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Comment by Espressosaurus | Hacker News Reader

It's worse: we're actively ejecting the global brain drain that has been to our benefit since the post-WW2 era.

I know several people on various visas that are making plans to leave after having gotten PHDs here. Still more have naturalized and are making contingencies for exiting.

Immigrants found close to half of the fortune 500 businesses, and start something like 20% of our new businesses each year. For those motivated immigrants to choose elsewhere is going to reduce our growth both from what they don't do, and because immigration is what has delayed our demographic inversion that Europe and other developed nations are going through.

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I'm from Germany, and from an outsiders perspective I can only say that your argument wouldn't convince me.

I looked into the h1b for myself before, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to start my own successful business while on it.

You're aware that there will continue to be immigration without the h1b visa, right? That's just a common way big corporations use to import cheap labor, at least that's what I looked like to me - because id be fully at the mercy of the company I'd be unable to really negotiate my contracts etc

It's definitely possible to make an argument in favor of the program, but it's a lot more nuanced at the societal level - and I suspect overall net negative, because often the h1b visa recipients will transfer their money back to their home country, which makes this into a net-negative again.

> You're aware that there will continue to be immigration without the h1b visa, right? That's just a common way big corporations use to import cheap labor, at least that's what I looked like to me - because id be fully at the mercy of the company I'd be unable to really negotiate my contracts etc

I believe the parent is referring to the knock-on effects of all the other immigration enforcement actions.

I largely agree with you about h1b specifically but this move doesn't exist in isolation. It's increasingly clear that the US is determined to make life hard on immigrants in general (or at least harder) and this is just another data point.

> That's just a common way big corporations use to import cheap labor

In the case of H1B, they’re paid slightly more on average. It’s myth that they’re cheaper. Usually they’re a lot more expensive given the costs of dealing with the immigration process

> I suspect overall net negative, because often the h1b visa recipients will transfer their money back to their home country, which makes this into a net-negative again

Why is this a problem? So what if someone transfers money back home - that’s their money that they’re free to do what they want with. Most people are okay buying imported products and also don’t support exit taxes in other situations, so why single out immigrants?

You left out the context. It's not an issue at an individual level. I very explicitly stated that I was talking about societal level.

That means that the society is worse of if everyone does it

And importing goods is a good example why the scale matters. People usually import items worth maybe some small fraction of their yearly income, whereas some immigrants are known to sent back more then they spent locally.

Which is fine if they're actually world class talent, because then there will be very few people doing so, and their intellectual contributions likely offset any other issues. However, as you scale up the immigration percentage, it eventually does become a societal problem.

And the governments job is explicitly to look at the well being if the society - at least ideally. How much they actually do (vs just trying to siphon as much tax payer money as they can get away with) is another question I'm unqualified to say wrt the USA

>and because immigration is what has delayed our demographic inversion that Europe and other developed nations are going through

The birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0. From the perspective of the conservative movement in power, it makes sense to halt immigration so the population becomes more and more conservative over time (as immigrants are left-leaning on average, especially Indians).

Not really.

Only a special group of conservatives largely in Utah have the ambition and brains to do much tech work. The rest aren’t very promising, and with the current birth rate, future tech jobs will mostly not get done and the work will move abroad.

Indians and even Chinese, not to mention most of the non-European immigrants, are relatively conservative (socially reserved, self reliant, lots of self responsibility) and are only seen as left leaning in the toxic form of nationalistic conservatism that dominates the USA.

I thought that the rural conservatives just needed to learn new skills in order to transition into a new job market.

At least, that was the messaging around 2019 when we were telling coal miners to 'learn to code.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/changing-america/en...

Now we are saying it takes a specific mindset...

It's also looking like those coal miners who pushed back had more foresight as the market is saturated and with the AI sea change.

https://futurism.com/computer-science-majors-high-unemployme...

I do agree with you in part however, it takes ambition to succeed. This is true no matter if you are an immigrant or native born.

Maybe the real question should be, why is our population losing their ambition?

They should learn to code, but as long as they believe math is some sort of conspiracy, they can’t. And it’s worse as they push their kids into the trades and into mining jobs that should go away, there simply won’t be an improvement quality if life.

Why do you think Utah is the richest red state? Mormon religion doesn’t see math/ science to conflict with faith for some reason, you will see a lot of Mormon programmers especially out here in the west. But the same isn’t true for the rest of red state America. Better yet, compare with China: China is a conservative country, but they believe in education. We simply don’t have that advantage in general.

Nobody says math is a conspiracy, except maybe the far left educators who think math is some kind of racist white supremacy. That's a ridiculous straw man.

https://www.hoover.org/research/seattle-schools-propose-teac...

> China is a conservative country but they believe in education

China is a communist country that banned private tutoring because some children were getting ahead, creating inequality (the "double reduction" policy).

China is less communist than America these days. And even if they were bonafide communists, that has no real relation to conservative values.

When you give American conservatives actual numbers on the economy, weather, healthcare, they assert that they would much rather go with what they think is true vs what actually is true. They simply don’t believe in data and math, you aren’t going to advance much in tech that way.

The Chinese economy is far more heavily planned than America's is, and they are far more totalitarian. There is no meaningful way you can claim America is more communist than China. China is less communist than under Mao, for sure, but it must still be kept in perspective.

You are conflating "government data" with "math" as if they're the same thing. That's a massive error and suggests you should fix your own understandings before attacking other people's. Someone saying they don't trust the government to report honest/accurate numbers doesn't mean they think math is a conspiracy, and it's a ridiculous distortion to present it like that. In fact, it's exactly that kind of behavior that causes conservatives to not trust leftists (and by extension the government departments most full of them).

I agree, but none of this is incompatible with what you replied to.

I have no idea if their claim that the "birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0" is correct, but a demographic power struggle totally fits the rhetoric I observe from abroad.

> as immigrants are left-leaning on average, especially Indians

Curious what you're basing that on?

Crack smoke

The birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0

That will not be enough to offset the oncoming boom in infant mortality.

and maternal mortality.

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