You nailed it with "yet another broken bit of bureaucracy" and "possible to hold two opposing beliefs at the same time (namely that the US needs to attract high-level talent to maintain a competitive global edge while also being obligated to protect Americans)".
I've spent the last 20+ year working for corporate America in the tech sector and I've had a front row seat to the H1B (and L1 etc) visas. Both things are true. 1) *at times* (usually during boom times when we're on a hiring spree), we can't hire engineers fast enough from the domestic talent pool so being able to tap into the global talent pool absolutely helps. 2) foreign H1B visa holders are definitely cheaper and usually less of a flight risk (to jump ship for an even higher offer a year later) due to the lengthy process the path-to-greencard (and then citizenship) entails so companies kind of have these visa holders by the gonads once that process starts. This latter point is pretty much entirely due to the broken government bureaucracy (not surprising).
IMO the correct way to fix this is to throw out the entire set of foreign workers visa programs (there are a bunch of different ones), and start with a clean slate. There should be a transparent and streamlined process for companies to get these visas when absolutely needed, and they should only be approved if there genuinely is no domestic supply of the talent needed - which admittedly is not all that easy to assess. Even today, it's not like these visas get approved willy nilly; companies do have to prove that they tried hiring domestically first (going through a 6 month waiting period during which they allegedly have to advertise domestically first, etc) - but at this point the big corporations have figured out the game and there are cottage industry immigration law firms that help them navigate these nuisances (for a hefty fee I might add).
At the end of the day, the issue here isn't that we're being overrun by these foreign visa holders, and also, *when* they truly aren't taking away any of our domestic jobs, these foreigners are a net positive to our economy because they're highly paid (on average) which means they contribute lots of taxes, and at the same time don't receive any benefits. So compared to our illegal immigration problems this is night and day and we've got a million other bigger problems as a country.
Thank you. I thought my head was going to explode trying to figure out what I thought/ felt about the whole thing. You have cleared up some confusion,for me…
It’s still absolutely vital that the border is secured,and any illegals that have done crimes,or,are known gang members,immediately deported..in that case,the visa thing doesn’t sound like a bad idea…🤷🏻♀️
The only bad part is when they take away jobs from (or undercut the salary of) American workers. I just saw Musk's mea culpa (of sorts) today on this issue saying that we should add a tax to corporations for every visa they use and also set a minimum floor on the salaries they pay these visa holders - which essentially takes away the "money saving" motivation. That would ensure they only avail themselves to the visa option when they truly can't fill the jobs domestically and are willing to pay a premium to fill them through these visa programs. It's a great idea, make it more expensive and see how quickly the number of applications shrink.
I explained this at length in another comment/response here, but a friend who was trying to get a (new) job in France repeatedly lost out because it was TOO EXPENSIVE to hire non citizens. That would definitely make it a "necessity only" situation--and folks like Musk can afford it! :)
I am in favor of these visas being granted when corporations need specifically skilled highly qualified professionals as part of their workforce at competitive salaries. I like the idea of of fees being charged to corporations when American professionals with similar qualifications are not able to be employed. I do have a concern with security within these corporations hiring professionals from other countries that may have ulterior motives to gain access to software, to steal secret information etc . And the impact that has on our overall national security.
"Importantly, what has happened to us as a society when just about any disagreement—even among allies—automatically and instantaneously devolves into a petty pissing match?"
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX This statement sums it up nicely. Blovating ffffffffffffffffffing nonsense by everyone everywhere always. WTFFFFFFFFFFFFff people. Trial ballons are everywhere. Cut out this BS nonsense and focus on doing great things with the Trump man. 2025 will be great year. Roll with it and help it happen.
Thanks to Jenna for always providing us with great musings.
Trump has always said immigration is for bringing in individuals who improve the talent pool and support our rule of law and merit-based compensation. To any who listen with a critical ear, there has never been deviation from that. I’m with your take. This is simply a manufactured outrage like every past manufactured social media exaggeration.
I don't know, TBH. The system is clearly broken if it's being used to import janitors and pickleball instructors. I do get the need to be globally competitive--but if we can come out and admit our educational systems are producing inferior talent, MAYBE LET'S WORK ON FIXING THAT? And let's make sure that these visas are actually only being used for jobs "that no American can do" and not as a way for folks like Musk to secure cheaper labor. (IDK about you but I'm suddenly less excited about DOGE.)
