Alty Alterson

The H1B debate is one of the most fascinating pieces of discourse in 2024, a humiliating defeat for the Musk, tech bros, and “Elite Human Capital”. But how did this happen? Basically because one party did not understand the nature of modern politics. On the surface “more H1Bs” is the classic slam-dunk technocrat policy idea. No doubt Elon was counting on this. Big tech likes it. Big Gov likes it, libertarians and leftists like it. The only people who don’t like it are disorganized middle Americans who can’t follow arguments and are easily distracted. So what better way to get this policy through than a big push on Christmas when most middle American Chuds we’re carving their Christmas goose? Worst comes to worst, you just offer a minor retraction. H1B visas aren’t even an issue Red America cares about so no one would get too angry. Right? Wrong. Elon didn’t count on a few critical realities that had changed since this H1B-visa policy first emerged as a real political issue. The first new reality Elon didn’t count on was that economic case for H1Bs was WAY weaker than it was in the 90s/2000s. In 2024, America was not in the middle of a “tech boom” and for the last decade highly skilled natives had a very hard time finding jobs, a situation made even more depressing by the constant threat of AI to remove certain low-level positions entirely. It also didn’t help that America had more information about what H1Bs actually were. Propaganda about new “Einsteins” and VonBrauns” (the "0.1% of top TOP TALENT) being brought in from the H1B expansion were transparent bullshit, since exceptional genius were brought in under and entirely different system. Furthermore, it was easy to verify through public data that H1B visas were largely given to mid-tier entry level positions, the very jobs that middle class Americans felt locked out of. The only benefit being that the foreign employees worked for less money. Further horror stories about how America was going to be “locked out” of a competitive market place by China and Russia were equally risible, since very notably these countries were not seeking to import a new tech elite. Elon also didn’t realize that Americans had experience with these kind of immigrants that was not positive. This is an easy oversight of your brain is stuck in the 1990s where a “point based system” was the holy grail of immigration. But we tried the point system, at least in Canada, and the results are not stellar. Far from getting a new tech elite the country was just flooded with mid-skilled pushy immigrants whose economic benefit was immediately swamped by their catastrophic impact on the housing market and social services. To date, I haven't met a Canadian, even a Canadian liberal, who thinks the last decade of immigration from India has been a good thing. And for some reason, with all of this "high skilled immigration" Canada didn't become the new Silicon Valley either.  Ok, so maybe pushing this whole H1B visas was a bad move? A political mistep? But it needed one more ingredient to become a political catastrophe. For that you neeed hordes and hordes of brain dead liberal and indian midwits, led by one paritcular indian midwit Vivek Ramaswamy.  This is always from the problem with arguments that seemed like "slam dunks" in the past, they attract an army of midget who argue for them without evidence just to seem like they are on the "winning side", smell-blind to their own bullshit. And this is more or less what happened to the defenders of H1B on Twitter. (Continued)