Know Thine Enemies, Yes, but More Importantly . . . Have No Delusions about Your Friends
Some things, like tech bro billionaires loving cheap labor and fat bottom lines, are so unsurprising as to be painfully predictable, no matter what color cap they wear.
I didn’t spend much time on the news over my break. I did however catch the big brouhaha over the MAGA Musk-Ramaswamy vs MAGA everyman/woman fight over H1B visas.
I can sort of sum up the general reactions as follows . . .
On the right, “MAGA” are disagreeing?!?!1
On the left, “MAGA” are disagreeing?!?!
And me?
“MAGA” are disagreeing.
Let’s be clear about the H1B visa. It is an example of one of those things that starts out as a good idea and is sold as a way to “enrich us all” but ends up being abused to fatten select designer, handcrafted wallets and while shrinking worn, mass-produced, “why do we even bother carrying these things as there’s nothing ever in them” wallets. And when you question it, well, you’re the bad guy because RaCiSM and don’t you remember this great thing it was supposed to do?
It’s a story repeated so many times that we could all tell it in our sleep.
John Carter summed up the situation the best . . .
H1Bs, the tech bros insist, are only for bringing over top talent – a few thousand of the world’s smartest engineers. What could be wrong with that? And the truth is that there is very little wrong with that, and almost no one actually has a problem with that ... but absolutely no one believes them when they say that. Long and bitter experience has demonstrated time after time that small concessions invariably become the camel’s nose of demographic change.
I’m actually less worried about the demographic change than the economic toll taken on domestic workers, something that Lee Fang points out . . .
Like much of the past few years of conservative populist rage, the issue is clouded by inflammatory rhetoric around identity and culture. But at the center remains an economic issue that has festered for decades. Elites have gained tremendously from the H-1B program. The record for everyone else is quite mixed.
I’d say that’s putting it generously.
Twenty years ago, whilst still editing academic books, I was reading about how tech employers—the ones that were supposed to be moving my generation (Xers) into a robust economic future where we lived like kings and queens relative to our parents simply because we could code—were replacing us with overseas labor (either literally overseas or importing it) because they could save money. And I would have been in my late twenties/early thirties at that point, the generation where liberal arts majors literally went into IT because most Americans who had any kind of high school or college degree had some basic training in programming and could “catch up.” Even now, I at turning fifty this year could back-door my way into a new Mac computer because I didn’t have the password the local computer had set it up with (and they hadn’t written it down 🤦♀️).
All they could do is go . . .
These people were half my age and worked at Billings Tech Guys of all things, so they were supposedly “experts.”
Now granted, Apple made it easy, but I started with the basic premise that somewhere there has to be a way to boot up from a disk. See, that’s what a dinosaur knows, and there are a lot of us dinosaurs.
Okay, maybe not dinosaurs. Maybe prehistoric mammals of some type, like mammoths or sloths or sabertooth tigers.
But you get the general idea.
My point is this: the idea that you can’t find good tech people in a country where a whole very recent generation was passing fair at computer programming as younglings and English lit majors could move smoothly into computer tech work is insane. I know I’m on the youngish end of Gen X, but give me a break. The argument just doesn’t pass the smell test.
And if you can’t find them, train them, as John Carter suggests.
My humble suggestion is that peace can be made for the low, low price of a billion dollars. Maybe a few billion. That’s a ballpark figure, about what I would imagine it would cost to set up a national network of training campuses designed to teach young Americans the skills they need for employment in artificial intelligence, aerospace, automation, 3D manufacturing, and whatever other emerging industries the tech sector is hoping to get rich on.
And this is it. Programming computers isn’t rocket science. At the entry level, it’s a vo-tech, two year program at best. And I have a feeling a lot of people would be fine with that. Get rid of the trappings of college that have become so overpriced and meaningless (if not outright destructive), leaving students functionally illiterate (in all but cultural virtue signaling) and with a mountain of debt. Instead, just teach people to code or use the necessary programs and give them jobs, like electricians or plumbers or diesel techs—they’re really just machinists after all (even if the machine is a bit more complex).