Do both. The educational system has been broken for a very, very long time. It is why our innovation requires importing talent to advance the newest of ideas. It is not cost effective to import janitors and etc. Our schools lately have provided training mostly for high class welfare recipients and it will take decades of constant raising of standards to fix. We have to continue to import talent for the time being but we must revamp education and our society's perspective on education. Parents have been lulled into thinking they could simply let the schools teach while they struggled to make a living. Today, parents have be on top of every aspect of childrearing. We need to make this societal shift. It is a huge task for people already going all out to earn a wage but we need to do it.
I don't know either, TBH, but I doubt many janitors or pickleball instructors are being imported legally. Yes, we absolutely need to fix our very broken educational system, but in the meantime there is a critical shortage of hard working, un-entitled, math and science whizzes. When our education system has been broken as bad for as long as ours has there is no quick and easy answer.
Oh, you should go through a four hour interview for a job, feeling very successful, and then find out your interview was merely to satisfy the easily gotten around requirement that an American must be considered for a job before handing it to an h-1B who does not even have the entire skill set for that job. There was consulting work done all over the US on how to get around that requirement.
I believe Musk ended up capitulating and admitting the H1B system was broken and proposed it could be fixed with much higher salary requirements and fees to the employers for using it. This would most likely put an end to importing janitors and pickleball instructors and other non-technical workers. It almost appears to be a contrived debate to bring attention to the broken system.
It is a sad fact that there are probably not enough qualified Americans to fill many of these highly technical jobs and, unfortunately, that is not a situation that can be remedied quickly. With the dumbing down of many Americans with a constant diet of toxic processed food, fluoride in the water, vaccines and other toxins combined with the fact that academic success is no longer given the same weight, since feelings and identity have become the overriding driver of everything. After all, it might hurt Susie’s feelings if Debbie gets a better grade in science, or children may be depressed if they don’t win a soccer trophy, or it’s racist to require that someone pass an exam to get credentialed.
I think we’re on the third generation of some of these societal attitudes prevailing in American culture (participation trophies) and until the culture shifts and assigns more value to excellence and merit over feelings and identity, and the educational system is totally overhauled to reflect that, Americans are going to continue to fall behind in being able to provide candidates in highly skilled fields, necessitating either companies bring in skilled workers or move their operations to where there are skilled workers.
Less excited as well. I don't have any tvs in my house but seems I've heard more than 1 person online say that Trump has flipped on some campaign promises already. Lol, Least that's what someone said. I don't pay attention for a reason and it's why I don't have tvs in the house.
It appears that the MAGA civil war has ended. Musk surrendered. In many ways I'm gratified that these eruptions occur (first the C.R. and now the H-1B visas). These matters need to be hashed out and in public, unlike the Dems who mostly used to move in lockstep and cancelled those who disagreed with them. Only Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden's views were permitted. [Please see Tablet's piece by David Samuels on Obama and permission structures.] While these "civil wars" are certainly discouraging to watch play out, they are great examples of how governing was meant to take place in the U.S.: an engaged citizenry is the key and MAGA is nothing if not engaged. Of course the Dems will celebrate every "civil war" as the end of MAGA; what else can a party of authoritarianism be expected to say? Expect more disagreements like this in the future. I think it's exciting. "A well-informed (and engaged?)citizenry is the best defense against tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson
I saw that Jeff Childers this morning called it a bit of a surrender; I'd label it more of a backpedal... and honestly, should a presidential appointee really be telling people who disagree with him to F*CK THEMSELVES IN THE FACE? I think if you're in a position of power, you can and should do better than that.
