“I am Iron Man. The suit and I are one. To turn over the Iron Man suit would be to turn over myself, which is tantamount to indentured servitude or prostitution – depending on what state you’re in.” – Iron Man 2
What’s the difference between an Indian and an African elephant? One’s an elephant.
I had intended to keep the posts between now and the next Civil War 2.0 update fairly light in content – fewer serious topics and more just “fun” stuff. But, no matter how much I try to get out, they keep dragging me back in. What inspired this post was the brutal civil war on X© this week over H-1B visas.
The H-1B visa program is a program that was (originally) set up to bring in workers in extremely specialized jobs, which required a unique talent or body of knowledge. Very specifically, the intent wasn’t to displace Americans (it says) but rather help employers who cannot otherwise find these skills.
No shortage of American rock star students here . . . .
Obviously, that’s government bullshit, and the program is one of the most abused government programs, which says quite a bit.
Who abuses it?
Mainly people from India – Indian companies and Indian workers, though plenty of “American” companies abuse the program as well.
How?
Well, Indian companies abuse the program by being consultancies: they essentially air drop in tens of thousands of Indians who they’ll rent to you so that they can do whatever it is you want them to do: accounting, programming, or running a cash register.
Running a cash register is a specialized skill that Americans can’t do? Yes, if you believe a company up in the Northeast which applied to sponsor $22,000 a year convenience store clerks on H-1B visas.
But, like I said, “American” companies abuse the system, too. In 2014, 250 American IT employees at Disney World© were laid off, but they were forced to train their Indian H-1B replacements. Want to know why I have a beef with Disney®? This is certainly a part of it.
Musk defended this program, noting that it should have a minimum wage of (he said) at least $120,000 to keep up with inflation. I looked up the H-1B workers he employed at Tesla® in Austin, Texas. The process engineers were making in the low $80,000s. Not bad, right? Well, it is when you compare them to the national average, which is $94,000. Elon’s hires aren’t the 0.01% “rock stars”. Nope, he’s hiring a garage band that you can pay in weed and porn magazines that will sleep on the sofa.
To be fair, this latter analysis assumes that “Indians” are a homogeneous population, and it’s likely that there are subgroups with higher I.Q. Is this the basis of the caste system? That would bring the numbers up, some, but the lower castes would likely have much lower functional I.Q. to make up the difference. I’d consider this the lowest number of Indians with an I.Q. greater than 130. I’d suggest the population could be in the low millions. Final note: I’d be that my readers come mostly from America’s 8 million (along with some wonderful foreign people!).
Vivek Ramanotanamerican further came out with a long, impassioned screed where he says that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence”. To be clear, Vivek’s company seems to be founded on a bit of a scam (LINK), and has consistently lost large sums of money. He’s also 100% cratered his political future by telling Americans being replaced by folk of his ethnicity that they’re lazy.
That is another glaring point that we simply have to bring up: India, as a country, is kind of awful and they don’t like us very much. There’s a game that I’ve heard some people play, which involves going on Google® Streetview™ in a random place in India. How do you win? If no trash or poop is visible in the random place, you win. Despite trying a dozen times today, I was unable to win. As to Indians not liking us much, see all the love that some Indians have for us below:
The Indian culture itself is a kleptocracy where bribery and corruption appear to be endemic. Why do scammers in India target the United States? Because they ran out of Indians to scam. Per the U.S. Department of State, politicians and public “servants” are openly corrupt and never charged with crimes because no one wants to fund anti-corruption investigators. Why spoil the party?
How bad its it? One report notes that Swiss bank assets held by Indian nationals are worth 13 times the national debt. When the Indians aren’t engages in trying to scam Americans for gift cards, they’re busy scamming themselves. Oh, and those Indian scammer businesses? When found, they’re never prosecuted. Why bother? No Indian was harmed. And, according to this speech (LINK) given by an actual Indian, Jayant Bhandari, India is far worse than you think. An article version is also available at American Renaissance® – warning, AMREN is likely banned by your work (link directly below) and will get you a visit from your HR if you click it and don’t own the place.
