Conference (a conference normally for women, LGBT in tech) was swamped with a lot of men claimed to be gays though in 2023 (there was a lot of complaints about this on Reddit at that time), so...
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.
List how many inventions Indian immigrants in America have made vs how many inventions white immigrants in America have made. Still think we need Indians?
We don’t *need* Indian immigrants any more than we *need* Americans. We can get by without any group of people if we feel like it. We’ll just be worse off because we won’t have all the benefits of cooperation.
You need Indians if you want the US to be the richest big economy in the world. But if you don't care about that and just dislike seeing people with the wrong colored face, like the Groyper crowd, then sure, you don't need them.
Most of those inventors are white or Jewish immigrants.
Liberals always play this game where they just say "immigrants" and hope you think of high skill Norwegians and Japanese when they're really importing low skill Somalis and Haitians.
Why don't you read the second link and look at the accompanying data before you post easily-debunked lies? It talks about the high Indian contribution specifically. The rest of the high per-capita groups include Chinese and aren't white or Jewish immigrants.
If you're going to engage is casual racism you could at least be consistent. You started your 'contribution' with comments about 'Indians', now widen it to Somalis (African) and Haitians (Caribbean / African descent).
Additionally anyone getting an H1B visa, which was what this article referenced, is by definition NOT low skilled, making your follow up comment even more weak.
It's also obvious you didn't bother to read, possibly even open, the links provided, having requested evidence of the contribution of Indians. Even if we accept patents are a poor measure of contribution / value, there is no evidence to support your claim and plenty to refute it.
Well.... doing a listing of patented inventions by the patenting parties supposed ethnicity is
A. Mistaking patenting inventions as the primary metric of utility (which .... for this visa category is Not Even Wrong as a level of kind of drunk-ranter at end of bar kind of nonsense) [as for clarityhighly skilled technical labor does not = invention, it's rather broader interest. Patents are a dime a dozen - companies with the skill sets to take inventions to build globally competitive companies is qutie another matter and a work of a wide range of skilled labor]
B. if one were to take this as a valid metric (it's not, it's stupid) one should compare a like-to-like time period
Of course Tengri is just engaging in racialised nativism, in the grand old tradition of the Know Nothings.
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."
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.
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 ..
"Doctors could qualify for exemptions from the Trump administration’s new $100,000 fee for high-skilled H-1B visa applications, the White House said Monday, after some of the biggest medical bodies called out the risk to rural America where there’s already a dearth of providers."
Well, no. There are a lot of small companies that employ H1-B visa holders as well. Not everyone company has a funding source like Google's infinite ad cash stream.
That makes no sense. First, a company may simply be unable to find enough US citizens for their jobs -- take a look at any engineering class, and you'll find a lot of foreign students. We simply don't have enough US citizens for all the jobs we need to fill. In that case, your $100K fee is simply a tax on a growing company.
Of course, an H1-B visa holder may still be adding value, but not enough to burn an *additional* 100K. In that case, your tax is preventing a company from getting the value of employing someone who's available but you can't afford to hire.
We're disagreeing on how much value an H1B visa holder should produce in order to eventually gain US citizenship. If it's not enough to burn $100k per year then sorry it's not enough.
I just want to leave a note saying that I love and support my east and south Asian brothers. As a Jew this is what we have been subjected to and feel your pain.
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.
This fiasco is why we should have a functional legislature (definitely no filibuster and ideally with the House and Senate doing everything unicameral as joint session). Could charging a one-time fee for an Hb1 visa be a good idea or at worst a good compromise? Sure, but representatives need to haggle over the amount and openly discuss on how the fee is supposed to work, in open debate. We can’t have a Czar basically drunk posting things on a Friday night.
"Why we should have" (then some pie in sky thing that would magically transform US system into some idealised other thing) is magical dreaming.
Actionable steps not dreaming of idealised transformations is what is needed (and actionable steps that don't involve magical presumption of passing constitutional amendments etc)
Returning power to subject matter committees in Senate and House, an idea I saw, had the air of actionability. Rules changes and modification of existing
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.
The slowdown in tech job hiring is hardly anecdotal. I think you probably realise that because you mentioned the stock of jobs and not the number of jobs being created. Even the industry leaders are predicting jobs reductions or slow hiring to continue. And maybe accelerate. Although they generally blame (or credit) Ai.
> and US colleges graduate over 700,0000 STEM degrees
Good place to hire from then, initially at least.