Absolutely he should have behaved better. As far as I was concerned, he showed that he fits right in to the spoiled rich kid category who can get his way by stomping his foot and tossing his curls. I regret that he de-monetized Laura Loomer's account. He'll learn. Or he won't. But at least he backed off, while also trying to save face. But I'm still gratified all this happened in public. We, of course, now know how to push back, put him into a corner, and make our will known. So, I'll take the victory even if it didn't play out as I would have hoped. If I could guess, I'd say that Musk will think twice before stepping in it again. My thoughts on Vivek's response are that he was spot on about American mediocrity. I taught U.S. history and political science at the college level for 34 years at one of the country's top 10 research universities. I watched as mediocrity took over more intellectual real estate every year as students arrived every fall who had never studied or learned anything of value. The literary canon was unknown to them; they couldn't find most states on a map; none of them could write a coherent sentence so I finally had to abandon blue book exams. And finally, the triggering in class began, helped along by the Chancellor's suggestion that we give over class time in Nov. 2016 for student grieving the day after Trump won the election, something I decided was a bad idea. We graduated students who never passed Algebra who wanted to go to pharmacy school. We graduated students who wanted to teach history because they really wanted to be the football coach and who never took a history course. Sorry for the rant, but the race to the bottom is still too close for me. 😩
Damn, that's depressing. What do you think (as an academic) was driving the trend though? Was it the No Child Left Behind Act? (Not joking.) Was it a state/school funding thing? How and when did we go from imparting knowledge to simply teaching-to-the-test?
On another note, I agree it's good that this little spat happened publicly and hope (but won't hold my breath) that Musk learned a lesson here.
Oh there were so many things that happened all about the same time. Here are the pieces parts as I understand it now looking back. I may have some of these not in the correct chronological order. First we had the first generation of faculty being hired who had more or less come out of the Frankfurt School and critical analysis of everything. In the humanities we saw the introduction of deconstruction which as far as I could see was just tearing up beautiful literature and poetry for the sake of destroying it and replacing it with stupid stuff that no one had ever read before. Writing classes became courses on describing your worst childhood memories rather than learning how to craft an essay based in logic and sources. At about the same time, the number of kids who should actually go to college began to dry up as the baby boomers were having fewer children. So what to do with all those empty seats that had formerly been used by all those boomers? The answer to the question of "getting asses in seats" (yes, that's how admissions directors talked about it) was to actually "leave no child behind" and open the doors to anyone and everyone irrespective of any standards. Failure rates surged among faculty who still thought standards mattered. Courses like Adolescent Literature and Detective Fiction and Women in Literature proliferated. Behavior in dormitories dropped to something close to cave man levels and administrators couldn't bring themselves to throw those kids out of school. And the number of administrators ballooned. They gave themselves huge salaries. At one point my dean asked me to serve on our "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee"; I resigned from it after the second meeting. Out of necessity, and to preserve my sanity, I not only gave up Blue Book exams, but ended up giving up even True and False quizzes. In the end, I moved to a seminar-based class, gave up lecturing, and graded students based on two things: 1) were you in class? and 2) did you contribute to class discussion in a meaningful way? Except for students who triggered and apparently needed space to grieve this worked for a while. Sort of. Anyway, I'm out of it now and there is not enough money in the world to entice me to return. Besides, I won't submit a statement expressing how privileged my being white has made me. In the end, I see some of what happened as the result of seeing students as "customers", also a term that our Admissions Director used. I'm sure I'm forgetting some aspects of the collapse of higher education. But I do applaud every time I hear of a college closing and I never advise anyone to enroll in college. Both of our grandsons have taken this advice: one wants to be a mechanic and the other wants to be a welder. We're very happy about their decisions.
It has been a while since my kids were in high school and college. But I had a sad moment of realization years ago when helping my daughter study for an exam and quizzing her on a topic she said to me, " Oh, I don't need to know that." The teacher had already spoon fed them the items to focus on for the test. There was no implicit need to know anything else about the subject or to think about it in an analytical way.
Teachers too are being graded on their test results. There might be some temptation to prep the results so that "everyone is, always, well, above-average" just to keep up with inflated averages of other cheating teachers.
I . too, was a teacher during the 60s and 70s when more and more mandates came down from upstairs into the curriculum.
Phonics went out and took grammar and spelling with it.
The new math replaced multiplication tables. Teachers had to be retrained to comply.
More and more kids learned less and less about history and geography. Social studies became empty conversations about nothing.
To anyone who had been educated prior to 1960 even magazine articles were full of errors after editing.
When the push came to add real job training in the vocational era,it appeared to separate the college bound from the worker bees who just wanted a job and money . That must have worked too well because the regular schools lost kids and funding … so I guess they tried to reverse that trend?
When government loans for college arrived it meant all the ill-prepared students could sign up for basket weaving classes and get degrees in woke culture?
