By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Somebody tell Steve Bannon: Here is a strategy for MAGA to win on H1B. Congress is so closely divided that even a few members hold veto power over the House’s choice of a Speaker. Take these steps: This week, form a MAGA caucus (minimum size: four. See below). Then, when Congress reconvenes at noon ET on January 3, the MAGA caucus should deny their votes to any Speaker nominee. No speaker can be elected. Without a Speaker, the House cannot function, let alone count and certify the results of the Electoral College so that Trump can take the oath of office on January 20. The only way out: The Republican Party agrees to the MAGA caucus demands on H1B policy. The MAGA caucus then allows the vote for a speaker to proceed to a conclusion.
That’s it, really. That’s the post. But I’ll expand a bit on details of the strategy, comment on H1B controversy over the past few days, discuss what the demand might be, and conclude.
Strategy Background
The idea of using the Speaker’s election as leverage comes from Chad Pergram, who covers Congress for FOX. He writes in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to failing to elect a House speaker quickly” (an earlier version appeared in Water Cooler)
[T]he speaker’s election on Jan. 3 poses a special challenge. Here’s the bar for Johnson – or anyone else: The speaker of the House must win an outright majority of all members casting ballots for someone by name. In other words, the person with the most votes does not win.
The head-count:
The House clocks in at 434 members with one vacancy [Gaetz]…. This is the breakdown when the Congress starts: 219 Republicans to 215 Democrats…. But the speaker’s election on Jan. 3 poses a special challenge. Here’s the bar for Johnson – or anyone else: The speaker of the House must win an outright majority of all members casting ballots for someone by name. In other words, the person with the most votes does not win.
This is why it took McCarthy so many ballots to win in January 2023.
So let’s crunch the math for Mike Johnson. If there are 219 Republicans and four voted for someone besides him – and all Democrats cast ballots for Jeffries, the tally is 215-214. But there’s no speaker. No one attained an outright majority of all members casting ballots for someone by name. The magic number is 218 if all 434 members vote.
By rule, this paralyzes the House[1]. The House absolutely, unequivocally, cannot do anything until it elects a speaker. Period.
Therefore, the Maga Caucus should consist of a minimum of four members. More:
This also means that the House cannot certify the results of the Electoral College, making Trump the 47th president of the United States on Jan. 6.
The failure to elect a speaker compels the House to vote over and over…
And over… and… over…
Until it finally taps someone.
McCarthy’s election incinerated 15 ballots over five days two years ago.
Of course, nobody wants that. Which is why the Republican Party should accede to the MAGA Caucus’s demands. In writing, naturally.
I am by no means an expert in Republican politics or factions; I came up as a Democrat. But following the H1B controversy on the Twitter, it struck me forcibly than many MAGA supporters were in fact very well versed in policy, history, and data, and deployed their knowledge effectively against Musk and his tech bros. For example, H1B is not about importing workers who are “highly skilled” (a pervasive, unexamined, and dishonest, tech bro talking point). That’s why, for example, Trump brought Mar-a-Lago waiters into the country under H1B. Rather, H1B is about importing workers who are cheap and compliant, because management can hold the threat of visa removal over their heads. That means that other things being equal, management will always prefer H1Bs over citizens (the power imbalance, as idpol types would say).
If MAGA is a party faction whose salient feature is loyalty to Trump, the MAGA caucus strategy just outlined will never be adopted. If MAGA is about policy, there is at least a chance. Here, the contrast between Democrats and MAGA is very great. It’s hard to imagine a furious debate over policy taking place among Democrats in public, one with very little deference to leaders shown. It occurs to me that Democrat charges of authoritarian followership and cultishness are, well, projection. It’s also hard for me to imagine any Democrats having the stones to adopt the MAGA caucus strategy. But perhaps MAGA does!
H1B Controversy
Axios has a good timeline of the controversy, in “Trump sides with Musk in H-1B fight“:
The MAGA-DOGE skirmishes started last Sunday, with anti-immigration and anti-Indian vitriol against Trump’s pick of venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his AI advisor.
I missed the Krishnan “vitriol.” Sad to say, but when so many “body shops” (InfoSys, etc.) are based in India, and important Indian cititzens, it’s easy to see why animus might develop.
It escalated into full conflict Thursday when Musk ally and DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy took to X to blast American “mediocrity” culture. Musk defended Ramaswamy, and the two sides started engaging in an increasingly bitter war of words.
I entered when Vivek posted his screed. Suffice to say that you could have swapped out Vivek’s words and swapped in Hillary’s “deplorables” speech, and nobody would have noticed. On the bright side, it’s wonderfully clarifying to see that leadership in both parties hates the working class.
On Friday afternoon, Musk doubled down, saying MAGA adherents who continued to blast immigration and the tech community were “contemptible fools,” later clarifying he was talking about “racists” who would “absolutely be the downfall of the Republican Party if they are not removed.”
That “later clarifying” is doing a lot of work; it’s almost as if somebody handed Musk the talking point. And then:
Just before midnight Friday, Musk once again defended the H-1B program in vulgar, all-caps terms, saying the program was the key to the success of his (and other big American) companies.
“Take a big step back and F–K YOURSELF in the face.I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” Musk wrote.
Oh? How exactly? The Axios timeline gives out before a series of engagements between Musk and MAGA, where MAGA beats Musk like a gong on data and policy. This is a very long thread, but gives the flavor:
Before I start, one note: All charts in this thread are for applications that were “certified” (in other words, approved for entry into the H-1B lottery). I filtered out applications the gov rejected.
