5 ms·

Not only are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I feel like the current rhetoric in the US doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the metaphorical

Not only are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I feel like the current rhetoric in the US doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the metaphorical baby anymore. The strongest advantage of the US has always been the ability to absorb global talent. I don’t think that is a popular view anymore, and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US.

calculatte 9mo ago
I think anyone working with the global talent can tell you there are absolutely no controls around measuring their quality. The skilled talent simply isn't skilled at all. They are willing to engage in kickback schemes. Even the O1 "genius" visa is being given to onlyfans models. Immigration is completely broken and it's by design.
- leptons 9mo ago
  Your take only applies to recent developments. For the entirety of the H visa program, it has brought in very valuable talent, which stayed here to generate incredible wealth for the country. "onlyfans" is a recent thing. The kickbacks are a relatively new thing. Sure immigration is broken, but that's what happens when the government is intent on breaking the country.
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    Onlyfans is a recent thing, but the First Lady had an EB-1 Einstein visa when she was posing for…interesting photos.
    - Muromec 9mo ago
      You mistyped Epstein visa
    - omnimus 9mo ago
      The fact that these visas are abused by people in power is completely different and in the end minor issue. I would bet vast majority of EB-1 are pretty out of the ordinary. This is just derailing the discussion. Visas for privileged individuals bad = immigration bad.
  - _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
    The H visa program has been heavily exploited since the 1990s when I started in tech. By recent do you mean 26 years?
    - leptons 9mo ago
      Was the visa program being exploited by Onlyfans models and "influencers" in the 1990's? Because that is what is being talked about here.
      - _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
        Your statements such as "only applies to recent development" "For the entirety of the H visa program" "is a recent thing. The kickbacks are a relatively new thing." expand the conversation scope to responding to what you state, and for me to say that in fact what you are claiming is incorrect.
  - calculatte 9mo ago
    Well you are right about one thing. Government is intent on breaking the country. But rampant immigration immigration fraud and abuse has been around for decades.
- SilverElfin 9mo ago
  Who are you to claim the talent isn’t skilled at all? Maybe you’re the unskilled, unemployed one who is now asking the rest of us for a protectionist tariff to save your employability. The business owners who are hiring these people are making the choices that are the best for their business, and they’re judging the quality. It’s their money, and they’re betting with it - and confidently too. But let’s assume you’re right. Even if 90% of them were unskilled, the other 10% is still incredibly valuable for the American economy and taxpayers. And it’s not even a difficult decision. That “loss” is tiny compared to the extreme benefit we receive, that literally NO other country on the planet can replicate. Unless we give it away, like you’re proposing to do.
  - itake 9mo ago
    I think the US should prioritize training permanent residence over temporary residents that may take their skills (and wealth) back to their home country. If the h1b program was a perm residence visa, then your argument holds water. When they return home, they will take their 15 years of experience and offshore their capital. Whereas if a perm resident had that same job, they would keep their money invested in American businesses (and real estate). If our goal is to brain drain the world, lets replace the h1b visa program with a program with a clear attainable path to perm residency.
    - arjie 9mo ago
      The H1B is dual intent. I was on one and now I’m here on a green card. Totally normal. The H1B has a clear path to application for permanent residency but permanent residency doesn’t have a clear path from application to completion because of the birth country caps. You have to ask yourself what other implicit objectives you have because as it stands, raising the green card employment-based cap and raising the per-country cap would get you want immediately.