The real problem here is that Trump (who is correct in not following the mediocre ideology of muh free market) should have said he was restricting the H1B visas during the tech recessions. H1Bs are not that specialised - despite the claim, and jobs should be advertised to locals first. That doesn’t happen. In a recession in the industry H1B visas are probably zero sum.
Even in a tough market, companies may want to hire the best talent, regardless of where they are from. I don’t trust any government, let alone this administration, to make better choices than the industry.
So we’ve move from not taking jobs at all, to “if it does so what - let’s get the best workers from anywhere” . Which isn’t the same argument at all. Impacting tech graduate employment could be accelerated by upping the h1B visas to infinity, and you probably will find there are enough non graduates across the world to do the job better than pretty much all graduates. And god forbid we train them.
Then you’ll find that that feedback loop accelerates and eventually the graduate stream is as eliminated as the tooling graduates or apprentices were eliminated by the transfer of manufacturing to China. What’s left is the hope that the immigrants keep coming rather than start to set companies where they graduate.
The industry will do what it wants. What’s good for the quarterly report is not what is good for society, nor the nation.
We're sat here debating this because tech companies created the internet and social media without any considerations for it's ramifications. Polarisation. Algorithms that feed hate. I don't have for one moment any sympathy for the industry. So the idea that the tech industry is good for this country as it destroys itself is very much debatable.
They still can. They just have to pay a one time fee of $100k. Given that meta and alphabet are making million dollar hiring deals with the best AI talent, this is peanuts.
Let's not forget that Trump and Biden also played a big role in causing the tech recession with that dumb R&D capitalization law which suddenly made it much cheaper to build tech outside America
There was no government program to subsidize American CS students. People pushed their kids into coding because of the lure of big bucks. You think if the government now says that there’s a shortage of factory workers and plumbers people will push their kids into these professions?
Yes they are doing that. Yes the government does have a responsibility to it's citizens which also includes American citizens whose parents previously benefited from the H1B visa.
All the big tech is laying off tech workers. There's no need for the 65k to supplement the workforce. If a different visa is needed type is needed then design one for outstanding tech workers.
I think we might be mixing apples and oranges here. Entry-level jobs are not the tier that most H1B workers are hired into. So the notion that the recent college grads are competing for the same positions as the H1B pool is largely incorrect. IMO, the entry level jobs are under a lot more pressure from AI than from H1B workers. Commentary surrounding the recent high profile layoffs by the big 5 supports this as well.
You neglected to mention that Trump also signed an EO to implement his $1 million “gold card” visa but it eliminates EB-1 and EB-2 visas, along with the current EB-5 investor visa. These are exceptional ability visas used by significant talents. While EB-1 includes lots of sports, music and film stars, including fashion models, ( didn’t Melania get in on one of those? ) who can afford to pay the new fee, it also includes scientists and EB-2 includes holders of advanced degrees who are crucial to research but whose numbers also will be reduced by this new fee.
Here’s a nice description of the clown show where Lutnick came up with this idea as a way to reduce legal immigration and how he also wanted to eliminate all green cards and replace them with the new gold card. And they are still talking about making the $100K H1b fee apply annually.
"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.
And moreover, net net, STEM talent is fungible. But this is a concept that requires understanding, not impulse and so...the ridiculous H-1B Visa fee fiasco.
This mis-administration is irreparably clueless about how the real world and our economy actually works and addicted to gauging their standing by social media algorithms.
What a disaster for our freedoms and prosperity.
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.
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
MAGAnanians? It’s MAGAts!
"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.
I was rather shocked to read his defense of replacement theory. Most white people don't think of themselves as "White" and don't see other white people having a seat at the table as a reflection on our status within the country. From what I've seen, the only ones that are anxious about this are the racist ones...
I wouldn't really call Noah's statement about whites being crowded out of elite positions a defense of replacement theory. I do think he's too restrictive about defining 'elite' spaces -- the status one gets from being a top engineer, medical researcher or business person is elite enough by my lights, and those positions are simply not a fixed resource to be fought over.
That being said, it does seem like human nature to stereotype people by random groupings. I've seen this more by university than ethnicity in my career -- being an MIT alum probably unfairly helped me get funding from an MIT educated VC at one point, and it wouldn't blow my mind if I learned that some IIT alum thought inordinately highly of other IIT grads. That's always going to happen, whether the elite are whites talking about whose ancestors were 'real' Americans who came over pre-1776, or someone talking about who went to Harvard.
But Noah made is pretty clear what he thought would happen to a country with 4% of the world's population if they try to keep the most talented immigrants out: nothing good.
