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The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically.

I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.

This is just an ego problem I suspect. It bruises the ego of MAGA voters to realize that immigrants actually are smarter, they actually do get paid more (and not because they're "taking the jobs" but because they are actually more desirable.)

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> including our technological lead, is built by immigrants

That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.

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It's a simple matter of math. The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. It's statistically impossible for that 5% to be the smartest 5% in the world. Therefore, if we want the smartest people in the world, we have to allow immigrants.
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The smartest aren't uniformly distributed across the Earth.
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That's true. It is possible that the smartest 5% are all here in the USA. But it is statistically unlikely that's true.
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You put words in my mouth. I don't claim that the smartest are clustered in the USA.
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is your contention that this new process is too difficult for the smartest 5% in the world to figure out?
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No? Not sure how you reached that conclusion. I'm just stating that the USA needs immigrants if we want to increase our median intelligence because we can't possibly have the smartest people in the world born here.
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The smartest 5% are able to figure out where they're not welcome.

https://yaledailynews.com/articles/international-grad-school...

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The current American immigration process is not figure-out-able. As any immigration lawyer will tell you, there's strategies with higher or lower chances of success, but there's nothing at all like a roadmap which will definitely lead to permanent residency if you follow it well.
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come on, don't do this here.
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It's not an ego problem. It's a racial one.
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I’m not sure US academia is mediocre. It’s more like… normal?

But America being what it is, it attracts those with most potential creating and sustaining a network effect.

But there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad of the US, and it’s quite easy to mess up the equilibrium and go back to the mediocrity you mentioned

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It’s a numbers game. Taking the best from the world talent pool is going to provide better results than from the much smaller American talent pool. Unless your country has more than a billion people, you need to look at world talent.
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The US has to especially encourage immigration since we have gone out of our way to make the education system systemically broken. Our funnel is broken on purpose. Look at countries with strong showings in things like chess or running. Why is that? They encourage large populations of kids to participate, the larger the pool the more top performers.
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Our lead does not come from immigrants. The American people, who are a distinct people, have shown time and again a potential for great things.

Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?

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By “American People” you mean native Americans?

Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?

I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.

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> Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant

I'm not American, but this conversation happens a lot in Canada where I'm from too

I was born in Canada, in a Canadian hospital. I've never had any other home than this country.

I'm descended from immigrants, but I am not an immigrant. I'm not considered indigenous either, that's a whole other type of person.

What a strange thing, to be from a place but have many people say "it's not your place, it's stolen" as if I had a say in that. If I went anywhere else, I would be an immigrant there.

Very odd.

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Unless your people walked across the Bering Strait during the last ice age you're an immigrant.
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> Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?

No, it couldn't. Trump tells then to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.

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> The current administration was voted in with an anti-immigration mandate

Given that they’re underwater for approval rating on immigration it seems both you and they have misread the room. Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants. For this, they have no mandate.

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>Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants.

There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature of Haitians and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.

And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.

And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.

White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.

[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/199094/dhs-neo-nazi-memes-no...

[1]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nati...

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We’ve also seen that you’re not safe on a green card either.
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Trump has -20% to -25% net approval depending on the poll, and his approval rating on immigration is -10 to -15%. Clearly people do not like any of this in practice even though they might have liked it in theory.
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I mean, the issue is that a large number H1B folks have vital skills for the US economy and that even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble
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> even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble

I'm not so sure.

I think it would play out like this:

1. 20% H1Bs leave; 2. Those migrants are now in countries of origin, looking for work; 3. Many of the big US tech companies will already have offices in those countries, and those that don't can make new offices if they wanted to; 4. many, but likely not all, of those employees are now working for the same employer (or close enough), just in a different jurisdiction; 5. as none of these employees are physically in US hotspots, all the other stuff that happened in those hotspots because of big tech pay, suffers, conversely all the stuff which was suppressed because of those wages may (possibly) return; 6. two of the things that go down are the number of people transitioning from temporary visa to citizenship, and the available talent pool for the local-to-those-places startup and VC scenes.

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Certainly a lot of them do. It's also true that having a large portion of them leave will just mean that the company will have to replace them with someone who will require a higher wage, and won't have any issue leaving if the workplace culture degrades.
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