      - itake 9mo ago
        I think it would help, but we could still be better. As an America living in southeast with ~40 years of life to plan for, I face the similar issue of: which country can I feel can be a 'safe' home for me to live in? If Vietnam had a f1 -> h1b system (and no country caps), I would still not feel safe to call Vietnam my home. - The h1b is a lottery. I could work my butt off and still just be unlucky. - H1b is tied to employment. If I lost my job due to economic situations, poor politics, or personal health issues, I have 60d to find a new job or buy airplane tickets to leave.
- mattnewton 9mo ago
  This is what I am getting at; the system is bringing skilled immigrants with some unskilled and some abuse, the baby and the bathwater. We should be focused on keeping that skilled immigration flowing, instead all these attempts are presupposing that all immigration is inherently harmful.
Espressosaurus 9mo ago
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.
- logicchains 9mo ago
  >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).
  - saagarjha 9mo ago
    Not really.
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    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.
    - themaninthedark 9mo ago
      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/enrichment/education/476391-biden-tells-coal-miners-to-learn-to-code/amp/ 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-unemployment-rate 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?
cmxch 9mo ago
That’s because the damage has gone on too long. When three generations (late Boomer, Generation X, and Millennials) have seen it and the various alphabet soup of programs from the perspective of having to train their replacements from these programs, or hear their parents having to do same, the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry. The only valid thing to do is to have the various involved entities from the law firms that architect the citizens out under dubious if not outright fraudulent terms, the companies that implement it (from the body shops to their clients, large and small), and the various lobbying groups that have pushed the sorry excuse of a program series (along with their smears about the citizens’ dare to protect their own first), to simply start cutting painfully huge, salary replacement checks to the entire generations that dealt with that mess. And then you might understand why this is even on the table, and hope that the 1965 Immigration Act (and its follow on provisions) doesn’t get repealed in full to get rid of the fraud and abuse that even Grigsby & Cohen advocated for in the early 2000s. Either you can stop this now and make amends with two and a half generations (and more) while you have a voice in the matter, or that it will be resolved in far uglier terms where your words will not be heard.
- thisisit 9mo ago
  As a country US can't even agree on securing rights for its own people. Raising minimum wage or universal healthcare or housing leads to lots of bad faith discourse on socialism. The wealth is instead spent on fighting wars and strong arming others. Heck even the guy who promised no wars and America First cannot get enough and attacks another country in name of "liberation" and oil. But somehow immigration has dealt damage to three generations? > the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry The has to be the funniest part of the whole statement. The whole point of creating an "outsider" is that you have an enemy to fight contend with and can justify your dislike by accusing them of fraud and other crimes. People who dislike "outsiders" never had sympathy or empathy for those "outsiders" so lets not pretend something has changed.
  - happytoexplain 9mo ago
    This is black and white thinking. I've seen what you're denying firsthand.
piva00 9mo ago