People are tribal, no doubt about it. I just don't think "White" is a tribe to anyone but people who care a lot about being white. Someone whose family came to the US during the colonial era and someone whose parents immigrated from Europe will have vastly different experiences and values despite sharing a skin color.
As for the first, just read it again, it's hard for me not to see it as an apology for the claim that immigrants will replace "us":
"I’m actually slightly sympathetic to the fear of a demographic turnover among the elite. The number of slots for elite politicians, businesspeople, and academics in America is fairly constant, so it does become a zero-sum competition. It’s natural to be afraid of getting pushed out of that elite by hard-charging immigrants who were selected for their genius — and also by ethnic cartelization to monopolize the elite."
I basically agree, and indeed have gotten into arguments with people who talk about white as an identity. I don't know a single person who answers a question about their ethnicity with 'white.' It's usually a mix of several European or Middle Eastern countries.
I also haven't met anyone who is concerned about being pushed out of the 'elite' circle because of being white, but I've basically been in CS-associated industry since the mid 1980s. I've worked for WASPs, Jews, Indian immigrants, Russian immigrants, Israelis and Italian Catholics, and it never seemed to matter a bit. I did know someone who liked to hire Harvard grads, but that was self-correcting :-)
Universities, of course, aren't really growing, and people there do pay attention to ethnicity to an (IMHO) unhealthy degree, so maybe that explains some of Noah's viewpoint.
Noah did write about how "alt-right" people think about White people in his old blog: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-siren-song-of-homogeneity.html
And many MAGA people actually don't want even white immigrants, even successful ones to come to the US; you can see comments on this Twitter post (from a German-born startup founder who got O-1 visa to come to the US!)
https://x.com/ironcarbs/status/1970325990913253772
Agreed was your first part
I don't think biden did anything to help the situation though
It was the left cultural pushes that created all the problems for democrats.In the first place
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.
Until Chinese companies start outsourcing manufacturing to places with cheaper labor, which I think is already happening...
It is. They outsource to SE Asia now for their cheap labor.
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!")
If O-1 visas go away the MAGAs are just shooting themselves in the foot because O-1 visas are overwhelmingly used by European immigrants.
Well, speaking about O-1, you can see this post on Twitter: https://x.com/schuttsm/status/1970224702842114446
Sometimes I am not even sure about whether these comments are from real people and not from bots though.
Do you have a link to that O1 data?
2019: https://khandelwalaw.com/o1-visa-approval-rate/
"Overwhelming" was the wrong word to use in hindsight but it's ~50% European which is a contrast to the 70-75% of H1-Bs going to Indians.
Africa total: 352
Asia total: 3,893
Europe total: 9,235
North America total: 875
Oceania total: 942
South America total: 2,450
No/unknown nationality: 4
You can find the data here: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-statistics/nonimmigrant-visa-statistics/monthly-nonimmigrant-visa-issuances.html
I haven't gone through it all and it's done by month instead of by year.
I only looked into May 2025 and filtering by all O1, O2, O3 visas I got:
1250 to European countries,
1808 to all non European,
309 to non European but Western countries.
Limiting to O1 only is 671 European, 645 non European, 113 non European but Western.
"Overwhelming" was definitely the wrong word to use - disproportionate is better since Europeans are no longer the majority of immigrants to the US.
Thanks
Reading some of the Reddit threads on this topic make me feel like I'm being gaslit, with how normalized such abhorrent takes are in an otherwise very liberal place. "But the job market is so tough," ok then, in that case maybe we should go further and ban all women from working in tech too. Less competition for jobs, then!
And also, leftists in the past (or more specifically, economic leftists) were anti-immigrants, lol.
To take Australia as an example, trade unionists there in the 1890s-1900s wanted to build a "workers' paradise", since the wage was so much higher than in Britain, but only for white people; and thus one of the first acts by Australian parliament was the White Australia Policy, which restricted immigration for only British and Irish people!
(You might see what happens even now with old leftists like Bernie Sanders though).
Well, people would only care for others when their material interests are not menaced though.
As with your takes about women, Grace Hopper Conference (a conference normally for women, LGBT in tech) was swamped with a lot of men claimed to be gays though in 2023 (there was a lot of complaints about this on Reddit at that time), so...
That’s how Melania officially came to the United States, right?
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 think you'd have to go back to the 1920s to hit Trump / Steven Miller's level of racism.
List how many inventions Indian immigrants in America have made vs how many inventions white immigrants in America have made. Still think we need Indians?
We don’t *need* Indian immigrants any more than we *need* Americans. We can get by without any group of people if we feel like it. We’ll just be worse off because we won’t have all the benefits of cooperation.