All numbers here are therefore for visas employers actually and realistically…
— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) December 29, 2024
And:
You can see that salaries are disproportionately weighted toward the lower bands:
17% are < $75k (blue)
21% are $75-100k (orange)
22% are $100-125k (pink)
15% are $125-150k (teal)In other words, ~75% are jobs paying < $150k. Only 25% are $150k+, and, of those, only 2.5% are… pic.twitter.com/tMfTxlSYkx
— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) December 29, 2024
And:
America needs to be a destination for the world’s most elite talent. But the H-1B program isn’t the way to do that.
I’m going to stop posting for now, but let me know if there are any other visualizations that would be helpful.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) December 29, 2024
Oh look. Labor arbitrage! To which Musk responds, meek as a lamb:
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.
I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2024
Quite the change in tone, eh? From ” F–K YOURSELF in the face” to “easily fixed”! It’s almost as if Musk got a call, isn’t?
Of course, if H1B were that “easy to fix,” it would have been fixed along ago. And it’s quite revealing that it took multiple blows to Musk’s head and body over many hours by MAGA with skin in the game who actually understood the data and the policy issues to get whoever in Susie Wiles’s office monitors Musk’s tweets to pick up the phone.
The Demand
Based solely on having consumed vast numbers of Tweets on H1Bs, my conclusion is that Musk is wrong to want “reform.” The purpose of H1B is, after all, labor arbitrage: cheap, compliant labor. If labor arbitrage is reformed away from H1B, then there’s no reason for it in the first place. If not, it should be abolished entirely. If Elon wants to import brain geniuses instead of waiters for Mar-a-Lago, we have another category for that: O-1 (“O-1 Visa: Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement“).
So that is my demand, ill-informed though it may be: Abolish H1B; reform O-1 as needed.
However, get the commitment to meet the demands in writing, for three reasons:
First, my takeaway from the controversy is that the H1B supporters — i.e., DOGE — are fundamentally dishonest; they held onto their “highly skilled labor” talking point like grim death, even that MAGA was easily able to show it was a lie (Sterling’s thread was the best response, but there were many, many others that were good too). Anything not reduced to writing will be gamed or not delivered on.
Second, it was amusing to see the cuddle puddle of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and media service providers — i.e., DOGE — acting as enforcers as soon as Elon took the “reform” line; they used the same phrases and tactics Democrat enforcers do! (“Now is not the time,” “one team,” “time to move on”). So, with dishonest party enforcers, yes, get it in writing.
Finally, I’m sick of DOGE just tweeting it out. It’s amazing to see a heated policy argument play out in public, but Elon’s commitments are worth the digits they’re written with. Elon tweeting “Reforming H1B is good, actually” and a whole cheering section chanting “The controversy is over” just doesn’t make it[2]. Get the commitment to meet the demands in writing.
Conclusion
Let me close with words from the candidate who, if the Democrats hadn’t stabbed him in the back, might have forestalled Trump:
When Bernie is more MAGA than the tech bros we’ve got a problem.
I realize companies want cheap foreign labor but investing into technical education for Americans is the actual America first policy I’m not sure why this is controversial.pic.twitter.com/GXhA7oZtor
— Will Donahue (@realwilldonahue) December 27, 2024
I’ve gotta say, quoting the President of College Republicans wasn’t on my Bingo card. But I don’t think quoting Bernie Sanders was on his Bingo Card either.
So far — Hello, President Romney! — Republicans have become more like MAGA, not MAGA like Republicans. Perhaps the H1B controversy will show whether this tendency will continue, or stall.
NOTES
[1] It may be that in extreme situations — and multiple votes for Speaker are not extreme — there are ways out. From “House Practice: A Guide to the Rules, Precedents and Procedures of the House“:
Under the modern practice, the Speaker is elected by a majority of Members-elect voting by surname, a quorum being present.
As Pergram says. More (citations omitted):
In two instances the House agreed to choose and subsequently did choose a Speaker by a plurality of votes but confirmed the choice by majority vote. In 1849 the House had been in session 19 days without being able to elect a Speaker, no candidate having received a majority of the votes cast. The voting was viva voce, each Member responding to the call of the roll by naming the candidate for whom he voted. Finally, after the fifty-ninth ballot, the House adopted a resolution declaring that a Speaker could be elected by a plurality. In 1856 the House again struggled over the election of a Speaker. Ballots numbering 129 had been taken without any candidate receiving a majority of the votes cast. The House then adopted a resolution permitting the election to be decided by a plurality. On both of these occasions, the House ratified the plurality election by a majority vote.
So if history is any guide, 129 ballots is the baseline for changing the procedure Pergram describes. Comments from Congressional rules mavens welcome.
[2] Re: President-elect Trump, once a Speaker is chosen, the election is certified, and he takes the oath of office, a happy ending would look like this: “Congratulations, you’re still my agent.”
> Bernie is more MAGA than the tech bros we’ve got a problem.
Brain melting statement. What even is MAGA without racial animus and the complete lack of understanding of material and class conditions?
If you even think MAGA represents working class protectionism, which would be so thoroughly misguided as to render everything you say completely irrelevant but that’s besides the point, why wouldn’t Bernie Sanders be more ‘MAGA’ than tech bros?
Perhaps MAGA can be divided into two factions . . . Class MAGA and Race MAGA. And then other forces and factions can figure out how to work with Class MAGA and against Race MAGA.
My wife coined the term MAWA, Make America White Again. That strand has definitely shown up in this discussion on Twitter. I’ve had to hit a lot of “Not interested in this post” to posts in the last two days.
I think that most people would be happy with a variant of MAWA – Make America Work Again. That would probably get other people suggesting that they try turning America off and turning it back on again.
While I could see the factual aspect of her characterization, it was a little close to the bone, since I think it’s class not race.