So, of places we want to emulate, India is probably the very last, and if we fill America with Indians, it won’t be America anymore – it’ll just be another India, and nobody (not even the Indians) want that. And if America is just an idea, why can’t they have that idea over there, rather than coming to the United States?
But part of the corrosion from the H-1B program is that ghost jobs are constantly advertised, not to bring in candidates, but to bring in applications that can all be denied so that a foreign worker (they’re not all Indians, just a vast majority) can be hired for far less than an American. I even saw some Xeets™ indicating that the reason that employers preferred the H-1B is that they never asked for time off, would work 100-hour weeks, rarely raised issues, and would happily work on the 4th of July.
So, like indentured servants?
One of the big points that Elon and his co-Xeeters™ brought up was the idea that American has to win. No, it doesn’t, not if it isn’t America anymore. To replace the people to win a game turns the United States into an NFL® franchise where nobody is from the city where the team plays, and everybody is swapped out on a regular basis. Or fired.
As found.
And I know that Elon has like thirty kids from half a dozen women, but I’m not interested in swapping my children out because I can get a deal on some Asian kid that has a slightly higher SAT® score. No, American can succeed or fail as America. We did wonderfully in the past, slowly assimilating people of similar backgrounds and faiths, with occasional small numbers of wildcards from other cultures. America is a Western European nation, and filling it with hordes of non-Westerners who worship blue elephant gods is a recipe for social division, which only leads to totalitarianism.
I can see bringing in true rock stars, but not 7-11® cashiers – they have to go back. Setting a minimum salary of $200,000 to $400,000 seems about right, as long as that salary at least twice the 90th percentile for wages for that job. Those are rock stars.
Real rock stars. Okay, there were a few Germans in there, but those were German rock stars.
I think that Elon, after having been raked through his own website now has the understanding that Americans aren’t at all excited about being replace and having their wages artificially held down through practices that would make Indian scammers blush. And, this is where the TradRight is the exact opposite of the GloboLeft: when we see something worth fighting against, we fight against it. Elon is not our leader. Vivek is not and never will be our leader.
I like 2016 Trump.
I’ve said it before: Trump is not our leader, either. Trump just saw a parade, and then jumped out in front. We will not follow him when we don’t want to go that way. Period. And America isn’t a franchise sweatshop where if we don’t race to the bottom on working 80-hour weeks forever, we’ll get replaced by 9 billion other economic units.
No, we won’t. We won’t go quietly onto that goodnight. And maybe, just maybe, Elon bought himself a clue this week.
Be vigilant. Don’t give in. Let your voices be heard and don’t let them backslide.
John – – A sober bit of commentary……. one of your best !
We need to shut down immigration for at least ten years, except for those with important needed skills. That decade would allow our full-up number of immigrants to assimilate. Cultural differences and language inhibit formation of connections or bonds that encourage assimilation and social cohesion.
As it is now, our communities feel the churn as the never ending parade of new-comers continues. Enclaves or ghettos become insular and assimilation crawls ever so slowly.
Perhaps eradication of the Dept of Education (sic.) will improve te “product”.
But then, with AI about to completely change our lives, what jobs will be available for our fully educated to take up…… ?? Oh, yeah…. those jobs….. the ones colonizing Mars !!
“We need to shut down immigration for at least ten years, except for those with important needed skills. That decade would allow our full-up number of immigrants to assimilate.”
You’re funny. Do you really believe that, in the light of the previous, oh, I don’t know, 5,000 years of recorded history?
Thank you very much! I wrote this in my head about six times before I hit the keyboard, even waking up at night thinking about it. The jobs that remain will require locality and real ability.
It will also require employers that are willing to work at ‘growing their own’ to account for the fact that our culture and edumacation system is broken enough that it’s hard to find a college graduate that has enough focus to read a novel, let alone put their phones down long enough to work.