Immigrants (including Indian immigrants) invent at a higher rate than white Americans. https://eig.org/immigrants-patents/
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Kerr%20WP08_EthMatch_f657d992-cf76-4b76-8b52-61cac126b5a8.pdf
You need Indians if you want the US to be the richest big economy in the world. But if you don't care about that and just dislike seeing people with the wrong colored face, like the Groyper crowd, then sure, you don't need them.
Most of those inventors are white or Jewish immigrants.
Liberals always play this game where they just say "immigrants" and hope you think of high skill Norwegians and Japanese when they're really importing low skill Somalis and Haitians.
Why don't you read the second link and look at the accompanying data before you post easily-debunked lies? It talks about the high Indian contribution specifically. The rest of the high per-capita groups include Chinese and aren't white or Jewish immigrants.
Who are these white immigrants? Europeans think of us as a shithole. Just look at polling data or ask your favorite Euro friend.
If you're going to engage is casual racism you could at least be consistent. You started your 'contribution' with comments about 'Indians', now widen it to Somalis (African) and Haitians (Caribbean / African descent).
Additionally anyone getting an H1B visa, which was what this article referenced, is by definition NOT low skilled, making your follow up comment even more weak.
It's also obvious you didn't bother to read, possibly even open, the links provided, having requested evidence of the contribution of Indians. Even if we accept patents are a poor measure of contribution / value, there is no evidence to support your claim and plenty to refute it.
Well.... doing a listing of patented inventions by the patenting parties supposed ethnicity is
A. Mistaking patenting inventions as the primary metric of utility (which .... for this visa category is Not Even Wrong as a level of kind of drunk-ranter at end of bar kind of nonsense) [as for clarityhighly skilled technical labor does not = invention, it's rather broader interest. Patents are a dime a dozen - companies with the skill sets to take inventions to build globally competitive companies is qutie another matter and a work of a wide range of skilled labor]
B. if one were to take this as a valid metric (it's not, it's stupid) one should compare a like-to-like time period
Of course Tengri is just engaging in racialised nativism, in the grand old tradition of the Know Nothings.
Since you can easily search this, I would assume that you have low IQ and ignore you.
When is the last time you were in a hospital or saw a doctor?
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
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.
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 ..
Did someone order TACOs?
"Doctors could qualify for exemptions from the Trump administration’s new $100,000 fee for high-skilled H-1B visa applications, the White House said Monday, after some of the biggest medical bodies called out the risk to rural America where there’s already a dearth of providers."
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/white-house-says-doctors-may-be-exempt-from-100-000-h-1b-fee
They will go to blue cities like they already do.
China has over one billion people
The US only has around three hundred and thirty million people
If we want to compete, we're going to continue having to import the world's best and brightest
The math is really quite simple
Sure but these companies can afford the best and brightest at $100k a pop.
Well, no. There are a lot of small companies that employ H1-B visa holders as well. Not everyone company has a funding source like Google's infinite ad cash stream.
Then there not adding value.
That makes no sense. First, a company may simply be unable to find enough US citizens for their jobs -- take a look at any engineering class, and you'll find a lot of foreign students. We simply don't have enough US citizens for all the jobs we need to fill. In that case, your $100K fee is simply a tax on a growing company.
Of course, an H1-B visa holder may still be adding value, but not enough to burn an *additional* 100K. In that case, your tax is preventing a company from getting the value of employing someone who's available but you can't afford to hire.
We're disagreeing on how much value an H1B visa holder should produce in order to eventually gain US citizenship. If it's not enough to burn $100k per year then sorry it's not enough.
If you tax, something you get less of it
We want as many of those best and brightest as we can get
Best and brightest but the argument is that companies won't be able to afford a $100k application fee. Maybe they're not the best then.
Noah showed the tweet half way down his article that says $100k one time fee
I just want to leave a note saying that I love and support my east and south Asian brothers. As a Jew this is what we have been subjected to and feel your pain.
How old *are* you? I'm 68, Jewish and have never seen anything attacking me remotely like Trump's H1-B attacks people from India and China.
Mike, some of the most influential podcasters in this country are out and out Jew Haters.
Thanks bro - I'm usually pretty pro H1B reform but the ugly and stupid racism on display the past few days has left a bad taste in the mouth.
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.
It’ll be very hard to establish laws again in this country that can affect how the government operates.