I like your variant.
If there really is a Make America White Again, then those who want to Make America Work Again will have to come up with a different acronym. Probably a semi-acronym . . like this: Make America WORK Again. MAWORKA.
MAWORKA. Make America WORK Again.
Meanwhile, I hope MANDA takes hold. Make America New Deal Again.
God forbid someone does a typo and makes it MAWOKEA….
Well, the Wokeness Party can try that one on purpose.
Make America WOKE Again. MAWOKEA. See how far they get.
They could draw some votes away from the Clintonite Sh!tombamacrat Party.
Sounds good!
I call it the Populist MAGA faction vs Idpol MAGA.
Agreed. While the tirades of Musk and Ramaswamy about american talent are correctly diagnosed as classist drivel by elites, why is the anti-Indian bigotry being spouted by MAGA not seen as similar contempt for working people, albeit in a system of globalized production? Setting aside the actual class composition of MAGA which is more “middle class” than anything, Manny Ness’s book Migration as Economic Imperialism makes it clear that this aspect of class warfare is equally important to any working class political project. I hope they succeed in curtailing H1-Bs, but handwaving away these glaring deficiencies in MAGA’s implicit class analysis only ends up reproducing a caricatured notion of the american working class.
Another Liberal Guilt-Monger heard from . . .
I live in America. So America is my concern. The foreigner is not my problem.
American jobs for Permanent Legal Residents at American wages. Ban the H-1B visa.
Promoting free movement of labor was always part of the neoliberal playbook, along with getting rid of tariffs and protecting the unimpeded movement of capital. To protect every man’s property, of course. Can’t have any pesky unions or labor marching in the streets getting in the way of efficient profits.
Well said! But:
If only four congressmen can hold this up, guess how much in the way of money/favors/future job opportunities for themselves and their families will be dangled in front of them? And also the stick: stop holding us up or we blacklist you and your family off and the press will slime you as a Nazi (if they even bother to mention you at all). Color me skeptical.
In the 1940’s 1950’s, and first half of the 1960’s, immigration to the United States was near zero. Sure, we imported the occasional Einstein or two but the overall numbers were very small. The United States exploded into the greatest scientific and industrial power the world had ever seen. The CEOs and entrepreneurs of this era did well for themselves, they lived in mansions, ate the best food, drove the best cars, etc., but they did not become (inflation adjusted) billionaires. That’s because the need to compete for a non-unlimited supply of labor forced a moderately equitable distribution of the profits. Yes we need incentives, but not billionaire-level incentives.
Were the pre-civil war southern American plantation owners rich because they were agricultural geniuses? Or because they had a ready supply of cheap labor? Obviously the latter, and they fought a bloody war to hold on to that cheap labor – because it was the necessary foundation of their wealth and status.
Current billionaires may some of them be truly talented – but – they are only billionaires because they have ready access to cheap labor. Without cheap labor, their industries will continue to thrive and innovate, but they will steadily lose their status as billionaires. Which is why ‘immigration’ (i.e.., forcing the population up and treating the working class like cattle) is utterly essential for them. They won’t give up unless threatened with actual revolution, public opinion be damned, IMHO.
We have an establishment that sees a problem economy as one that doesn’t prioritize trying to mint the first trillionaire. Everyone else and everything else be damned.
As Charles Hugh Smith said, we have a fossilized Politburo, fanatically devoted to making the rich richer.
Technically, slaves weren’t cheap, but, unlike free labor, they couldn’t talk back. That was the real issue, imho. That is also the issue on hand with illegal immigrant and h1b labor: they can’t talk back, due to their insecure legal standing. And if the capital has easy access to the labor that can’t talk back, they can put squeeze on the people who theoretically can talk back.
If the foundation of democracy and liberty is that everyone has the right to talk back, this is a serious problem.
Since the cost of a slave could be as high as the equivalent of a modern car, all those slaves on those large plantations were a vast fortune, which made the Antebellum (prewar) South the wealthiest section of the United States, not the manufacturing and shipping Northeast. A constantly growing source of income, wealth, capital with the northern banks happy to provide loans with the human collateral.
Add that cotton and tobacco tends to strip the soil of its fertility especially under the practices of the day, you had a strong incentive to keep expanding, which the North was not going to let happen. This last was especially true if it meant conquering other countries for the expansion of the “peculiar institution.”
Of course, the slaves were all used in the skilled trades including shipbuilding and (just before the war) started to be used in the limited Southern manufacturing industry. I vaguely recall that the use of the slaves in manufacturing was a success. Poor Whites in the South were in constant competition with slaves for work.
Price (or cost of labour, slave or waged) is only one of the frictions detested by oligarchs — as you point out, “voice” is another.
If they can choose hampsters from around the world, they keep the hampster wheel turning. And not as much concern for the well-being of the hampsters is needed.
HamstersRUs (Int’l)™
TY for this post and what will likely be a lively and enlightening discussion. Seeing DOGE figuratively holding its groin like a boxer just caught a low blow is very satisfying and calls out for more.
this entire post is pure fantasy. where will even four MAGA types be found to defy Trump, who has already come down on the side of Musk and is not known for tolerating dissent within his ranks?
Chigal I don’t disagree. My reaction is based on the onus as well as ire redirected among many from desperate people blamed for taking jobs americans themselves won’t do to less desperate people taking jobs that americans want.
Over half of graduate students in STEM courses at US colleges are international students. It is up to 80% in computer science. So the result has to be a shortage of Americans for these kinds of jobs.
The situation is totally abnormal. Bernie is right, the problem lies in the education system.
DOGE’s (Ramaswamy’s) answer: “Let’s abolish the Department of Education!”