Now that I’ve expressed how I feel about the issue itself (feel free to disagree), let’s talk about the brouhaha and why “bemusement” is the only word I can find as a reaction to people’s (over)reactions.
I would have been shocked . . .
. . . if Ramaswamy and Musk had not defended the H1B visa program. Why?
Musk is a “skilled”2 immigrant (who it was suggested came over on an H1B, though you can tell me if that’s true or not), and Ramaswamy is the child of “skilled” immigrants. And Musk himself has used (or abused, depending on your POV) the H1B visa program, as Lee Fang points out.
Last year, the top 30 H-1B visa employers laid off 84,556 people at the same time as they sought 34,414 new H1-B foreign workers. This includes firms such as Musk’s Tesla.
Their reactions are born of tribalism and economic self-interest.
That’s not bad faith action. That’s just human nature.
Though it did get ugly.
There’s some truth here, but this is an oversimplistic explanation neglecting a whole range of issues, many of them caused by prioritizing the economic interests of people such as, well, Ramaswamy over the interests of domestic tech workers.
And some of us both valued and related to Screech and thought Zach was a meathead, I’ll have Mr. Vivek know.3
I have my complaints about the youth of today, and about our culture, but we’ve always been pretty much as we are, and we’ve done just fine, as Techno Fog points out.
Not that America doesn’t have its educational or cultural problems, and the lowering of standards has certainly undercut the development of our brightest, but we still produce the best STEM talent out there. It’s also worth noting that many of the brilliant engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs that built America and American technology didn’t have the upbringing or grades that Vivek demands.
Steve Jobs was a mischievous kid who who dropped out of college after a semester. Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Jobs, was an electronics prodigy who was self-taught. Wozniak left the University of Colorado after running up a $50,000 bill (measured in today’s dollars) in computing time.
Or consider Jack Kilby, who was from small-town Kansas and had a variety of interests as a young man: sports, photography, radio, and especially electronics – an endeavor he had the freedom and time to explore. He failed the MIT entrance exam and enrolled at the University of Illinois to Electrical Engineering. Kilby had average grades as an undergraduate and later received an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He went on to invent the integrated circuit (microchip) during his time at Texas Instruments (independently and concurrently with Bob Noyce). Kilby would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.
And here is the problem . . .
But Kilby’s story is not only relevant to Vivek’s misguided rant. It also poses a question: would Kilby be given an opportunity in America’s current economic climate, where talented and well-qualified citizens are ignored for cheaper foreign labor?
Or - are just how many other talented Americans are passed-over, or fired and replaced, so the mega-corps can earn an extra quarter cent per share?
As Eric Weinstein pointed out, American workers have higher expectations.
As for the claim that we produce the best in STEM from both Techno Fog and Weinstein . . . 🤷♀️
But I’d say our scientists are on par with the rest of the world’s even if our students rank lower.
SpaceX is a good example. Because of SpaceX’s close relationship with the military, Musk can’t outsource to foreign workers and keep his contracts. So here is what his engineering team looks like . . .
These kids are good. They could get a rocket booster to do this . . .
If you don’t know how big this is, it pretty much is inventing the wheel for launching into space. A reusable rocket booster that instead of ending up in the sea or littering space is put back on the launch pad and can be made ready to go again in hours . . . revolutionary.
And a bunch of regular old American Millennials and Zoomers did it (maybe even an Xer thrown in for good measure).
So why is Musk so fixated on H1B workers? Well, because of this (also from John Carter’s post) . . .
Elon Musk is a businessman.
As is Vivek Ramaswamy . . .
I loved how this one got memory-holed by the generally suspicious “how dare they track me” right . . .4
Datavant was/is basically proposed to be a “safe and secure” clearinghouse for patient data to be used to design “clinical trials” (wink wink).
All that information in one place, and that’s all you’re going to use it for?
But Vivek doesn’t care about how his product will be abused, just that he makes money off it.
Again, that’s not bad faith, and I don’t hate Ramaswamy for it. That’s just business. As a liberal, I have my eyes open about how “business” functions. That’s why I do think government is necessary to regulate business. And, yes, I know often government ends up regulating people to the benefit of business. That’s because the eye gets taken off the ball and we let “business,” along with the politicians and media it owns, lie to us. But that doesn’t negate the original point.