This fiasco is why we should have a functional legislature (definitely no filibuster and ideally with the House and Senate doing everything unicameral as joint session). Could charging a one-time fee for an Hb1 visa be a good idea or at worst a good compromise? Sure, but representatives need to haggle over the amount and openly discuss on how the fee is supposed to work, in open debate. We can’t have a Czar basically drunk posting things on a Friday night.
"Why we should have" (then some pie in sky thing that would magically transform US system into some idealised other thing) is magical dreaming.
Actionable steps not dreaming of idealised transformations is what is needed (and actionable steps that don't involve magical presumption of passing constitutional amendments etc)
Returning power to subject matter committees in Senate and House, an idea I saw, had the air of actionability. Rules changes and modification of existing
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.
The slowdown in tech job hiring is hardly anecdotal. I think you probably realise that because you mentioned the stock of jobs and not the number of jobs being created. Even the industry leaders are predicting jobs reductions or slow hiring to continue. And maybe accelerate. Although they generally blame (or credit) Ai.
> and US colleges graduate over 700,0000 STEM degrees
Good place to hire from then, initially at least.
The real problem here is that Trump (who is correct in not following the mediocre ideology of muh free market) should have said he was restricting the H1B visas during the tech recessions. H1Bs are not that specialised - despite the claim, and jobs should be advertised to locals first. That doesn’t happen. In a recession in the industry H1B visas are probably zero sum.
Even in a tough market, companies may want to hire the best talent, regardless of where they are from. I don’t trust any government, let alone this administration, to make better choices than the industry.
So we’ve move from not taking jobs at all, to “if it does so what - let’s get the best workers from anywhere” . Which isn’t the same argument at all. Impacting tech graduate employment could be accelerated by upping the h1B visas to infinity, and you probably will find there are enough non graduates across the world to do the job better than pretty much all graduates. And god forbid we train them.
Then you’ll find that that feedback loop accelerates and eventually the graduate stream is as eliminated as the tooling graduates or apprentices were eliminated by the transfer of manufacturing to China. What’s left is the hope that the immigrants keep coming rather than start to set companies where they graduate.
The industry will do what it wants. What’s good for the quarterly report is not what is good for society, nor the nation.
The fact that US tech companies are the best in the world and are popular worldwide is definitely good for the country.
We're sat here debating this because tech companies created the internet and social media without any considerations for it's ramifications. Polarisation. Algorithms that feed hate. I don't have for one moment any sympathy for the industry. So the idea that the tech industry is good for this country as it destroys itself is very much debatable.
They still can. They just have to pay a one time fee of $100k. Given that meta and alphabet are making million dollar hiring deals with the best AI talent, this is peanuts.
Meta and Alphabet can, most startups can’t.
Let's not forget that Trump and Biden also played a big role in causing the tech recession with that dumb R&D capitalization law which suddenly made it much cheaper to build tech outside America
Americans were told to learn to code. Now it's time for the government to deliver on that promise.
There was no government program to subsidize American CS students. People pushed their kids into coding because of the lure of big bucks. You think if the government now says that there’s a shortage of factory workers and plumbers people will push their kids into these professions?
Yes they are doing that. Yes the government does have a responsibility to it's citizens which also includes American citizens whose parents previously benefited from the H1B visa.
All the big tech is laying off tech workers. There's no need for the 65k to supplement the workforce. If a different visa is needed type is needed then design one for outstanding tech workers.
H-1B is used by more than just the tech industry.
I think we might be mixing apples and oranges here. Entry-level jobs are not the tier that most H1B workers are hired into. So the notion that the recent college grads are competing for the same positions as the H1B pool is largely incorrect. IMO, the entry level jobs are under a lot more pressure from AI than from H1B workers. Commentary surrounding the recent high profile layoffs by the big 5 supports this as well.
I think the rise in tech worker unemployment is just a correction from overhiring in the early days of the pandemic. I'll be surprised if it keeps up.
You neglected to mention that Trump also signed an EO to implement his $1 million “gold card” visa but it eliminates EB-1 and EB-2 visas, along with the current EB-5 investor visa. These are exceptional ability visas used by significant talents. While EB-1 includes lots of sports, music and film stars, including fashion models, ( didn’t Melania get in on one of those? ) who can afford to pay the new fee, it also includes scientists and EB-2 includes holders of advanced degrees who are crucial to research but whose numbers also will be reduced by this new fee.
Here’s a nice description of the clown show where Lutnick came up with this idea as a way to reduce legal immigration and how he also wanted to eliminate all green cards and replace them with the new gold card. And they are still talking about making the $100K H1b fee apply annually.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/inside-trumps-chaotic-overhaul-of-the-h-1b-visa-b23bfdd3