This will be made even harder by publicly traded companies who’s boards of directors are more interested in cutting operating expenses to drive up the bottom line in this month’s P&L than worry about the ‘long view’ (like – next quarter, let alone next year). And the kicker is – local business have to compete against the larger corporations, and are often squeezed out. Hmmm. I seem to recall another ‘mega business’ that used a business model like this – killing mom-and-pop stores whenever they came into an area… :-/
The rot is deep, but the opportunities to correct this abound. Part of it will be finding a way to show that quality matters – rather than cheapest possible for a product that’s (sometimes) almost good enough.
Dealt with a lot of them at work and in grad school. There were a few exceptions but overwhelming majority were very low performers and would eventually get fired or laid off if they didn’t manage to get DEI promoted. Those that did get promoted would decimate whatever organization they were put in charge of as their incompetence, coupled with the blatant in-group preferencing, would run off our more capable employees.
Still….you gotta love the irony and lack of self awareness when Indians (like Vivek) tell you how much better and smarter their culture is even when half of their country still doesn’t have functioning indoor plumbing. You’d think that would be higher on the list of priorities for the supposed master race.
No Indian wants to stay in the country they made. Should tell you everything you need to know.
As a US federal employee, I had an US citizen but ethnic Indian boss for a few years. He saw that I had reached minimum retirement age, and could not comprehend that I was committed to SERVICE, not PAYCHECK. I tried to explain that I thought the taxpayers needed people with my particular expertise and experience to properly manage the hordes of contract employees. “But you could make so much more money if you went to work for a contractor!” I wonder whatever happened to him… probably went to work for a contractor, himself. He was a “manager”. I don’t even remember his name, now. Not a bad guy; just not invested in the mission.
Yup, it’s all about the scam.
I’m not a fan of AI nor do I believe all of the hype, but there may be a silver lining if it eliminates many call center and low grade coding jobs. If we can just teach it how to make a good Slushie.
Or give them a one-way ticket home.
As a US federal employee, I had an US citizen but ethnic Indian boss for a few years. He saw that I had reached minimum retirement age, and could not comprehend that I was committed to SERVICE, not PAYCHECK. I tried to explain that I thought the taxpayers needed people with my particular expertise and experience to properly manage the hordes of contract employees. “But you could make so much more money if you went to work for a contractor!” I wonder whatever happened to him… probably went to work for a contractor, himself. He was a “manager”. I don’t even remember his name, now. Not a bad guy; just not invested in the mission.
As a US federal employee, I had an US citizen but ethnic Indian boss for a few years. He saw that I had reached minimum retirement age, and could not comprehend that I was committed to SERVICE, not PAYCHECK. I tried to explain that I thought the taxpayers needed people with my particular expertise and experience to properly manage the hordes of contract employees. “But you could make so much more money if you went to work for a contractor!” I wonder whatever happened to him… probably went to work for a contractor, himself. He was a “manager”. I don’t even remember his name, now. Not a bad guy; just not invested in the mission.
Happy Penultimate Day to you John and all the rest!
When I was in graduate school for chemistry at a major state school in ‘91 there were many in the entering class from foreign countries who literally could not speak English, although passing the TOEFL was a requirement for entry. as a teaching assistant in the lab, I would have students who were not from my section who would crowd around to listen to me because they could not understand their assigned instructor. I would tell them that they could not be in my section and if there was a problem, they needed to tell the dean.
Great inflation was another problem, the Chinese students especially learned early on that nobody ever argued against an a so they gave everybody an a. I literally had to explain to my students that the reason they didn’t get an a was simply because the sections were assigned by alphabetical order and if they had had a different section, then they would’ve gotten an honor day versus the grade that I gave them. Ultimately, the American graduate students all got together and approach the dean regarding the uneven grading, and the Chinese were forced to reconsider their grades which meant some of the students were dropped to bees.