By now I’m not surprised that young adults don’t know who’s buried in Grants tomb or can no longer write their name in cursive!
It was all preplanned and carried out in plain sight .
Absolutely agree. The Feds took over education in the 70’s, and then there was the whole union thing. So now we basically have a corrupt as hell union,dealing with a corrupt as hell government, controlling who and what gets discussed in schools, and it appears we’ve pretty much been forced to see the results of what happens when you get down down to teaching kids what a penis and vagina are for, at the fourth grade. And everyone gets a trophy because competition is so unfair! Democrats have pretty much ruined the country.
I think Bannon was correct in viewing it all as a childish tantrum on the part of Musk. As to a possible reason that he blew up so much like a two year-old -- the guy is taking Monjuro to lose his flab and here is a description of its prominent side effects: https://neurolaunch.com/mounjaro-emotional-side-effects/ He'd be much better off getting on -- and staying on -- a low-carb diet. Safer weight loss, more level mood.
Another on X asked if Musk was “ drunk posting” after his crude comment & threat of war over the visa topic. All in all maybe it showed both Musk & Ramaswamy that there are boundaries & to spect push back to their power. I noticed after Musk acknowledged that there is a problem after all with the current corrupt visa system, he published a very pro American, pro Trump vid montage on X.
That's really crude (at best) and utterly uncalled for in what is a reasonably debatable matter. Let's act like adults and have a meaningful conversation rather than dismiss with expletives those who disagree with us.
It's fixed!!! Both your substack comments and all the drama that plays out on the polticial theater!
American culture is defined by American institutions and American institutions are unfortunately controlled by the psychopathic parasitic class that has been dumbing down American education for the last 50 years. An education in America used to mean something. What happened? Was it purposeful? Of course it was.
Musk is a welfare baby of the government. Every business venture that he has supposedly been successful at is because of the billions of dollars that the federal government pumps into his ventures. It's ironic that he and Vivek are supposedly supposed to clean up government inefficiencies when they both became billionaires because of government inefficiencies.
Excellent point (the irony of Musk bit) and I agree we have very intentionally been stupidified (*not a typo). And THANK GOD FOR YOU a) being here and b) letting me know when I'm an idiot [I BLAME MY SHITTY EDUCATION HAHAHAHA] and publish with dumb default settings. :)
Totally agree with Vee. As Catherine Austin Fitts says, Elon is a defense contractor and a billionaire only because of the largess of the fed. His role is to help institute the control grid with surveillance satellites and electric cars that can be switched off the moment the driver “misbehaves.” Elon should be viewed with extreme caution on everything.
Vee, thanks for the comments thing. I think Jenna would have figured it out when she wasn't getting very many comments despite her shitty American education.
I dunno, Vince. I went to private Catholic school, so it was especially shitty. (In high school, literally the ONLY sports equipment we had were lacrosse sticks, so it was that or running SHOOT ME. We also had no computers--those actually did exist in the 1980s--so we took TYPING every year. I *can* type like a mofo, so there's that. ;)
SOMEBODY is going to suck on the free government teats all-over-the-place. In my opinion we should count ourselves lucky that ANY of those suckers show any conservative tendencies.
Typical behavior for the sycophant class is to cozy up to the government "wet nurse" and then work with her to build legislative walls to ensure the continuance of the program and that the number of future sucklings on TPT (this particular teat) is greatly reduced to near-zero.
The answer is to reduce the number of "programs." Musk can at least point to real, actual, things that exist now but didn't before he took the grants.
I think the government gets better bang-for-the-buck by buying from competitive private companies than from creating yet-another "agency" filled with non-competitive bureucrats concerned about minimizing effort while maximizing benefits.
I think we need to listen to each other and see where we agree and be able to disagree without disparaging each other. RFK Jr knows this and is a good model for it. We have a lot to accomplish and need to use our energy in the right direction, otherwise, we're just caving into the establishment control that wants us to be at war with each other so they can continue their wealth/empire building.
I'm left wondering how to contribute positively to the movement that we voted for. Keeping the eye on the prize.
That guy should be blown up, dragged behind a pickup, covered in biting ants, and then shipped to Afghanistan. Do you even know what a young Turk is? God. How to piss me off in one sentence.
