rayiner

Yes, a Syrian immigrant who made it through the very strict immigration filters we had in place in the 1950s. (Also an odd example because Jobs had no contact with his father and was raised and socialized entirely by his American mother.)

It’s precisely because I’m an immigrant that I chafe at the narcissism of immigrants who want to overstate our contribution to the U.S. as it exists today. The U.S. was already a fully formed, technologically advanced superpower by the time my family got here in 1989. Desis like me came here because our effort goes a thousand times farther within the system—constitutional, legal, cultural, etc.—that Americans created than it does in the countries we created. We shouldn’t be blowing smoke up our own asses and pretending that we had more to do with it than we did. It’s obnoxious, diminishes the contributions of others, and is contrary to our own interest, because it gives us a false sense of what made America into such a place that we were willing to leave our family behind to come here.

Yes, the U.S. benefited from key foreign talent acquisitions like bringing over German scientists after World War I. The 1952 H-1 Act and some ad hoc programs brought over college professors and people like that. But “mass skilled immigration” in the form of H-1B, OPT, etc., didn’t happen until the early 1990s. We should evaluate these programs on their own terms, not link them into some grandiose fictional narrative. Especially now where AI is going to displace many knowledge workers.

You can’t see any change in the trend line in the mid 1980s: https://www.aei.org/economics/eu-vs-usa-part-v/. The growth slope for the U.S. has been very consistent since the early 1980s.

The DOJ prevailing wage certifications are a joke. The same people who say advertising a web developer job in the sunday paper is sufficient notice also say if what you’re paying for that web developer is market rate.

The wait time is long from the perspective of an individual immigrant (about 17 years for sibling preference for India, for example), but not that long from the perspective of population dynamics. A single skilled immigrant can bring over a dozen family members within 25 years. That's how you end up with these huge ethnic enclaves popping up all over the country in places that had very few immigrants when Al Gore was running for President.

> But if I were to put numbers on how many new people a group can absorb per year without radically changing its culture, I'd put it at about 10% … If we extrapolated to the whole U.S. population and assumed they were all evenly distributed, this'd be 34M people/year

You think you can absorb 10% of the population every year without radically changing the country’s culture? My parents are still 80% Bangladeshi even after 40 years in the U.S.

We have empirical data showing that cultural differences in everything from social trust to savings rates persist for generations. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/09/th...

I used it as an example because I’m from Bangladesh and have family in Queens. There’s 65,000 Bangladeshis in Queens, about half of them on welfare. That number can’t be explained by the paltry number of H1 or EB visas granted to Bangladeshis.

The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.

India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.

It’s a scam.

These are Department of Labor regulations that are updated with some frequency.

I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.

I mean that each employer petition on behalf of a worker is selected randomly. But, prior to the petition, the workers are hired by the companies in a non-random fashion. That’s important to keep in mind because I think a lot of people are like “oh the H1Bs I met working on AI at Google are super smart, so the program must bring over the best of the best.” But the system treats an H1B petition from WiPro the same as one from Google. Because the system is a lottery, it can be true that there are super smart H1bs working at Google and also that most of them are doing jobs many Americans could be doing. The lottery system makes the bar quite low and the spread very wide.

What is the evidence of selective enforcement?

You should listen to the NYT podcast I linked! It describes decades of exactly what I’m talking about, and the NYT is neither nativist nor populist. Yes, the Bush-era GOP was shilling for cheap labor for big business. There is a reason a Bush can’t even get elected dog catcher in Texas anymore.

I was literally just quoting the first two sentences in the section describing the provisions of the law.

Remember that H1B is a lottery. If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery. But most of the jobs aren’t going to those people. The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.

Yeah, the rules are designed to facilitate fraud. They let you put job ads for web developers in a newspaper instead of, you know, on the Internet.

If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.

Yes, that’s useful:

> summary, the provisions of AC21 did the following:

> They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers")

All of this is done under the pretense that these are temporary workers who will eventually go home. That’s the only way Congress could get away with it, and it seems like people are now wising up to it.

Go to Little Bangladesh in Queens and tell me how all those people came here. It’s mathematically impossible unless they’re all illegal (which I don’t think is true) or it’s family reunification.