As a field service engineer, now whenever I go to an academic account, I almost never seen an American student, primarily Chinese an Indian, and this is in the Midwest.
I think it depends on the discipline. One grad class (heavy math) was all Chinese except for one guy from Poland and me. Most of the rest of the engineering work were just filled with white dudes.
My opinion is that Musk and Ramblinmanawamy badly misread the room. They were mildly useful in winning the election but the people that voted were voting for Trump, and more were voting for America First which must by definition mean Americans First. If we don’t get immigration under control, we lose everything, and that means realizing that replacing Americans with “legal” Indians, Chinese, Haitians, what have you, is little different from replacing Americans with the descendants of Aztecs. Replaced is replaced.
They misread the room, but are also showing their true colors. It was bound to happen sooner or later as both are grifters/sociopaths.
Musk has always leeched off of the taxpayer to fund his ventures and cheap H1B labor is just another in a long list of ways he has done so. His narcissism led him to incorrectly assume that all of the recent MAGA support meant he could persuade them on any issue… so he doubled down on his comments only to have them backfire spectacularly. If he had read the room better, he could have backed off and maintained credibility, but now he is political toast and will not be trusted (whether Trump will realize that is still TBD).
While Musk has at least made some positive contributions around Twitter, Space X, etc., Vivek is just a white collar version of the phone scammers that bilk the elderly. His one “success” is a pump and dump of a drug he knew didn’t work. He should have gotten arrested for fraud, but it appears his political connections not only helped fund much of it, but also shielded him from the consequences. It wasn’t so much narcissism that brought Vivek down as the fact that his true Indian mannerisms eventually came to the surface (it also caused his ratings collapse after the first debate when he came across as a tech support rep). Same thing destroyed Nikki’s career.
It is. And as the man said, a house divided cannot long stand. All part of the program.
It seems that, as with any government program, the paperwork increases exponentially, after the program begins additively. Exceptions to the 65,000 annual limit of H-1B visas are many. Tell me no one saw this coming! Looks to me like a permanent OVERclass.
I too liked Trump’s words on H-1B in 2016. Maybe the Republican majorities in Congress will help him carry through this time.
The WSJ article on tech jobs drying up – headlines, not necessarily reality. However, the CalBerk CS prof’s observations are worrisome, especially if his feedback from current students itself is accurate. Computer science folks are in the background for most jobs these days, technical and non-tech as well.
” headlines, not necessarily reality.”
No, it’s reality. You can go anywhere on YoutTube, Blind, Reddit… any social network and you will find people in the industry expressing amazement at the way that tech jobs have dried up. I’m in the industry and I’m getting out as I am well aware that as a 40+ white male (even with an elite CS background) my days are numbered. The industry is basically jettisoning senior people at the same time they are clamoring for H1B visas. I can still get the odd interview, but it is clear that the age discrimination problem is getting worse.
People realize that H-1B us just one small slice of “legal” immigration in the 8th letter of a list that goes on with multiple types per letter?
It all adds up to pressure that forces even mid-IQ workers that used to be able to feed a family with one paycheck into a “basement-dwelling gamer” with no prospect due to poor parenting or drugs or whatever.
Nothing is fixed until after everything burns to the core.
I actively told my sons to stay out of CS – if it can be done remotely, it will be done by the lowest hourly wage – period.
“Hands On” jobs – mechanic, plumber, stone mason, HVAC technician – are hard to replace by ‘remote’ workers. There’s a lesson to be learned here…
30+ years ago dated a woman who worked in the financial side of an international carrier. Asked her what was the absolute worst place seen in all her free travels. One word immediately, then more.
India.
In summary – “Filthy beggars everywhere, pickpockets, poop on every street, ad nauseam….It was sickening.”
And what happens to these a-hole refugees when the economy tanks and they have no jobs?
That is actually a huge advantage – Indians repulse white women, and they don’t want them around.