However, the lesson here is the only thing worse than not “knowing thine enemy” is not acknowledging the ugly parts of your “friends.” Or an even better lesson? Understanding these people aren’t really our friends. We just have a common score to settle, but in the end, they’ll use us just as easily as, well, we’ll use them. So, as John Carter points out, let’s be realistic about the situation.
It’s worth pointing out that the alliance between the tech right and the new right is one of both convenience and necessity. The left offers the tech bros mandatory DEI and ESG that will destroy their companies’ productivity, and unrealized capital gains taxes that will annihilate whatever’s left of the tech ecosystem. The right is happy to let them keep their money, to run their companies as they see fit, indeed the right is broadly in favour of massive deregulation, and the right asks in return only that the American tech industry employ Americans, pay them well, and not serve as a vector for unwelcome demographic change.
I disagree about the “right” here. This is not a “right-left” issue as we’ll see in a bit.
But we have a right to tell the Ramaswamys5 and the Musks, “Our priorities are different, and we owe you nothing, so the answer is no.”
Oh, and, with all due respect and due deference . . .
Or as John Carter explains (because he has a flair for words that I envy and his basic point is spot on) . . .
The chuds, it turns out, understand all of these [economic] arguments perfectly well.
They simply don’t care.
The chuds don’t care because, for the chuds, this is not a matter of ‘economics’, of Big Line Go Up. It is a question of their homeland, what is happening to it, and whether they even get to have one. It is about being ethnically replaced. It is about being relentlessly undercut by the cheap labour of bargain-basement aliens, whose presence en masse makes it harder to get a job, depresses the wages of what jobs you can get, and inflates the cost of housing. It is about being expected to work twice as hard as your grandfather for half the standard of living. It is about decades of affirmative action policies which have frustrated young white men at every step of their lives, from being treated like defective girls in elementary school, to being made to affirm that their ancestors were genocidal racists in high school, to being deprioritized for admissions, scholarships, internships, and mentoring in college, to being discriminated against in hiring and passed over for promotions in the workplace, all while being expected to clap like trained seals for their own dispossession while being gaslit that that they are not being dispossessed and if they’re having problems it must be their fault because they just suck and clearly the women and the immigrants are just better than them.
Now John Carter kind of undercuts his own arguments about demographic change being the driving factor when he admits that there is a brutally pragmatic economic element to this that is independent from the demographic change.
One by one, all of the economic arguments in favour of mass migration from the third world to Western countries have been dismantled, leaving the pro-foreign labour side sputtering to a deeply unsympathetic mob about how their business model requires them to close off entry-level employment opportunities while under-investing in education and training at home, eating the seed corn of future prosperity in order to fatten the stock portfolios of foreign-born executives, and that this is what is called ‘America winning’.
And I suppose that is my point of hope: MAGA did get in a fight, over a substantive issue. And the masses called out the blatant self-interest of the would-be, self-appointed saviors on their side. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen that? I had thought that instinct mostly dead.
But then an even more amazing thing happened . . .
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., plans to shake things up with a new political fight over the controversial H-1B visa program. What began as a dispute on social media over the last week will soon hit the halls of Congress.
A source close to his office told me that the senator is drafting several amendments to improve the program radically – including raising income levels for foreign workers taking jobs through the H-1B visa and hiking the application fees for corporations utilizing the program. The push is a reprisal of similar 2007 amendments Sanders offered during the debate over the Bush immigration bill. During that period, he worked closely with his Republican colleagues.
The new amendments will be attached to major legislation offered over the coming weeks — essentially forcing lawmakers to go on the record.
Sanders is currently in talks with potential cosponsors and expects to bring a unique pro-American labor coalition of Democrats and Republicans together to crack down on H-1B abuse.
And this is how “politics” should work.
A fight starts over a substantive issue, like H1B visa abuses.
People drag out statistics and default to their own self interest to push back on even their powerful “friends” to bring the issue to light.
The other “side” notices an opportunity (if I’m being really cynical) and leaps in.
And finally we get people crossing the aisle to work on an issue that actually matters.
That’s how this thing is supposed to go.