In a country as large as ours, to say that we need to import talent is a falsehood. We have plenty of really smart and talented people here.
This issue is about $$$ and driving down wages for American workers. Look at the OPT program. Please consider writing a Substack on that program. It will open your readers eyes to a lot more issues with respect to bringing in foreign workers.
Further, we went from roughly 500k foreign students in academia in 2006 (or so) to 1.5 million a decade later. Most are from India and China.
This all goes hand in hand. But few are truly aware of all of this.
I HATE when terms are changed to avoid the unsavory truth, ie “illegal alien = foreign worker”. They avoid illegal alien because the answer to the question is in the name; ILLEGAL.
But also, I totally agree with Vivek’s comment about the US raising lazy workers, and focusing on the wrong character traits. Totally reminds me of something CS Lewis wrote as an addendum to “The Screwtape Letters” in 1959. Its called “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”, and includes these words, said by a head demon to young demons at Tempter’s Training college:
“The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to industrious and intelligent people. That would be ‘undemocratic’. At universities examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance exams must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power, or wish to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages, and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and Collett modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially, kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind.”
So we aren't talking about immigration without visas (Biden method), but we are talking about hiring the best talent in the world and that some how that should be prohibited?
When you work with people who are much better than you, you get better yourself. This isn't about 'taking jobs' it is about 'improving workers we have'.
I often say that "half of all professionals are below average". Going to a doctor because they have a degree doesn't mean they are good at what they do, just that they passed a test. It doesn't mean that being able to recite what was in a text book or on a test makes you qualified to be exceptional at your job.
Those that are self taught have a much better understanding of science than those that echo what academia has told them to. America is starving for experts who really understand what they do.
By the way... do you know what an expert is?
An ex is a has been and a spurt is a drip under pressure. ;-)
From what I've seen online, it seems as if this visa program is being seriously abused for the purpose of cheap labor--and NOT simply to "hire the best talent in the world." I agree we shouldn't necessarily throw the baby out with the bath water, but something needs fixing here, no doubt...
Cheap labor is when you employ people in other countries (like Nikki shoes or iPhones). If they are employed here, aren't they paid US wages (which are too low, but not pennies an hour)?
I grew up in a Mennonite commercial beekeeping family. My father ran over 2000 hives of honey bees for 50 years. My nephew runs the business now. We are not honey producers, but commercial honey bee queen breeders and pollinators. This is a very specialized niche at a critical nexus in agriculture and planetary ecology.
Even when I was a child ( 60 years ago!), it was virtually impossible to find experienced workers within our agricultural specialty.
Somehow, my father connected with a family of Hungarian beekeepers who escaped Hungary during WW2 and landed in Toronto. These 3 men, 2 brothers and a cousin, joined us every spring for 3 months during our " queen season" for many years. They ate at our table 3x a day and my father paid them as skilled workers. They became family and even showed up to say goodbye to my father before he died decades later.
Now, my nephew scrambles for competent employees. The H2-A visa program is so cumbersome and has so many employer requirements it is essentially unrealistic and unaffordable to engage even though there ARE qualified, willing beekeepers from places like Argentina and Venezuela, where political instability has ruined their lives and destroyed their businesses.
For example, just this year, farmers are informed they cannot house visa workers in trailers. They must rent or build conventional housing! Rental housing is non existent in our area and what little is available in nearby towns is prohibitively expensive. And the travel trailers I've seen are nice! Clean, roomy, and inspected regularly by the powers that be.
Having engendered such a physically and psychologically weak, lazy culture, few white guys will even apply for a job that requires long, hard days in the field, much less commit to the 2- 3 year training period necessarily to create a qualified technician. So, we usually end up hiring 2nd generation Latinos for field work and Latinas for technician work.
I have a friend here who farms 2000 acres of rice. Her primary concern is employees at harvest time. Nobody wants to work! Nobody even applies! ...and if they do, they're usually soft, plaintive, incompetent, and flighty. H2-A visa employees break the budget and are beaurocraticlly/logistically unattainable.
Yes, the visa system is broken, but from where I stand, not in the ways being discussed. It's too difficult and expensive for small to midsize farmers to bring foreign workers in!
The old saying " Time waits for no one", is exceptionally true in agriculture. Seasons change. Plants must be planted and harvested. Animals, birds, and insects breed and reproduce in a cycle. Without workers to accomplished critical tasks, our food production suffers and farmers go bankrupt.