RE: High Tech education
I think the future High Tech education is about 3 or 4 years in length:
a 12/18 month VoTec electrical program, a 6/12 month HVAC program, and 6/12 month plumber/gas fitter program. Add either small engine repair or welding certificate to round things out. With this combo you could pretty much work as much or little as you want/need.
A skill set like this would address just about anything an economy might throw at you.
Nice.
The helpdesk at work replaced the Americans with Indians overseas. They naturally have a great Average Handling Time for calls vs their American counterparts as all they do is transfer your call until they get an American.
It’s funny when they conference in another Indian and neither of them can understand the other. When you go walking through IT you see two of them diligently coding while the rest are standing around bull shitting each other in Hindi.
My employer outsourced procurement and supply chain work to an Indian company. It went so badly they had to bring it back to the US after only a year.
They’ve been (mostly) awful until you get the one out of 10 that knows something. I’ve seen entire businesses shut down when they outsource to Indian call centers.
Your mileage may vary, but I’ve noticed that most of the call centers I interact with now are in the Philippines or south of the border (Puerto Rico??). Not great, but better than the Indian ones. Maybe the feedback has been so bad that companies have been forced to move them out of the sub continent??
But to your point, it’s not just call centers…..We noticed over the years that whenever a company starts bringing in lots of foreign employees into engineering, product development, etc, then it is usually just a few years before the company is in serious financial trouble. It happened with my first employer as well as with many competitors and companies we acquired over the years. First step with any acquisition was to clean up the incompetence which usually meant a lot of these folks would got fired.
Before even starting to pick up the pitchforks and torches about H1-B, you gotta read this thread….
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1873174358535110953
…and my takeaway is that H1-B visas are as obsolete as printed newspapers.
If the H1-B program is basically about organizing access to a pool of cheap IT talent, there’s this thing call the Interweb, or something like that – a set of tubes you can yell through to communicate with others in their own country without actually having to go their country or them actually having to get on a plane to visit yours. This Interweb thing could eventually become a big thing with companies looking to cut expensive American salaries on their workforce while not having to fool with H1-B visas or actually bringing foreigners into the US.
Oh wait, it already HAS become a big thing…
https://iscworld.com/the-h-1b-visa-alternative-how-to-keep-foreign-talent-employed/
https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/tools/best-employer-of-record/
… and these so called Employer of Record (EOR) services ALREADY dwarf the 65,000-per-year H1-B program. For example:
https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/how-big-is-the-u.s.-call-center-market-compared-to-india-latin-america-and-the-philippines-2#:~:text=The%20overall%20back%20office%20sector,second%20place%20behind%20the%20Philippines.
“…The overall back office sector, inclusive of IT services, is now approximately 8% of India’s GDP and employs an estimated 3.1 million workers. However, voice-related call center operations have an estimated employment of 1.1 to 1.3 million call center workers which puts India in second place behind the Philippines.”
Bottom line, the current H1-B kerfuffle is a typical American “look – a squirrel!” distraction from the far greater issue of how the offshoring of American jobs REALLY works.
Offshoring jobs and importing people to take jobs domestically are two different issues. The former might make your country poorer, but it doesn’t change your demographics. When you import an Indian to take a job on an H1B, his wife can also work under the EAD program (automatically). Meaning you now have two people competing with actual Americans. Then they can import family members, and any children they have (and Indians love to pop out hordes of unibrowed broodlings) are US citizens.
This is why entire areas of NJ and Seattle are now Indian. They are low trust, clannish, xenophobic, racist, and dishonest people as a whole. Yes, you might think that you know a lot that are polite, but you don’t understand how life works in their own country. They are relentless social climbers who alternate between being polite to those above them in the hierarchy, and vicious towards those underneath them.
Ask any insurance adjuster which groups commit the most fraud. Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis. Any large insurance firm has special fraud units composed of Hindu, Urdu, Tamil (etc) speakers.
