Thoughts from Eric Raymond:
Today's big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don't want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 26, 2024
To be honest, I think both sides are making some…
Having worked with immigrants from a couple of dozen countries, I’ll take a motivated immigrant employee over a citizen that thinks I owe him a “living” wage. Around my area, immigrants are a major force in construction and agriculture. An increasingly in white collar offices.
You want to straighten out immigration? Stop paying citizens to sit on their butts on one hand and penalizing them for improving on the other. “I don’t want a raise because I’ll lose my benefits” is all too common. And someone that won’t climb the first ladder rung never gets to the second or tenth.
I don’t know the tech world from the link. The H2S agg workers brought in cannot change companies or improve themselves beyond the fruit picking or whatever they were specifically brought in for.
“Stop paying citizens to sit on their butts on one hand and penalizing them for improving on the other. “I don’t want a raise because I’ll lose my benefits” is all too common.”
The social safety net is specifically designed as a gill net. That’s a feature and not a bug for those wishing to give faceless government bureaucrats significant say into an individual’s actions.
Having experienced H1-B visas first hand in academia and also seeing the quality of undergraduate students, I can appreciate both sides of the argument. An H1-B is a license for indentured servitude, and if you work for a federal agency, it even gets worse as you can be forced to go through two rounds of H1-Bs before even being allowed to apply for a green card. Your family cannot legally work at all. Legal immigration is a miserable process and most Americans have no clue how screwed up it is. Back when I was trying to even get an H1-B, the quota would be filled by March and you would have to wait for October before you could apply again. However, things have loosened up a lot because of the demands of the tech sector, I believe.
On the other hand, when you see fresh faced young and entitled American high school grads not being able to read, write, or count past 10 without removing their shoes, you can see why there is a certain amount of desperation in the tech and STEM academic sectors.
What’s needed is a vast improvement in the K-12 education system, as much of university education now is merely remedial. Trade and apprentice training needs to be vastly enlarged. When you see first hand the difference between the skill levels of Asian and some European students in STEM fields compared to home grown, you see why there’s a problem. Merely throttling back on importing skills is a top down approach that is doomed to fail. We need to make American young people more competitive in the skill market, but that will take time.
Maybe Mike Rowe should be Labor Secretary, or possibly Education secretary, if the department can’t be abolished..
Yes, we need to improve the skills of American students. We also should not pull the rug out from under those who work to obtain the skills, only to find that the jobs have been given to H1b people or outsourced overseas.
The tech oligarchs broke education and adopted racial hierarchy hiring practices which left them no choice but to import workers who could be paid less.
Musk was talking about importing the best of the best and a lot of people took that to mean people a couple rungs lower than that. A lot of the h1b jobs are not for super nerds or even nerdy nerds but just nerds that could likely be filled by Americans.
You are right about our education system. It will take time to fix. In the USA, we also let people pursue their desires and that means intelligent people will take different paths. It is important for kids to have a broad base of exposure so that they can have options to pursue desires they wont discover until they are older.
What will help fix education and industry is abandoning the systematic racism of affirmative action and gender based privileges. What if all students were afforded the same level of support as young women?
What we are seeing is the result of not letting failing kids fail. When, historically, a student could not handle the rigors of higher education, they were encouraged to find another way to contribute to society. But when everyone gets a participation trophy, and no one gets a failing grade, then some of the people who attend colleges and universities cannot master the requirements of a college degree. But the schools took the student’s money, so they had to create fields of study fitting of the student’s abilities. It’s difficult for parents to accept that their offspring will not be the next Marie Curie, or will never cure infectious disease, nor build the next tech mega-company. Especially when they only have one or two. But someone said it’s morally wrong to let suckers keep their money, so here we are.
Those who claim to be our best and brightest could have seen this coming. Maybe they did. It’s not complex. It’s a simple problem to solve.
MichiCanuck mentions Mike Rowe. I think Mr. Rowe said, ‘some of the happiest people stink to high heaven at the end of the day.’ We should be truthful with the next generations, otherwise my social security might get cut.
Letting kids fail doesn’t mean they fail. It means they have the opportunity to improve themselves. There will always be something beyond your abilities but for most things, that isn’t the case. Failing is a signal that you aren’t doing something right. Everyone fails, it is one of the most valuable tools for learning.
Not letting people fail deprives them rather than helps them.
Many intelligent people work dirty jobs. Being in the trades doesn’t make someone a dummy. You might be missing some of Rowe’s message.
In my experience, the skills of H1B IT workers is vastly overrated, and the US workers are under-selected, by absurdly ignorant management who can’t tell the good from the bad and mostly don’t care. I’ve met a lot of boobish managers who look at my asking price, and then crow, “I could get ten foreign programmers for that.” Then I shrug and say you can hire me now as a software architect or hire me next year as a rescue programmer. Then you’ll have to pay three times as much. In my heyday, I could generate perfectly debugged code as fast as I could type (about 50wpm).
As for trades and labor, if its illegals, the hiring entity should be indicted and tried and perhaps, if convicted sent to prison for life. The deliberate hiring of illegal aliens is treason. Maybe a shorter sentence if you’re only stupid?
Relevant to your experience
https://x.com/RobertMSterling/status/1873174358535110953
How is the idea of “immigrant cheap labor” consistent with the entire concept of a legally decreed “minimum wage “? If you can’t legally pay less than a certain wage, how can immigrant labor be cheaper than domestic labor?
And can we do away with the Soviet vocabulary, where employees and professionals (such as brain surgeons, nuclear physicists, etc) are called “workers”? If I thought that the guy who was going to perform my brain surgery got up that morning after a long night of drinking, swallowed a brief breakfast of toast and a couple of shots of vodka, and after donning his cartoonish Mario Brothers cap, dashed to the hospital in the same burlap clothing he had worn for the previous three days because he couldn’t afford the laundromat’s evil profits, well…I think I would rather just die naturally.
What, you never watched House? Or Nurse Jackie? To my certain knowledge, it’s worse than that.
Drs are notoriously bad with money and yet we trust them with our lives. Most of them have an oversized opinion of their abilities and never get any feedback on their failures because people will just go to a new dr without the dr getting the market signal.
A person should put as much research pre/post dr visit as they would talking to a plumber, electrician, or mechanic. Maybe even more considering what is at stake.
I find myself wondering if the idiotic and offensive comments by Musk and Ramaswamy have blown the Republican Party’s chances of winning the 2026 elections. I mean seriously, “go fuck yourself in the face” on the one hand and “Americans are lazy and stupid” on the other.
Musk could have said “keep H1B but get rid of the abuses.” And Ramaswamy should be kicked off the Trump team. It’s too bad he can’t be deported.
I knew Musk was a bit of a loon, just like I know Trump is kind of a boor. I didn’t know Ramaswamy was an asshole, though. Live and learn.
The biggest problem with these types of debates on TwitterX is that people only get isolated out of context snippets delivered to their feed.
This leads to comments like Musk made and others made in response to him.
IRL people, rather than terminally online people, haven’t heard of this debate and the issues will be mostly solved before they do.
Musk was misquoting Tom Cruise’s Hollywood agent character from the comedy “Tropic Thunder.” I suspect that was Musk’s way of communicating his disdain for the way people were conducting the debate.