Wow, thanks for the powerful perspective. I don't have an answer, but I see your points and your family has my utmost respect and sympathy. And you are correct; THIS is the problem that needs fixing: "Nobody wants to work! Nobody even applies! ... and if they do, they're usually soft, plaintive, incompetent, and flighty."
Hmmm...as I sit here, hypocritically even, pondering "social media" (of which this is the most "social" I care to engage in)...could society give up social media??? Social media is the GREATEST drug of allll drugs...Instant information...that eventually comes to truth or fraud. Interesting...isn't it??? It has made people become so fierce and let go of any kind of "self control". The world loves controversy...in any form. The worst is people who record crimes occuring and do NOTHING to help except get it on social media ASAP. Very very sad. These people IMO, are worse than the perpetrater. Further more, we who watch...well, what does that say about us??? Just imagine...if everyone said NO to X, Youtube, etc...how much would we love one another again??? Could we???
There are so many twist and turns on this H1B issue that I'm not sure what to think anymore.
At a 10,000 foot level I agree with Mr. Musk that importing bright, competent talent makes America stronger but drop down a couple thousand feet and you see this is just another government program being abused to lower wages (mostly in STEM fields) to increase corporate profits. On the other hand, I've witnessed the degradation of the workforce; current new hires can't stay off their phones long enough to do the work they're being paid for, when they run into an issue they can't solve they'll sit and wait for the deadline to come instead of asking questions, and the company hires people based on what's between their legs or the color of their skin instead of who is the most qualified. My estimate is the current workforce is producing about 50% of the work that was produced 15 years ago.
The American education system is substandard, pushed there by the Department of Education, No Child Left Behind Act, participation trophies, grade inflation, teacher unions demanding work from home because of covid (I know, that was a couple of years ago but it had a major impact on learning loss of our children). It will take years to correct just this one issue.
Quick example: We hired this one employee, recent college graduate with a degree in finance, who didn't know how to use Excel. Seriously, finance degree and couldn't use a spreadsheet. DEI compliant though.
I do believe our decline will not be solved by more government programs.
Basically agree with all of this (although I do think there's the HUGE issue where the program is abused--for the purpose of securing lower-wage labor--and until that's addressed, it will continue to be a problem).
For decades I've run an engineering services business serving the needs of the cell phone chip industry. Early on I sponsored an H1-B visa for an exceptionally talented Canadian engineer. The restrictions then were clear:
1. Must offer skills not readily or easily available
2. Must be compensated to US standards as documented by industry surveys for example.
My experience was that my clients used these visas extensively as well though in recent years the internet has allowed the use of technical labor directly, overseas. In San Diego, the majority of technical labor seemed to be of foreign origin. The idea that such a workforce could be sourced from US citizens seems unlikely. The wages at these sites don't seem to indicate an erosion of pay and benefits as will be supported by a survey of upper middle class neighborhoods in cities such as San Diego.
Is the system being abused? I don't know but I do know of a British national who 25 years ago formed a services corporation and then had that corporation sponsor his own H1-B visa. He was an apparently talented software developer though. If the image listing a ranch hand position is actually an H1-B visa then that is definitely a problem.
An apparently greater problem is the lax and widespread declarations of individuals as independent contractors. I've witnessed many instances of construction labor being paid directly as "independent contractors" to avoid payroll taxes. I know of an organic berry farmer who boasts of treating an entire staff as independent contractors.
One of my dearest friends was recruited by a Canadian company in the 1990s. She lived in Quebec for a few years until they tapped her as part of a team to open an office in Paris. (She was bilingual, which was part of the reason she got the job.) She ran that office for 6 years until the company decided to close it. She wasn't even really aware that the company had been paying her work visa (which I guess was substantial). She tried for weeks to find another job, but nobody wanted to pay the extra, exorbitant fees to hire a foreigner when they could get a French citizen for so much less. Obviously I was heartbroken for her as she loved it there and really wanted to stay, but in reality, that just makes sense. It should be harder/more expensive to "import" talent than to hire domestically IMO.
"... the lax and widespread declarations of individuals as independent contractors"
Yes, I'd like to hear the full debate on this practice. I'm sure some people want the freedom to work that way, and others want to be able to buy the milk from the independent cow fending for herself.