If this brouhaha is not an opportunity for MAGA and the “Left” to actually put their money where their mouths are and push through measures to fix certain educational issues, I don’t know what is.
Fixing the education issues will be a generational endeavor, or, at least, it’ll take at least a decade to bear fruit, and a lot of sacred cows on both left and right will need to be burned to achieve anything useful. That’s why I’m afraid we are not going to get anything done. No politician has the time horizon to make fundamental reforms. But in so doing, they’ll offend a whole bunch of self-important and powerful interests on both sides of the ledger while there will be a lot of short term costs.
BUT, if we want to re-industrialize, the first serious step we’ll need to take is to fundamentally reform education, especially at K-12 level and, more gradually, at the university level (along with creating incentives for people to learn how to do useful trades, professionally.)
that’s graduate students. they get a masters in the us to establish ties with the us. and to improve their job prospects which are inherently worse as foreign nationals. there are still plenty of american cs graduates.
I’m friends with the Dean of Engineering (aka Computer Science) at one of the UC’s. He has huge demand for admission from highly-qualified in-state U.S. students, but the state legislature and university admin want high-fee foreigners to cover their legal obligation to fund the university. When I got my UC degree 45 years ago it was tuition-free and foreign students went to private schools.
Silicon Valley finance has successfully driven down STEM wages since the earliest days of globalization. I’ve told the MAGgots that I agree with their grievances, but that their inherited-money wanna-be oligarch isn’t going to lift a finger to fix them. He’s already showing the true caste-allegiances that were always going to drive his second term. Bernie was the answer, but the few dozen grifters running the DNC needed to protect their rice bowls. May they rot in hell, but maybe this will finally elevate their caste consciousness…
As a graduate from the “Berkeley Farm” at about the same time, I can attest to just how good (world [family blogging] class in the College of Engineering) and inexpensive an education you got. I went through the UC system as broke as smoke (because with seven kids in the extended family, we were all going to have to do it ourselves.) I could have got loans, and did have some small scolarships, but I was able to work enough in the summer (and worked for profs during the school year). We did have foreign students paying big bucks, but they were actually rather rare.
I even met other students that had transferred from Stanford because everybody knew Stanford had “grade inflation” (if you could afford to pay, you were a B student), and knew they had a better chance of getting into Vet school if you got good grades at a public university which was much more of a true test.
Having the UC become so expensive and money driven means it’s no longer going to afford an opportunity to find and educate your best talent.
You have to ask yourself, why aren’t Americans going into the profession? Perhaps there are more highly paying jobs out there, like being a finance bro or anything else?
Perhaps the median pay at the Bachelors level is too low? I believe its around 50k median to be a lab tech. How do I know this, I went from the lab into education because education pays more.
In the 1990’s, I was a STEM college student. In one class of mathematical methods for physics, I was the only American. All the rest of 22 students were Chinese except one from France and one from Japan. All those from China were ahead of me technically. Soon I learned why. They had already acquired advanced degrees in China before their country would sponsor them for study abroad. So they were people with advanced degrees competing with people who didn’t yet have those degrees.
Maybe things have changed since then, but maybe not.
There’s nothing wrong with our American students except weak support, a reluctance to invest in their education, which does take a little time. The role of government to my way of thinking is to invest in its own population to achieve the best outcomes for that population long-term (say 5 years from now, rather than 1 year).
To a billionaire like Elon Musk, he looks at countries as different worker plantations he can shop. He cares less for investment in a people or their civil liberties, and more in harvesting them. So when he talks about DOGE or efficiency all he wants is more short-term harvesting of people for his personal benefit, not the population benefit. He is NOT going to make America great again, but the reverse.
In China, VN, etc, all the kiddies study English starting grade 3. They also cover Calc, physics, chem, etc in high school. 99% of american hs students do not even one of these things..
I taught English as a substitute for a few years. Questions like “What do you do in your free time?” simply flop.. they get a confused look, “What free time?!?” the usual answer was sleep.
When you can point out the window at someone in the rice field, or say study harder, they tend to study harder.
HTH.
It’s been several years ago, but I read an article by the IEEE US Activities Board (now called IEEE-USA — generally has policy positions against abuse of H-1B) that cited approximately 30% of US undergrad STEM majors were working outside of STEM. Implication being there does not appear to a shortage of trained persons.
Be nice to see Elon get a facial on this one, and a double header…hoist on his own petard.
Thanks for this post Lambert. I too am intrigued to see how MAGA v Tech Bro Weasels plays out.
I’m particularly interested to see how many MAGA-seeming politicians take the SV side. Gaetz’s crew (Mace, Luna etc) seem likely to follow his lead. Gaetz of course has an Billionaire SV weasel as a brother-in-law. Can we call these types WIMHs (Weasels In MAGA Hats)? Who would be True MAGA in Congress?
More broadly, I’m interested to see the competing visions of American Greatness. The Weasels vision is based on Thiel’s manifesto’s about ending America’s “technological stagnation”. It also has a lot of Nationalism and supports modernising and increasing America’s military power. There’s also a desire to destroy the current education system. To my eye, they view “America” as an aggregate: the State, the ability to produce and project power.
MAGA has a different view which I will leave to others to describe. To my eye it views “America” not as an aggregate, but as the local place in which one lives, and ones daily experience.
Two very different ideas of America. I wonder how they’ll mesh and conflict going forward. It’s promising that the Weasels are already getting called out.
Bonus material
1. Elon’s alt-account was uncovered. He uses it tell himself what a great Dad he is and participate in Twitter Spaces using a voice changer. Pathetic stuff!
