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Comment by qppo | Hacker News Reader

The largest H1-B visa sponsors are Cognizant, Tata, Wipro, Infosys, and Deloitte. None of those scream "innovation" to me. The system absolutely needs reform, and I think most people can agree with that.

But that said, blanket bans on immigration by the white supremacists and nationalists currently running our government and deciding our immigration are probably not designed to help America or innovation either.

The whole H1-B ban feels like something the admin could throw to their supporters without making too much noise in the press, because it affects very few voters and we have more pressing economic problems than the tech labor shortage.

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This CNBC article says Amazon was the largest sponsor of H1B in 2019

> Amazon, which received more H-1B visas than any other company in 2019, described the move as “short-sighted” in a statement.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/google-amazon-tesla-trump-im...

I wasn't aware that our government was currently being run by white supremacists. Do you have a source?

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/26/783047584/leaked-emails-fuel-...

"For almost three decades, Jared Taylor has been publishing his ideas about race at the American Renaissance magazine and now at a website called AmRen, which is considered a mouthpiece for white supremacist ideology. ... The website is not well-known outside white nationalist circles — but it found an audience in White House adviser Stephen Miller."

So Stephen Miller is a white supremacist now? He must be hiding it pretty well, since I've heard through hundreds of hours of his podcast with Raheem Kasam and he has never said anything remotely racist.

Stephen Miller, the one working in the White House, doesn't host any podcast. You are thinking of Jason Miller.

You're right, sorry about that one.

Last time I checked there is quite a lot of evidence pointing to him being a white supremacist: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/13/politics/katie-mchugh-stephen...

Thanks for the link, I confused him with the chief strategist of trump campaign Jason Miller.

To be fair the bar to be considered a white supermacist is very low in today's political correctness environment.

And what is your evidence of that?

The bar is so low that Jewish (like Stephen Miller) and even black (e.g. Ben Carson, Candace Owens) people are frequently called white supremacists. So low that people saying "It's ok to be white" were called white supremacists.

Does the term have any meaning now, or has it become simply a slur for anyone whose political beliefs differ, like "communist" or "terrorist" before it?

Agreed that there's risk in overuse which can lead to numbness for the real thing.

In some ways, I'd argue we should then be even more vigilant because white supremacist rhetoric / apologist sentiment and actions are having an easier time to hide behind the veils of fuzziness.

One comment though: you do not have to be white to be a white supremacist. White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to people of other races, and should thus dominate them.

We see this pattern in other arenas too, e.g. gays and homophobia or women and gender bias.

I've personally been accused of being a neo-nazi on reddit because my username includes the number 88, which is only there because my wife's birth year is 1988 and I'm not creative enough to think of a unique name. I've seen the same frivolous accusations thrown around here as well.

This has no sources other than the SPLC's analysis of some leaked emails and selective quotations from them [1]. The SPLC has further examinations as well [2].

Look at the out-of-context quotes given in the first link and decide for yourself whether this is enough to justify a charge of being a white supremecist, even given that the article is explicitly dedicated to working towards that conclusion. Don't just take their word for it. I'll gladly concede that Miller is anti-immigration to the point of being xenophobic, but white supremecist is a huge stretch.

[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-mille...

[2] https://www.splcenter.org/stephen-miller-breitbart-emails

The bar for proving that "America is run by white supremacists" needs to be a lot higher than, one guy in the white house reads a blog.

Here are 6 sources. Different incidents, different news organizations. There are hundreds more, but I got bored. Hell, his campaign was running an ad with the Nazi pink triangle (like the gold star, but for gays and liberals) last week. That didn’t even make my list.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/white-supremacists-c...

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/23/735191317/white-supremacy-and...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-e...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/opinion/trump-white-supre...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/11/el-paso-shoo...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/06/donald-trump-jr-rifle-magazi...

We should remind ourselves that white supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to people of other races, and that white people should thus be dominant over them.

In academics, white supremacy is a term to denote a system of structural racism which privileges white people over others, whether or not there's racial hatred.

You do not have to be white to be a white supremacist.

We can then critically evaluate what the current presidency and their network of advisers and influencers say and do. Some of the rhetoric and actions fall along lines other than white supremacy (e.g. xenophobia, nationalism, etc.), while others are less veiled.

Let's open our eyes, turn a mirror, and ask ourselves some hard questions: do I believe white people are superior? Do I benefit from a system that does and do I think anything should be done about it?

>The largest H1-B visa sponsors are Cognizant, Tata, Wipro, Infosys, and Deloitte. None of those scream "innovation" to me.

of course. Those are the B2B ugliest enterprise software jobs that not many people really want to do, yet those are necessary jobs. Bad as it is, when/if those jobs move overseas due to the factors like those visa restrictions, i don't think it would make that software and its support for US customers better as overseas situation adds additional complexity and cost, and that in turn may get reflected in the performance of those US customers.

Note: i did almost 8 years on H1B in the previous decade (and before that few years as a remote in 199x), and i think the greatest threat to our cushy jobs here isn't small (85K/year) inflow of immigrants, it is full fledged remote work to which the companies have been pushed by factors like covid and now the work visa restrictions which can as well result in tech jobs leaving the country like manufacturing jobs left it in the past. The work visa program is like a safety pressure valve - shutting it off brings the risk of the thing blowing out, ie. the jobs just going away.

> by the white supremacists and nationalists currently running our government and deciding our immigration

This type of baseless rhetoric is rooted in identity politics and underlies the current division in the US.

Directly from the Whitehouse Proclamation[0]:

"American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States to perform temporary work. Temporary workers are often accompanied by their spouses and children, many of whom also compete against American workers. Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered temporary worker programs can provide benefits to the economy. But under the extraordinary circumstances of the economic contraction resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, certain nonimmigrant visa programs authorizing such employment pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers."

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

As a person of color whose parents immigrated to America via H1B and saw the footage out of El Paso and Charlottesville and the murder of people that look like my uncles in Olathe Kansas the rhetoric has tangible effects and is anything but “baseless”.

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