> and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US. In my opinion this is even more general: there's a culture of focusing on punishment in the USA that creates more issues than the abuse it tries to punish. It's one of the reasons of much of the bureaucratic mess in many systems, like healthcare and social welfare, an eternal game of whack-a-mole to stamp out abuse/fraud that creates Kafka-esque results. The focus is to find, and punish as much abuse as possible through increased requirements, increased bureaucratic burden, so on and so forth, instead of iterating the design in more clever ways to diminish the downsides. I don't think there should be resignation to fraud and abuse, at the same time it doesn't matter how much more complicated the process gets it will always suffer from fraud/abuse, this extreme focus on trying to stamp it all out, punish, etc. instead of searching for a good balance where it's the most net-positive without creating additional issues, becomes very counter-productive after a certain level. Punishment of all waste, abuse, fraud is an impossible goal but it's always a political need given how American society needs to feel it's possible and will be done. It's quite a cultural quagmire.
- _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
  This is by design by replubicans so that they can claim government doesn't work, or so that they ca kneecap programs before becoming successful and permanent. Look at their plan to 'starve the beast'. They claim they are for fiscal responsibility as their number one priority, but they would rather bankrupt the country in order to get their political way than be fiscally responsible. They have zero morals. It's hard to have a working government when half the people in charge don't want a working government.
mrtksn 9mo ago
US looked like the next stage of humanity, if you are ambitious you go to USA. Anyone can become American and didn't feel like betrayal to the country or the people who raised you. Whatever you achieve in USA it will be available to all the humanity. Fast forward to mid 2020s, now USA feels like old style European country that is rich as f and about to go through stages of great suffering to eventually become a nation. It's not even like Dubai or something, its straight out time travel. You don't go to USA to be treated fairly and climb to the top in a meritocratic system anymore, its all about race, identity and paperwork now. It looks like a shitty European country, why would you go to a shitty European country? You can have that experience at home in most places in the world and you don't have to suffer the part of being far away from your friends and family. I'm sure a lot of people will still go to USA but their profiles will be different. IMHO the predominant feeling towards USA is disappointment, not even anger. It wasn't supposed to end up like that.
- HaZeust 9mo ago
  "We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball... What bothers me isn't that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did." - Steve Eisman, 2008
- phs318u 9mo ago
  I agree with your points about how the USA used to be viewed globally, and that the predominant feeling is disappointment (or in my case, sadness). However, your characterisation of European countries as “shitty” is unfair IMO. I’m reminded of the saying “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other ones). Europe is FAR from perfect, but the long arc of history factors large in their politics and humanistic predilections (relative to other countries that is). They have living memory to just how devastating divisions on the continent can be. So yes, the EU may be the shittiest form of government... except for all those other ones (acknowledging that this paraphrase only makes sense if your values are similar).
sksishbs 9mo ago
[dead]
zozbot234 9mo ago
Meh. Every time the H1B visa comes up on HN, you always see the exact same THEY TOOK ER JERRRBBS comments about the program as a whole, even irrespective of any supposed abuse. Why should we be surprised that some Congress critters are now taking that exact attitude at face value?
baubino 9mo ago
> The strongest advantage of the US has always been the ability to absorb global talent. Among the many inexplicable things the current US administration is doing, abandoning soft power in favor of returning to militaristic brute force makes the least sense to me. Soft power costs less, is easier to maintain, and creates a vast moat. Giving that up is nuts.
OptionOfT 9mo ago
Without passing judgement on whether eliminating the Visa is a good idea or not: Global talent can still come in on a different visa. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/o-1-visa-individuals-with-extraordinary-ability-or-achievement https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... H1-B has lower standards.