Each legal immigrant who becomes a citizen is the root of a tree that can continue indefinitely. If you come from anywhere other than India or China, it takes about 10 years to get citizenship from when you get your H1B. It took us less than 10. After that you can sponsor family for green cards directly. That person only needs about 6 years before they can get citizenship and start sponsoring their own family members. So it’s easy to see how we went from 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. in 1990 to 300,000+ in just 35 years.

> That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker

That’s very easy within a few decades when you consider that the people who are sponsored will get citizenship and can then sponsor their own parents, siblings, etc. My dad sponsored six people, and he just has one brother. My mom has 12 siblings, but them and their families went to Australia following my uncle.

There are 300,000-600,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S., up from under 10,000 in 1990. Based on H1B petitions and natural growth, the population should be more like 15,000. People are bringing their entire extended families over.

Same thing with au pairs and childcare work: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/09/683831264/au-pair-sponsor-age.... It’s basically below minimum wage.

Cato did a study in 2017 that asked people if they supported immigration. Most people did. Then they asked people what they thought the level of immigration should be. The median answer was around 500,000 a year. The real level is 2-5 times higher than that. That’s why nobody will push for a real skilled immigration system. Once you open up the issue to public debate, a likely outcome will be a demand to drastically cut the level of legal immigration.

For example, right now, nobody is thinking of how many immigrants come to the U.S. through family unification for each H1B worker that eventually gets permanent residency. If you open up the issue now it’s going to become a firestorm when people realize that “65,000 skilled workers a year” actually results in millions of people every year, most of whom aren’t skilled workers.

It’s not weird when you understand that Americans never voted to have a skilled immigration system: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... Had someone tried to get one through Congress, they would have lost elections.

The system we have is one that was politically feasible to implement. On paper, we have a system for “non-immigrant” temporary workers. Employers sponsor green cards for skilled workers because the theoretically temporary job is the only avenue for most of these workers to get to the U.S. in the first place.

No, people should honestly confront your question. The “skilled labor shortage” premise for the H1B is dead, at least in tech. Maybe we still need to bring in a handful of superstars. But at this point I think TCS, Wipro, etc., exist only due to foreign lobbying efforts.

Surly the “corruption” is big corporations pushing for the H1B program in the first place, at a time (early 1990s) when decreasing immigration was overwhelmingly more popular than increasing it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx. Surely the “corruption” is the government looking the other way for years while Indian body shops imported massive numbers of foreign workers while ignoring the requirement in the law to advertise to americans?

And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.

This is an open secret. My dad was an H visa (H1B didn’t exist yet) in an industry that uses a lot of H visas because the job involves recruiting public health experts for projects in foreign countries. He said that companies never advertise these jobs to Americans and will hide the posting in some obscure newspaper or whatever to bypass that requirement of the law.

They were living the same way prior to colonialism.

Your argument ironically refutes the original point. The bad thing colonization did to Bengal was prevent “pursuit of growth and capital accumulation.” The tariffs and restraints on free trade were the real culprit.[1] The people in Bengal weren’t poorer than they were before colonization. Bengal’s GDP per capita was about the same in 1700 as in 1900. The real problem is that Bengal missed out on all the profits from capitalism that they could have enjoyed had they been allowed to trade freely with other countries. So England went from being twice as rich per capita as Bengal, before colonization, to being more than 10 times as rich at the time of independence.

My dad’s village was a lovely socialist utopia. Rice farming requires a high level of communalism. During religious holidays, the community comes together and pools their resources has feasts for the whole village. Villages like that post videos of it on Youtube, it’s very charming: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rf9x_YZwE5c

[1] Direct revenue extraction was relatively low, and the famines were structural in the region for thousands of years.

> Once again, we see the incentive of limitless growth and capital accumulation at all costs turns out to be harmful, actually.

My dad's village in Bangladesh doesn't incentivize either growth or capital accumulation. They also don't have any problem with social media. Do you want to go live there?

It’s not there:

> The project’s official website says the grove is not even on its land. That contradiction is the whole problem, and it has no public answer yet.

> Watson used his credibility to advance unscientific eugenics theories for years

You’re making the same argument that you are accusing others of making.

I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation. This period was the age of empires. Why were the Victorian elites so much more successful at it than their counterparts?