The H1B is much more of a thread (along with the other work visas) as it is allowing Indian colonization. To see your future, simply pop up to Canada and visit the suburbs of any major city. Formerly pristine place like Scarborough are now dumps thanks to Indian immigration. They have to warn people not to poop in parks now.
Embrace the healing power of AND.
Excellent.
It seems that literally overnight, all the East Asian owned standalone liquor stores in my AO were taken over by Hindu Nuffins. Unsmiling, unfriendly, there are always more family members than customers in the stores. They literally follow you around to make sure you aren’t stuffing liters of Jack Daniel’s into your cargo shorts (anything smaller than a liter bottle is kept behind the counter). It was quite a relief when big chain Total Wine opened up in a shopping center in the next town over. They hire locally, which in these parts means friendly, White, southern folk.
Low trust world, writ large.
The problem goes well beyond H1B visas, as Ricky points out. We export jobs to India and even China so they get the work that would have been done here in the US without needing a visa to move here. Some countries won’t allow a US company to sell products into their market unless the US company creates jobs in their country – see, for example, Tesla building a plant in China so it provides jobs over there. Back when Boeing was still Boeing, they built a factory in China so they could sell airplanes into the country. Maybe the tariff idea could work for exporting jobs? Or does having everything connected by the internet kill that?
When I first started at my last job, one of the largest Avionics manufacturers in the world, they outsourced some software work to China. I wondered why we would ship intellectual property to a country that doesn’t recognize copyright laws, but that’s laughably naive in that anything we send over there is going to end up in Chinese products. Heck, they have huge numbers of spies over here, not just Fang Fang, sending info back to China by the gigabyte. In our case, considering it was avionics software, it was probably in their military aircraft within a year.
My obligatory India story was the woman in the office next to mine back around Y2K, a software engineering manager and a good friend, had to go to India to do an audit on the software being done there. She said that as soon as the plane got onto its final approach to the airport (New Delhi, iirc) the odors started to fill the cabin. By the time they were at the gate and the doors opened it was a horrific smell. Which didn’t go away until she was well out of the country.
They shipped it there for quarterly profits. There’s no way they should have shipped any of that to China. At all.
You’ll work for less than I Gunga Din
As a US federal employee, I had an US citizen but ethnic Indian boss for a few years. He saw that I had reached minimum retirement age, and could not comprehend that I was committed to SERVICE, not PAYCHECK. I tried to explain that I thought the taxpayers needed people with my particular expertise and experience to properly manage the hordes of contract employees. “But you could make so much more money if you went to work for a contractor!” I wonder whatever happened to him… probably went to work for a contractor, himself. He was a “manager”. I don’t even remember his name, now. Not a bad guy; just not invested in the mission.
The H-1B program has always been a scam. Going back decades, FFS.
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2024/12/some-people-just-need-helpful-boot-in.html
Yup.
https://gab.com/Zaklog/posts/113739060124771887
https://gab.com/Zaklog/posts/113736692931857623
Well done.
Also, a relevant chapter from my novel:
https://zaklog.wordpress.com/2023/08/01/october-12-2015-hostile-environment/
Indenturing is wrong, it is in the direction of slavery. However, it is impossible to ban competition with all the humans outside a line on a map. Do you want to be the Spanish who traded with the world, or the Aztecs who didn’t?
I don’t know where the line is, but Vox Day argues that free trade, in true form, necessitates the free movement of people, which eventually means the destruction of distinct nations. I think he’s right.
Free trade, in its true form, is nothing but a race to the bottom, as every industrialized nation descends into Shitholia, and all but the top 0.1% become indentured serfs.
Your New World Order would-be overlords love them all of that they can get.
F**K Free Trade.
It’s also spawned of the same bright, shiny happygas lies that gave you Pure Communism, or Pure Capitalism.
None of those things exist.
Because people are neither fungible nor disposable items, and the kleptocrats who forget that have a meeting scheduled with Madame Guillotine.
I’d rather be part of a nation that prioritized its own, period.