calculatte 9mo ago

I think anyone working with the global talent can tell you there are absolutely no controls around measuring their quality. The skilled talent simply isn't skilled at all. They are willing to engage in kickback schemes. Even the O1 "genius" visa is being given to onlyfans models. Immigration is completely broken and it's by design.

leptons 9mo ago
Your take only applies to recent developments. For the entirety of the H visa program, it has brought in very valuable talent, which stayed here to generate incredible wealth for the country. "onlyfans" is a recent thing. The kickbacks are a relatively new thing. Sure immigration is broken, but that's what happens when the government is intent on breaking the country.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  Onlyfans is a recent thing, but the First Lady had an EB-1 Einstein visa when she was posing for…interesting photos.
  - Muromec 9mo ago
    You mistyped Epstein visa
  - omnimus 9mo ago
    The fact that these visas are abused by people in power is completely different and in the end minor issue. I would bet vast majority of EB-1 are pretty out of the ordinary. This is just derailing the discussion. Visas for privileged individuals bad = immigration bad.
- _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
  The H visa program has been heavily exploited since the 1990s when I started in tech. By recent do you mean 26 years?
  - leptons 9mo ago
    Was the visa program being exploited by Onlyfans models and "influencers" in the 1990's? Because that is what is being talked about here.
    - _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
      Your statements such as "only applies to recent development" "For the entirety of the H visa program" "is a recent thing. The kickbacks are a relatively new thing." expand the conversation scope to responding to what you state, and for me to say that in fact what you are claiming is incorrect.
- calculatte 9mo ago
  Well you are right about one thing. Government is intent on breaking the country. But rampant immigration immigration fraud and abuse has been around for decades.
SilverElfin 9mo ago
Who are you to claim the talent isn’t skilled at all? Maybe you’re the unskilled, unemployed one who is now asking the rest of us for a protectionist tariff to save your employability. The business owners who are hiring these people are making the choices that are the best for their business, and they’re judging the quality. It’s their money, and they’re betting with it - and confidently too. But let’s assume you’re right. Even if 90% of them were unskilled, the other 10% is still incredibly valuable for the American economy and taxpayers. And it’s not even a difficult decision. That “loss” is tiny compared to the extreme benefit we receive, that literally NO other country on the planet can replicate. Unless we give it away, like you’re proposing to do.
- itake 9mo ago
  I think the US should prioritize training permanent residence over temporary residents that may take their skills (and wealth) back to their home country. If the h1b program was a perm residence visa, then your argument holds water. When they return home, they will take their 15 years of experience and offshore their capital. Whereas if a perm resident had that same job, they would keep their money invested in American businesses (and real estate). If our goal is to brain drain the world, lets replace the h1b visa program with a program with a clear attainable path to perm residency.
  - arjie 9mo ago
    The H1B is dual intent. I was on one and now I’m here on a green card. Totally normal. The H1B has a clear path to application for permanent residency but permanent residency doesn’t have a clear path from application to completion because of the birth country caps. You have to ask yourself what other implicit objectives you have because as it stands, raising the green card employment-based cap and raising the per-country cap would get you want immediately.
    - itake 9mo ago
      I think it would help, but we could still be better. As an America living in southeast with ~40 years of life to plan for, I face the similar issue of: which country can I feel can be a 'safe' home for me to live in? If Vietnam had a f1 -> h1b system (and no country caps), I would still not feel safe to call Vietnam my home. - The h1b is a lottery. I could work my butt off and still just be unlucky. - H1b is tied to employment. If I lost my job due to economic situations, poor politics, or personal health issues, I have 60d to find a new job or buy airplane tickets to leave.
mattnewton 9mo ago
This is what I am getting at; the system is bringing skilled immigrants with some unskilled and some abuse, the baby and the bathwater. We should be focused on keeping that skilled immigration flowing, instead all these attempts are presupposing that all immigration is inherently harmful.

Espressosaurus 9mo ago

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.

logicchains 9mo ago
>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).
- saagarjha 9mo ago
  Not really.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  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.
  - themaninthedark 9mo ago
    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/enrichment/education/476391-biden-tells-coal-miners-to-learn-to-code/amp/ 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-unemployment-rate 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?

cmxch 9mo ago

That’s because the damage has gone on too long. When three generations (late Boomer, Generation X, and Millennials) have seen it and the various alphabet soup of programs from the perspective of having to train their replacements from these programs, or hear their parents having to do same, the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry. The only valid thing to do is to have the various involved entities from the law firms that architect the citizens out under dubious if not outright fraudulent terms, the companies that implement it (from the body shops to their clients, large and small), and the various lobbying groups that have pushed the sorry excuse of a program series (along with their smears about the citizens’ dare to protect their own first), to simply start cutting painfully huge, salary replacement checks to the entire generations that dealt with that mess. And then you might understand why this is even on the table, and hope that the 1965 Immigration Act (and its follow on provisions) doesn’t get repealed in full to get rid of the fraud and abuse that even Grigsby & Cohen advocated for in the early 2000s. Either you can stop this now and make amends with two and a half generations (and more) while you have a voice in the matter, or that it will be resolved in far uglier terms where your words will not be heard.

thisisit 9mo ago
As a country US can't even agree on securing rights for its own people. Raising minimum wage or universal healthcare or housing leads to lots of bad faith discourse on socialism. The wealth is instead spent on fighting wars and strong arming others. Heck even the guy who promised no wars and America First cannot get enough and attacks another country in name of "liberation" and oil. But somehow immigration has dealt damage to three generations? > the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry The has to be the funniest part of the whole statement. The whole point of creating an "outsider" is that you have an enemy to fight contend with and can justify your dislike by accusing them of fraud and other crimes. People who dislike "outsiders" never had sympathy or empathy for those "outsiders" so lets not pretend something has changed.
- happytoexplain 9mo ago
  This is black and white thinking. I've seen what you're denying firsthand.

