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Comment by rednafi | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. As you should. Indians and Chinese are no longer considered minorities in the US, so it makes sense to curb the influx.

However, the problem is that the US tech market is volatile, with zero job security. Since H1B makes it difficult to switch employers, tech companies often exploit this and pay these workers disproportionately. On top of that, there’s always the looming risk of getting fired before securing a green card, and the stress of that hangs over you constantly. This part could definitely be improved.

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> Indians and Chinese are no longer considered minorities in the US, so it makes sense to curb the influx.

Why would this ever be rational a basis for immigration?

It's not rational at all. India and China are huge, and subjecting them to the same quota as a tiny island is irrational.

What would be rational quotas for countries that have over 1B people?

How about no quota at all based on nationality (actually place of birth) when you already have a limit of 65k visas a year being apportioned by lottery.

Very unlikely. The per country quota is to limit influence of any one country via immigration.

Then one country would clog up the entire system.

Why should the population of the country even be a factor in deciding how many immigrants we'll accept from there?

Not saying it is the actual reason, but one rationale is that you don't want a sudden influx of a single demographic taking over the nation and disproportionately affect policy making and culture.

It would take 100 years for a single demographic if they were using all the 65000 annual H1B visas to reach 2% of the population assuming the population doesn’t grow for a century.

This argument makes no sense at all.

Hasnt happened at the country level but has happened at the company level

As someone mentioned:

> Hasnt happened at the country level but has happened at the company level

Yep, I've seen a company completely taken over by a single nationality and the result wasn't anything to be happy about.

First, are we talking about the green card or H1B? There is no quota on H1B and we already see a shift in culture and demographic in many companies.

Second, an immigrant can take their spouse, have kids, sponsor their families' visas, etc. Any one of these will double their demographic's representation, and they are not mutually exclusive, i.e. it can easily be triple or quadruple, or more.

> There is no quota on H1b.

There is no per-country quota on H1b, but the total number of H1bs are capped to 85000, (and close to 100k if you include research / non profits) a year.

A lot of this feels like a worry over the fact that many tech companies now are no longer majority American (or white), with Meta being the first tech company that’s fallen below the 50% threshold. Probably other companies will fall soon, looking at the trends. Has Meta’s culture been destroyed? I don’t know, feels like Mark has far more control over Metas culture than the immigrants who choose to work there.

India is about as diverse as Europe for most dimensions of diversity.

I will push back on that. "India is about as diverse as southern or western europe for most dimension of diversity" is probably more fair. As diverse as europe, especially if you include the Balkans, southern europe, northern europe and "eastern" europe (in a large sense, including Georgia, and western Kazakstan), seems quite hard, for a subcontinent at least.

India has 270 languages with at least 10K speakers; Europe has ~200 languages. India has ~1.4B people; Europe has ~750M people. India has about ~2000 distinct ethnic groups; Europe has ~200.

Don't let the subcontinent bit trick you.

s/immigration/skilled immigration

How is 3% of the population not a minority?

The quota is fixed per country. For India and China it gets filled immediately. So the sentiment is that they’re no longer considered minority as quotas from other countries are barely filled.

And honestly, it's kind of nuts, when you think about it. For India at least, it's better compared to the EU than a 'country'. The concept of 'India' is like 'Christendom'. It describes a very broad cultural region. But realistically, the gulf between culture in one state in India and another is as different as the gulf in culture between the UK and France. It's a bizarre accident of history that they even are under one sovereign jurisdiction. The languages are different (even more diverse than Europe, since there's two independent language families), the writing system is different, the food is different, the religion is different (despite what everyone says, Hinduism is a broad spectrum of beliefs; it's like classifying Judaism and Islam together as the same thing not to mention massive non-Dharmic cultural groups that have also been there a very long time and are sufficiently 'Indian').

That is to say... if the goal is diversity, which is a good goal, you should probably split some of these larger countries up. Especially countries like India which are not dominated by any one ethnic group. There is no equivalent to the Han Chinese in India.

Unfortunately, the basic precept here seems to be 'has brown skin' makes you exactly the same as anyone else with brown skin, which leads to absurdities, such as California's old anti-miscegenation law that considered Indians and Mexicans the same race.

It's nuts but at the same time, removing the limit isn't viable as in that case India and China will clog up the entire system.

I was suggesting a limit based on subnational distinctions or another form of delineation. Although in general, I tend to be anti immigration, so I would rather just see a total cap and no quota.

India has had those borders long, long before the British. It was initially formed under the Mauryan empire in 300BC and quite a few times again since then. Infact if you consider the Mauryans, Mughals and the British, India has had these borders for 1000s of years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurya_Empire

India has had those borders in the same way the 'greater Mediterranean' has had those borders.

Mauryans were an empire which means that they ruled over disparate nations

No the country of India is in fact not at all united. The various jatis worship different gods, speak different languages, have distinct cultures. Just because they all celebrate a few holidays in common and have some shared cultural beliefs does not make them the same

This is like saying every Roman Catholic is an Italian.

Lastly, the Mauryans never ruled all the way to South India. This is the first time in history the entirety of 'Bharat' has been under one polity (although arguably with the exclusion of Pakistan and Bangladesh, even this is wrong).

Every place in the world was small disparate kingdoms until the rise of nation states. If anything India has been united longer than almost any other place in the world.

Since when does a country mean a single cultural group? By that metric Switzerland, Russia, the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Central Asia, most of SE Asia, any country in Africa, large parts of the Middle East and South America are not countries. For that matter, all of China isn’t Han Chinese, there are Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Zhuang, Hui etc.

> For that matter, all of China isn’t Han Chinese, there are Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Zhuang, Hui etc.

The difference is that no one clan in India comprises any majority. Again, imagine a country where the french lived next to the english and the italian (like literal next door neighbors), but kept their own languages, customs, etc and only intermarried people like them. That is India. There is ample evidence for this. The differences between the cultures can be extreme.

It is relatively recently that any person in India would even claim to be 'Indian'. Most identify with the state / jati they belong to. Yes, they're 'Indian' in the same way that an Indian is 'Asian' or an Englishman is 'Eurasian', but it's not a coherent identity.

The indian gov't is certainly trying to make that a reality (this is the source of their 'Hindu nationalism' -- which is really a particular kind of North Indian hegemony), but it's been a long time coming, and there are a lot of issues with it.

Also, this is wrong.

There is no quota for the H1B visa.

There is a quota for the number of H1B visa holders who have then additionally been sponsored by their company (something which costs a company $20k at a minimum) that can get permanent residency in a year.

White people are 10% of worldwide population. The concept of "minority" changes depending on what you're analysing.

Is the H1B a worldwide visa?

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