The amazing thing to me is, in this day and age—and it’s been going on for many years now—how willing some people are to utterly embarrass themselves in public.
W many laughs and catching me up w the the latest thing
Feels to me this brouhaha is an intentional publicity stunt to put a spotlight on something - e g what IS a sound immigration policy; Highlighting censorship; shadow banning; national our poor education policies.
My money’s on “stunt”
The case for the US shifting to a secure border and a sane immigration AND DEPORTATION policy has been made and has been predominantly accepted. This is a REMARKABLE accomplishment …
And there’s more info coming.
I’m with David Z Joseph It’s gonna be a great 2025! Buckle up !!!
I believe Musk is correct re the visas. However, he is neck deep in the political pool and needs to state his case and move on. Squabbles on X do nothing but provide fuel to the Dims.
They've (Musk, Ramaswamy, Trump) all said silly things. [Musk took the stand for infamously calling a cave diver involved in the 2018 Thai rescue a "pedo guy." The jury found him "not guilty," of malice at least. He was guilty of thoughtlessness too, but he was able to cough up an apology before the suit.] They will say more, and I wish they wouldn't, but I do hope they'll always feel free to speak their minds, to let us know what they're thinking.
I wish Soros and Gates and The Unseen Powers would tweet in frustration more often.
You nailed it with "yet another broken bit of bureaucracy" and "possible to hold two opposing beliefs at the same time (namely that the US needs to attract high-level talent to maintain a competitive global edge while also being obligated to protect Americans)".
I've spent the last 20+ year working for corporate America in the tech sector and I've had a front row seat to the H1B (and L1 etc) visas. Both things are true. 1) *at times* (usually during boom times when we're on a hiring spree), we can't hire engineers fast enough from the domestic talent pool so being able to tap into the global talent pool absolutely helps. 2) foreign H1B visa holders are definitely cheaper and usually less of a flight risk (to jump ship for an even higher offer a year later) due to the lengthy process the path-to-greencard (and then citizenship) entails so companies kind of have these visa holders by the gonads once that process starts. This latter point is pretty much entirely due to the broken government bureaucracy (not surprising).
IMO the correct way to fix this is to throw out the entire set of foreign workers visa programs (there are a bunch of different ones), and start with a clean slate. There should be a transparent and streamlined process for companies to get these visas when absolutely needed, and they should only be approved if there genuinely is no domestic supply of the talent needed - which admittedly is not all that easy to assess. Even today, it's not like these visas get approved willy nilly; companies do have to prove that they tried hiring domestically first (going through a 6 month waiting period during which they allegedly have to advertise domestically first, etc) - but at this point the big corporations have figured out the game and there are cottage industry immigration law firms that help them navigate these nuisances (for a hefty fee I might add).
At the end of the day, the issue here isn't that we're being overrun by these foreign visa holders, and also, *when* they truly aren't taking away any of our domestic jobs, these foreigners are a net positive to our economy because they're highly paid (on average) which means they contribute lots of taxes, and at the same time don't receive any benefits. So compared to our illegal immigration problems this is night and day and we've got a million other bigger problems as a country.
Thank you for this very thoughtful comment! You hit every nail squarely on the head. 😊
Also pinned this cuz it’s 🎯
Thank you. I thought my head was going to explode trying to figure out what I thought/ felt about the whole thing. You have cleared up some confusion,for me…
It’s still absolutely vital that the border is secured,and any illegals that have done crimes,or,are known gang members,immediately deported..in that case,the visa thing doesn’t sound like a bad idea…🤷🏻♀️
The only bad part is when they take away jobs from (or undercut the salary of) American workers. I just saw Musk's mea culpa (of sorts) today on this issue saying that we should add a tax to corporations for every visa they use and also set a minimum floor on the salaries they pay these visa holders - which essentially takes away the "money saving" motivation. That would ensure they only avail themselves to the visa option when they truly can't fill the jobs domestically and are willing to pay a premium to fill them through these visa programs. It's a great idea, make it more expensive and see how quickly the number of applications shrink.