2. Long-Time New Right guy Charles Johnson has gone wild spilling Elon dirt. His somewhat manic timeline has a lot of interesting stuff with receipts (as well as collateral damage takedowns of Lex Friedman and others)
The dad thing is really pathetic. Do you think he uses it to try to leverage his kids into liking him?
It’s at least in one sense a struggle between a nascent American aristocracy and the American gentry; tech-bro elites vs owners of local car dealership networks, local real estate and the like
I love, love, love seeing this. We know what liberal Democrats would do because we’ve been here. The Squad ™ refused to force a vote on Medicare for all in 2021. Instead they got basically nothing. And now 4 years later AOC loses a committee chair vote to a virtual corpse.
Sorry, the parlimentarian won’t allow it
My spouse was an H1B who graduated Suma Cum in computer science and within a few days, was offered an H1B job. I met my German BFF in grad school. He was a Nepo but liked the idea of working for a while to get a sense of how Americans do business. So, he applied for a job with a big company, got H1B’s and within 2 years was their VP for international sales. He stuck around for a few more years for the networking. Then, he fell in love, married a Yank, and they moved back home and took over the family business.
Over the past 50 years, both personally and professionally, I have made numerous EU friends from Oslo to Sofia. So, my sense of the H1B world is at least informed. The stereotype that H1Bs are mediocre people working as indentured servants is not the norm in my experience. First of all, poor families cannot afford to send their kids to US universities. As for foreign scholarship students, they have had to prove that they are above-average upstairs to get a student visa.
Few businesses recruit H1Bs overseas as there are plenty of candidates already in US universities who are fluent in English and American culture. A great many foreign students stay stateside for a while after graduation to get a better handle on how Americans do business before returning home to take over the family business or search for a job with an impressive resume’.
My sense is that most stay on past a few post-grad years as they become comfortable in their careers and aim to explore staying permanently. That can be achieved by staying H1B for 6 years and getting a green card for 5 more years qualified to apply for citizenship. Before that happens, as in my case, some wind up marrying a Yank and become citizens only 3 years later – or like my German BFF – they return home with a lifetime souvenir. Thus, in most cases, H1Bs are somewhat indentured as they may not change employers, but they are well-paid (by US law), and are building successful careers.
You have heard of Cognizant , Tata consultancy Services, Infosys, Capgemini, Accenture.
They recruit in India not so much in US universities.
” First of all, poor families cannot afford to send their kids to US universities. As for foreign scholarship students, they have had to prove that they are above-average upstairs to get a student visa. ”
They could borrow money and that’s what a lot of Indian students have done. I went back to get a Master’s Degree in the US sometime back in 2013, and a lot of my Indian classmates were there because they had taken loans back home.
If you are correct according to your limited experience, then the answer is to ban H-1B on an interim basis, just till “we can figure out what the hell is going on” in the deathless words of one-time President Trump.
When we can figure out how to write dodge-proof, trick proof, workaround-proof legislation to limit H-1B to strictly and only the type of people you met through your very narrow and exceptional slice of the H-1B world, then H-1B can be legalized. Not till then.
Your anecdotal experience is very narrow. The vast majority of these visas are obtained by American firms to bring Indians from India, educated mostly by one of the IIT schools. The firms pay the cost of transfer and the salaries are around 1/3-1/2 of what they paid the American who formerly held the position. In the industry, the Indian firms are known as WITCH for Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Cognizant and HCL. Look at the tweets above for the list of the biggest (ab)users of the H1B program. In the industry again, WITCH is synonymous with poor quality and cheap services.
There’s a class action lawsuit against Cognizant for discrimination against non-Indian workers that makes for edifying reading. An excellent article on it was recently linked to here.
This is not the statistical preponderance of H-1Bs and, if H-1Bs were eliminated, keeping this pathway can easily fixed by creating a work visa where eligibility is tied to attending and graduating from a U.S. university w/ various restrictions.
There is such a visa already, albeit very time limited. Foreign graduates from US universities are generally eligible to work in the US for (IIRC) 18 months after graduation under OPT.
I’ve worked with a couple of people who got an H1B out of that afterwards, as unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much of another path in situations like this other than maybe O-1.
> MAGA has a different view which I will leave to others to describe. To my eye it views “America” not as an aggregate, but as the local place in which one lives, and one’s daily experience.
I have long felt that this desire to see America the macrocosm as simply an extension of its small town microcosm lay at or near the heart of America’s political divide. You hear and feel it when you’re in conversations where there is still a sense of community and the macrocosm hasn’t yet feasted on everything good.
The “citizens of nowhere” vs the “citizens of somewhere” or words to that effect if my memory of what Theresa May once observed is correct
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-theresa-may-s-conference-speech/
When I observe this, I can’t get Jack Dean’s views on the GOP out of my head where they are loyal except for breaking a few key Commanndments such as no new taxes. Trump succeeded because he wasn’t Jeb! at the end of the day. “Build the Wall” was the chant, not “the good immigrants.”
Trump may have flaunted certain norms, but he never broke any core GOP Commanndments. This feels like Trump moving towards Trump! status. They have used mindless ABC TGIF lineups to make their point.
As for the MAGA types who seem reasonable, there are way more Liz Warrens out there than realized. She was a nose to the grind stone type who saw the light when she saw the struggles of her pet concern up close.
Er…John Dean that is.
When you say “flaunted”, do you mean “flouted” certain norms?
In the early to mid 90s, new graduates of CS were being snapped up with high salaries and attractive benefits because of obvious urgent need.
In 1996, as I was beginning my tech career, my wife, working in retail, met a married couple, recent CS grads who had both signed up with the same employer who agreed to pay them $70K/year, each, and gave them a month to show up to work, allowing them a month to take a vacation after graduation.