And finally it seems to be happening.
I think Ace Venture said it best.
This piece is already too long, so suffice it to say, I hope you’ve had a good two weeks. I’ve seen a few of you around, though I’ve spent much less time online, and it felt very good to disconnect a little.
I spent a lot of time writing fiction, and that made me feel a lot better too. When I was a young, naive person I had dreams of going to Hollywood and writing screenplays. Yeah, stop laughing. I can hardly stand movies now, but I read books and I’ve written a few, well, book length manuscripts (nothing published). But it’s therapy, and maybe someday . . . hey, you never know. But it’s a great way to escape into, literally, my own little world.
If not that, how about this?
Yes, proper use of the plural verb there, as “MAGA” is a collective noun and the collective is not acting as a unit. Grammar lesson for the day, but also fun way to get your attention.
I put “skilled” in quotes because I find “skilled” to be a relative term and very broadly defined (sometimes as “hey, we could have taught a local to do this in a semester-long course, but that one came already ed-u-ma-kated”). And in Musk’s case, I suspect “skilled” worker (if that’s what he used as a way to get into the US) meant “has lots of money and this is his visa out of South Africa.” I can admire the man and be brutally honest about how the world really works.
My sister watched Saved by the Bell. I actually bemoaned the loss of Saturday morning cartoons and resented kiddy sit-coms and therefore found something else to do. But I did like Screech.
To be clear, I’m with you on the “how dare they track me” part.
Ramaswamies? 🤷♀️
"Programming computers isn’t rocket science. At the entry level, it’s a vo-tech, two year program at best. And I have a feeling a lot of people would be fine with that. Get rid of the trappings of college that have become so overpriced and meaningless (if not outright destructive), leaving students functionally illiterate (in all but cultural virtue signaling) and with a mountain of debt. Instead, just teach people to code or use the necessary programs and give them jobs, like electricians or plumbers or diesel techs—they’re really just machinists after all (even if the machine is a bit more complex)."
It was once thus, believe it or not. Before it was an accredited university, DeVry Institute was where one learned to code and gain other technical credentials and skills — and it was not the only one to do so.
Remember ITT Tech? The student-loan regulations overhaul that enabled the Dept of Ed to kill not just the tech schools, but less expensive alternatives to culinary, commercial art & design schools, or industrial & trade apprenticeships if one didn't want to be beholden to a labour union. Thanks, Obama!
Know what differentiated those who completed their certificate programs from the graduates of liberal arts colleges? They got jobs, paid back their loans, and likely didn't vote Democrat.
DeVry must have seen what was coming and got religion in a hurry.
Make no mistake — big tech, and most enterprises of a national and global scale, DO NOT want to pay competitive salaries if they can avoid it which is why they want the H1-B visa program to remain as-is so they can exploit its loopholes. The US Chamber of Commerce, whose members are overwhelmingly the national and multinational corporations are easily the biggest lobby against a secure southern border, and FOR the highest minimum wage possible (see my essay on economic populism).
These national and multinational corporations also prefer to hire women over men to exploit the wage-gender gap, and not the one about which you may be thinking. No, this is the one where eventually, that young female (while being paid at a salary commensurate with the grade), will marry, and have kids, leaving the organization with an unfilled job which remains so as long as she is on unpaid maternity leave. Odds are she isn't returning, and the organization hasn't had to pay her a dime while the work is being done by others for no more pay — cynically ingenious, is it not?
However indelicately made, Ramaswamy's point is valid, and anyone who's not a 'bot who thinks this civil war in MAGA needs to spend time off of X. H1-B visa program reform is coming.
I have to say that I absolutely hated "Saved by the Bell." Despised it. Loathed it. I never once, EVER, saw any redeeming value, or entertainment, or humor, or anything in that show. All my friends, they loved it. I felt like I was the only person would didn't like it. And I tried, I sat down with friends, and they would literally be rolling and I just couldn't see it. Still can't. And I tried, because these were my friends after all. But, nope. Nope. Nope.
I still think it's a psyop. I think I could only find entertainment from "Saved" if someone scratched away my prefrontal cortex with a teaspoon inserted thru my nose.