piva00 9mo ago

> and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US. In my opinion this is even more general: there's a culture of focusing on punishment in the USA that creates more issues than the abuse it tries to punish. It's one of the reasons of much of the bureaucratic mess in many systems, like healthcare and social welfare, an eternal game of whack-a-mole to stamp out abuse/fraud that creates Kafka-esque results. The focus is to find, and punish as much abuse as possible through increased requirements, increased bureaucratic burden, so on and so forth, instead of iterating the design in more clever ways to diminish the downsides. I don't think there should be resignation to fraud and abuse, at the same time it doesn't matter how much more complicated the process gets it will always suffer from fraud/abuse, this extreme focus on trying to stamp it all out, punish, etc. instead of searching for a good balance where it's the most net-positive without creating additional issues, becomes very counter-productive after a certain level. Punishment of all waste, abuse, fraud is an impossible goal but it's always a political need given how American society needs to feel it's possible and will be done. It's quite a cultural quagmire.

_DeadFred_ 9mo ago
This is by design by replubicans so that they can claim government doesn't work, or so that they ca kneecap programs before becoming successful and permanent. Look at their plan to 'starve the beast'. They claim they are for fiscal responsibility as their number one priority, but they would rather bankrupt the country in order to get their political way than be fiscally responsible. They have zero morals. It's hard to have a working government when half the people in charge don't want a working government.

mrtksn 9mo ago

US looked like the next stage of humanity, if you are ambitious you go to USA. Anyone can become American and didn't feel like betrayal to the country or the people who raised you. Whatever you achieve in USA it will be available to all the humanity. Fast forward to mid 2020s, now USA feels like old style European country that is rich as f and about to go through stages of great suffering to eventually become a nation. It's not even like Dubai or something, its straight out time travel. You don't go to USA to be treated fairly and climb to the top in a meritocratic system anymore, its all about race, identity and paperwork now. It looks like a shitty European country, why would you go to a shitty European country? You can have that experience at home in most places in the world and you don't have to suffer the part of being far away from your friends and family. I'm sure a lot of people will still go to USA but their profiles will be different. IMHO the predominant feeling towards USA is disappointment, not even anger. It wasn't supposed to end up like that.

HaZeust 9mo ago
"We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball... What bothers me isn't that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did." - Steve Eisman, 2008
phs318u 9mo ago
I agree with your points about how the USA used to be viewed globally, and that the predominant feeling is disappointment (or in my case, sadness). However, your characterisation of European countries as “shitty” is unfair IMO. I’m reminded of the saying “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other ones). Europe is FAR from perfect, but the long arc of history factors large in their politics and humanistic predilections (relative to other countries that is). They have living memory to just how devastating divisions on the continent can be. So yes, the EU may be the shittiest form of government... except for all those other ones (acknowledging that this paraphrase only makes sense if your values are similar).

sksishbs 9mo ago

[dead]

zozbot234 9mo ago

Meh. Every time the H1B visa comes up on HN, you always see the exact same THEY TOOK ER JERRRBBS comments about the program as a whole, even irrespective of any supposed abuse. Why should we be surprised that some Congress critters are now taking that exact attitude at face value?

baubino 9mo ago

> The strongest advantage of the US has always been the ability to absorb global talent. Among the many inexplicable things the current US administration is doing, abandoning soft power in favor of returning to militaristic brute force makes the least sense to me. Soft power costs less, is easier to maintain, and creates a vast moat. Giving that up is nuts.

OptionOfT 9mo ago

Without passing judgement on whether eliminating the Visa is a good idea or not: Global talent can still come in on a different visa. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/o-1-visa-individuals-with-extraordinary-ability-or-achievement https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... H1-B has lower standards.