In reaction to the high wages those with CS degrees could demand, the tech bros came up with the H1B scheme, and so today, thirty years later, the average wages paid to America’s IT work force has hardly moved from the $70K offered in 1996.
Combine the ever-higher cost of higher education with the stagnant wages achieved through the dishonesty of our leadership and you have the formula for the failure that is currently manifesting.
If our country had a level playing field, and the business community wasn’t able to write the self-serving rules that hold back the average American’s ability to better their lives, people like Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would never find themselves in positions of power, and we would have as brilliant and capable a tech sector as is possible.
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are evidence of the broken nature of our culture, not people to be respected, or allowed to lead.
You date the commoditization and mediocritization well. It’s about the mid90s that I had to get my ass into gear and move out of fun general programming/computing into ever more specialized and fewer people fields eventually into data science with the attendant management /consultant spiel bullshit.. By the time it got commoditized and H1Bed, I am retired.
I’m following this kerfuffle with great interest.
I am 10 months into retirement, and couldn’t be happier to have nothing to do with what is now going on.
We are the lucky ones, first because we saw how good it could be, and now because we’re done with it, just as the miserable future comes into focus.
Unfortunately for me I turned 50 when the H1-B visa hit so there was really no where to turn to. In my world being 50 is already dangerous – most companies I worked for usually have an early retirement program where they add years to your age and give you credit for having worked them so you will get a bump in your pension when they lay you off. As a consultant I worked for a number of insurance companies and I could usually count the number of IT employees in a company over the age of 50 on one hand. So I tried to get out of the industry but couldn’t as no one will hire someone over the age of 50 that doesn’t have experience in their industry. They just aren’t going to spend the money to train older workers.
I’m also an IT guy over 50. Same observation here, very few companies who IT staff over fifty, although it seems a little more prevalent in more traditional industries.
Also, most companies barely invest in training their younger workers, so no wonder they invest zilch in their older employees.
Whitney Webb on Twitter hits the nail on the head:
The real op was the effort to convince regular Americans that Silicon Valley oligarchs (who literally help build and maintain the surveillance state for intelligence, deeply invest in/promote mRNA tech, want to price carbon, develop precrime tech used to target both conservatives and leftists alike, and are pushing for surveillance programmable money) cared about them and wanted to restore the country to prior times. They want to build an American technate where they hold all the power and wealth and you drink out of the trough in a digital cattle pen while they milk you for data
Their main lessons came from Edward Bernays.
It’s been a fascinating incident. An angle I wonder about is that twitter pays registered people for the engagement for their posts. I’ve had to do a lot of tagging ‘not interested in this post ‘.
Another is …are the “tech bro billionaires/ multi millionaires” really so oblivious.
And so arrogant too at that ?
We shall see. I look forward to this developing in greater depth – like what product did Vivek Ramaswamy actually develop ?
Charlatans the lot of them. What a surprise.
Three observations:
The pushback on X was led by what used to be called the Alt Right, most of whom, with a few notable and inexplicable exceptions, Musk allowed back on the platform last year.
The ideas that were pushed by this phenomenon/movement, from Gamergate in 2014 to Charlottesville in 2017, are now so widespread that they constitute a metapolitical shift the likes of which haven’t been seen in US since the 1960s, when such a thing was celebrated as “consciousness-raising”. Progressives, liberals, conservatives and libertarians remain in denial about this, push censorship, or else fall back on comfortable forms of nonthink such as misguided positivism.
Finally, this has been an unforced mask-off moment for many immigrants from the sub-continent, not a few of whom have revealed themselves to be more arrogant, entitled and racist than the caricature of white Americans that Hollywood has pounded into mush-heads for the past half-century.
. . . ” Quite the change in tone, eh? From ” F–K YOURSELF in the face” to “easily fixed”! It’s almost as if Musk got a call, isn’t? ” . . .
Musk is pretending to change his tone but he is merely biding his time and any pretense of newfound reasonableness on his part is a devious trap. Any law to “reform” H-1B visaness will be filled with loopholes and workarounds. Anything less than the full, complete and total abolition of H-1B Visas from existence will be an utter defeat and a total own goal.
If the “Musk Plan” is legislated and signed, my prediction just above will be proven right or wrong. I would rather see my prediction not even tested at all. And the best way to get my prediction not even tested at all is to abolish H-1B from existence; totally, utterly and completely.
Lee Fang on Twitter:
Non-twit user link here
And there you go. Totally not about suppressing wages say the tech-bros.
Think of all the other greedy CEO POS’s in other industries seeing this who must be feeling jealous and want in on that sweet sweet worker replacement scam.
Shadow Twitter…well, this is a fun discovery for me!
https://unherd.com/2024/12/the-maga-battle-over-foreign-workers/
Lee Fang has a good piece on this.
Raise the min wage for tech workers from other countries, how great is that?
Thanks for the sunday dinner reading, mmm mmm good!
I’m seeing all the makings of a greek tragedy emerging, very dramatic…
Will someone fly too close to the sun, or bang his moms by accident?
Enquiring minds want to know!
reference…
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly
More Swiss to replace the French Guard with!
More from Fang’s twitter:
The level of blatant corruption on display with the H1B process is simply astounding and indefensible. Scammy American tech firms benfit from H1B and guest worker visa abuse on a grand scale, and scammy Indian tech firms benefit supplying the endless stream of indentured labor with which they then turn around and bribe the “nothing to see here” government.
No sane country would ever allow this.
We are seeing a lot of this in corporate medicine. Doctors in the US are too expensive for the health insurance suits to hire so they hire H1Bs. I was in India one year and visited a medical school. Many of their medical schools are just storefronts where they give classes focused on passing the ECFMG or whatever they are now using. We see ads for doctors and nurses all the time in the US with “H1B candidates welcomed…..” in the ads. I guarantee that this H1B bullshit would stop if they could figure out how to H1B American lawyers. You do not see many foreign lawyers in the US. Why is law privileged in terms of foreign low wage competition? How about we outsource our government to China….at least we might get national health insurance and high speed rail.
Laws are arbitrary, and different from country to country. STEM is same everywhere (because it is based on laws of Nature).
P.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyers
I’m not picking up on the math here. With a 434-member house, the majority is 434/2 + 1 = 218. If the split is 219-215, and voters vote their party, the Republicans can burn one vote and still achieve the majority. That means the MAGA caucus needs a minimum of two members. Unless there’s some magic House math I’m not aware of.
I would think they could pick up way more than four. Safer with more on their side.
Nancy Pelosi may still be in a hospital in Europe recovering from hip replacement surgery. I did a quick google search and can’t find much information since the surgery 2 weeks ago. So the practical majority may be 219-214.
Of course, if the stakes are high enough they might life-flight her into DC and wheel her out on the House floor with a medical team.
(I’m presuming that the 3 GOP House members who have taken positions in the Trump admin will show up, as other than Gaetz none have resigned yet.)
That Pelosi goes to Europe for surgery (assuming she did) speaks volumes
She broke her hip in Luxembourg (I think) and it was not really practical for someone to fly back with a broken hip (at her age especially) to get surgery. So I’ll have to giver her a pass on that…
There seems to be an information vacuum on her whereabouts since the accident.
I guess medical privacy does exist for the elites.
Whether she is medically able to travel is an interesting question. This could linger on into the next Congress, giving the GOP a small break on close votes.
She had surgery at a US military hospital in Germany and per the link below is now back in the US.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/18/us-news/nancy-pelosi-back-home-after-hip-surgery-following-high-heel-fall-in-europe/
Thanks – I hadn’t seen that. So she’s back home, resting. I’m no doctor so I have no idea whether further travel is advisable or medically cleared. Maybe IMDoc could chime in?
It must have been a private jet that brought her back to CA. I suppose they can do the same to fly her to DC, but I would guess that she’ll stay in recuperation mode until the next Congress is officially sworn in … no need for her to vote in the House Speaker drama as that will come down to whether the Freedom Caucus can muster enough NO votes to keep Mike Johnson out.
Recent events may have pushed the sides too far for even that.
I don’t think MAGA will settle for anything short of an immigration moratorium after this.
This was the most striking aspect of the online debate so far. The total intellectual rejection of standard neoliberal cliches. Where once an appeal to “the market” or “competition” or “enterprise” would elicit at least a token concession from the average right wing commentator, I have been reading a wall of wall-to-wall outright rejection, with normal genuflections to capitalist and individualist ideology replaced wholesale by defiant exhortations towards nationalism and collectivism. As well as a torrent of shamelessly reactionary racism it must be added, stoked even higher by the open contempt on display by the elites.
The older and mainstream right is mostly silent. They were not and are not ready for this. This is not what their Reganist and Thatcherite training prepared them for. What was supposed to be an easily lead and cynically betrayed voting block, has now rounded on and bitten the entire intellectual framework of the intended corporatist reform. No-one has been caught more off-guard than the (now aging, Gen-X lead) tech-bros. They are faced with 2 generations of immiserated and enraged 16-36 year olds who are loudly expecting a very big payout from this election, which not a single oligarch imagined they would ever need to so much as pay lip service towards. The mob is off-script and setting up their own soap-boxes somewhere in the back.
The GOP is now riding the populist tiger.
MAGA is not in a position to get its way fully and may by betrayed fully. They won’t be able to exact much in the way of revenge, ex the ploy Lambert set forth, before the midterms. In theory, Trump voters can choke a lot of key production since its followers are well represented in agriculturally productive and other critical resource-extractive areas. But we saw one way they could in theory throw their weight around, the truckers’ attempt to cripple traffic in and out of DC, turn out to be a bust.
Now having said that, it’s the tech worker bees who are very much screwed by the H-1B visas. I have long thought that the fact that sys admins comes from that cohort means they could, if they went into general strike mode, paralyze some chucks of the US economy. But too many of them are libertarians and thus don’t seem to be the types who would go for collective action.
As the Apparition of Saint Luigi has shown, the concept of a Vanguard of the Deplorables is still in play. I do not know whether the Anarchist bomb throwers came first, or the Kerensky like Social Reformers, but many of the early Union gains were driven by individualist direct action cadres.
In this regard, the history of the steel builder unions and their bombing campaign against the infrastructure of the capitalist bosses at the turn of the Twentieth Century is instructive. Up until the Los Angeles Times office bombing of 1910, where “innocent” paper workers were killed, the public mainly had supported the union’s ‘explosive’ program. In this regard, the public relations aspect of the struggle was important.
Saint Luigi is in a similar situation. As long as his target is identified with an elite, and not with the generality, he wins on the public relations front. What I fear is that the hidden Elites will engineer a mass casualty event that could be blamed on acolytes of Saint Luigi. Considering the truism that what the Empire does abroad eventually “comes home” with a vengeance, a callous indifference to Terran human life will manifest itself in some outrage here in the Imperial Homeland.
My best guess here is that we will see another Oklahoma City bombing, this time with an Insurance Company headquarters as the target.
Stay safe (TM.)
I tend to agree with Yves here. It’s a smaller percentage of the workforce, but finance / banking uses a fair number of H1-B in other areas, principally back office, but they are also well represented in the front office, particularly in international firms, where a transfer to the US on an H1 (less frequently an O1) is considered a pathway to getting US citizenship. Given the potential effect on banking (e.g., losing a method of holding down wages for junior staff), I expect that Important Bankers’ spokespeople have made some quiet calls to get this all tamped down. Expecting the H1s to do something on their own is highly unlikely, less so because they’re libertarians, but more so because they don’t want to put obtaining citizenship at risk – it can be a decade of work, and there are often wives and kids in the equation as well.
They’ve been undergoing a metamorphosis into “social nationalists” over the last few days. I mean that in every possible interpretation.
I think this has caused ideological earthquake. Traditional collective action is unlikely, but influence in the information space is not linearly proportional to numbers. The screenshots of H1B visa jobs now proliferating the debate on twitter show this: It only took one website and interest in it to expose the whole rotten mess. Some people have begun to dig further, and there is a lot of anger on this issue. The more the mob is denied, the angrier it is going to get.
Globalisers and free-traders and even de-regulators are not going to have an easy time in this administration anymore.
But “social media” is not the country; so how far does this extend outside of Twitter?
I’m curious if anything actually comes from this. Were it liberal Democrats, there is no bite there, so absolutely nothing. But for this crowd, it is an unknown.
. . . ” replaced wholesale by defiant exhortations towards nationalism and collectivism.” . . .
Hmmm . . . National Collectivism? Is there a National Collectivist Party in America’s future?
Seems like Daddy’s involvement here is being glossed over for the grenade throwing online. I’ve had a lot of contempt for any notion that Trump had a pro labour bone in his body but I did not expect it to be demonstrated (again) so early, let alone before he even took the oath.
I’ve yet to see any real shots taken at Trump by the party loyal and these dupes probably think that it’s the Elon/Vivek influence that is corrupting their pure and noble president. This whole ordeal for me does smack of a ‘they have nowhere to go’ moment for the MAGAs.
All possible people should keep pounding the President Musk meme everywhere and everywhen possible, and see how Trump reacts.
President Musk is eating the pets.
> This whole ordeal for me does smack of a ‘they have nowhere to go’ moment for the MAGAs.
Precisely the point of this post; avoiding that.
My friendly bet would be is the supporters are going to take this directly on the chin – I could see a lot of pressure being put upon the Senator/Congress members of the GOP but given Musk has more or less succeeded in threatening those who would defy his wishes via the recent CR deal, they are likely going to choosing riding out the anger vs. going up against Musk’s money.
This is one hell of a cognitive dissonance generator for the faithful though. For being the apparent agent of change / anti-establishment he’s already shown (as I would posit he even did during his first term) to do precisely what the establishment wants. He works in his own self interest first and foremost but is an absolute master in pulling off the kayfabe as if he cares about the little guy.
“IANAL” but I’m not buying the “Hitchhiker’s Guide”.
I only see three things applicable in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022.
1. The joint session of Congress including members of the House “duly sworn”.
2. In resolving an objection or question,
“such objections and questions shall be submitted to the Senate for its decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like manner, submit such objections and questions to the House of Representatives for its decision.”
3. “…two tellers previously appointed on the part of the House of
Representatives by the presiding officers of the respective chambers.”
I don’t really see the “speaker” as a impediment to counting votes. There is of course a “bootstrapping” issue on organizing the House: You have to swear in members to create a constitutionally required “quorum”. So who has authority to swear in members? Seems to be vested (2USC25) in the House Clerk. Everything else is by rules, which have to be voted once a quorum is met. Precedent is to use Jefferson’s Manual as modified over time, but that is convention.
> I don’t really see the “speaker” as a impediment to counting votes.
Please read the post again. The House cannot function at all with no speaker, and that includes certifying the restults of the vote in the Electoral College.
As Yves mentioned above, MAGA is not presently in a position to get its way fully.
There is a deep power imbalance in the coalition (the populist MAGA New Right and the Silicon Valley Tech Right) that gave Trump the win in 2024.
This power imbalance centers around money and personality. The Tech Right provided the necessary funding for the Trump victory along with Elon-like all-in political tactics while the MAGA New Right provided much of the vote.
A significant portion of the MAGA New Right now recognizes that their Tech Bros have the potential power to shut down their voices on Twitter and, within the past week, the present leadership at Twitter has apparently started to cancel some accounts (Loomer, etc.).
This conflict appears to be organic, not an op, and the outcome appears far from certain.
See musings of Mike Benz on this issue.
Since President Musk renamed the company X, and since the twitter name is still famous, well known, much beloved, and widely mourned-for; I would suggest calling Musk’s company by the name twiXtter. That does homage to the memory of twitter and acknowledges the fact of the ” hate-sh!t” which Musk took all over twitter’s face when he renamed it X.
it also means that all those twitter-workers-in exile could, if they wanted, revive twitter and call it Twitter. What would President Musk do about that, sue? And since all those ex-twitter workers are in exile, having been driven into exile by the evil President Musk, perhaps they could stick the knife in even further by calling their revived-twitter-type company . . . Twitter in Exile.
Do we want to important talented people who have been raised, educated and trained with other people’s tax money? Sure, it is a great bargain. We also get to solve the low birth rate problem. Are there abuses of H-1B? Sure. Shall we get rid of H-1B? It doesn’t matter. Unlike the Southern border, this isn’t a crisis. We can debate and compromise. It is really not a big deal one way or another.
In the end, there’s either going to be enough jobs for everyone or not. If an economic depression were to happen, I would not want to be an Indian caught holding an H1B visa. By the way I foresaw this whole H1B thing coming to a head a couple of years back, so I decided to return to Asia.