I explained this at length in another comment/response here, but a friend who was trying to get a (new) job in France repeatedly lost out because it was TOO EXPENSIVE to hire non citizens. That would definitely make it a "necessity only" situation--and folks like Musk can afford it! :)
Yes. Of course. Lowballing employees should never be the motivation for hiring….something would need to be in place to assure that dosen’t happen….
I am in favor of these visas being granted when corporations need specifically skilled highly qualified professionals as part of their workforce at competitive salaries. I like the idea of of fees being charged to corporations when American professionals with similar qualifications are not able to be employed. I do have a concern with security within these corporations hiring professionals from other countries that may have ulterior motives to gain access to software, to steal secret information etc . And the impact that has on our overall national security.
"Importantly, what has happened to us as a society when just about any disagreement—even among allies—automatically and instantaneously devolves into a petty pissing match?"
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX This statement sums it up nicely. Blovating ffffffffffffffffffing nonsense by everyone everywhere always. WTFFFFFFFFFFFFff people. Trial ballons are everywhere. Cut out this BS nonsense and focus on doing great things with the Trump man. 2025 will be great year. Roll with it and help it happen.
Thanks to Jenna for always providing us with great musings.
Happy and Healthy 2025 to all; Happy Holidays.
Respectfully
🎯
Trump has always said immigration is for bringing in individuals who improve the talent pool and support our rule of law and merit-based compensation. To any who listen with a critical ear, there has never been deviation from that. I’m with your take. This is simply a manufactured outrage like every past manufactured social media exaggeration.
I don't know, TBH. The system is clearly broken if it's being used to import janitors and pickleball instructors. I do get the need to be globally competitive--but if we can come out and admit our educational systems are producing inferior talent, MAYBE LET'S WORK ON FIXING THAT? And let's make sure that these visas are actually only being used for jobs "that no American can do" and not as a way for folks like Musk to secure cheaper labor. (IDK about you but I'm suddenly less excited about DOGE.)
Do both. The educational system has been broken for a very, very long time. It is why our innovation requires importing talent to advance the newest of ideas. It is not cost effective to import janitors and etc. Our schools lately have provided training mostly for high class welfare recipients and it will take decades of constant raising of standards to fix. We have to continue to import talent for the time being but we must revamp education and our society's perspective on education. Parents have been lulled into thinking they could simply let the schools teach while they struggled to make a living. Today, parents have be on top of every aspect of childrearing. We need to make this societal shift. It is a huge task for people already going all out to earn a wage but we need to do it.
I don't know either, TBH, but I doubt many janitors or pickleball instructors are being imported legally. Yes, we absolutely need to fix our very broken educational system, but in the meantime there is a critical shortage of hard working, un-entitled, math and science whizzes. When our education system has been broken as bad for as long as ours has there is no quick and easy answer.
Oh, you should go through a four hour interview for a job, feeling very successful, and then find out your interview was merely to satisfy the easily gotten around requirement that an American must be considered for a job before handing it to an h-1B who does not even have the entire skill set for that job. There was consulting work done all over the US on how to get around that requirement.
Oh,dear! Here goes my head again, wanting to blow up from confusion…
I did not consider that issue…
I believe Musk ended up capitulating and admitting the H1B system was broken and proposed it could be fixed with much higher salary requirements and fees to the employers for using it. This would most likely put an end to importing janitors and pickleball instructors and other non-technical workers. It almost appears to be a contrived debate to bring attention to the broken system.
It is a sad fact that there are probably not enough qualified Americans to fill many of these highly technical jobs and, unfortunately, that is not a situation that can be remedied quickly. With the dumbing down of many Americans with a constant diet of toxic processed food, fluoride in the water, vaccines and other toxins combined with the fact that academic success is no longer given the same weight, since feelings and identity have become the overriding driver of everything. After all, it might hurt Susie’s feelings if Debbie gets a better grade in science, or children may be depressed if they don’t win a soccer trophy, or it’s racist to require that someone pass an exam to get credentialed.
I think we’re on the third generation of some of these societal attitudes prevailing in American culture (participation trophies) and until the culture shifts and assigns more value to excellence and merit over feelings and identity, and the educational system is totally overhauled to reflect that, Americans are going to continue to fall behind in being able to provide candidates in highly skilled fields, necessitating either companies bring in skilled workers or move their operations to where there are skilled workers.
SO many excellent points here! I hope it WAS contrived, and in that case, kudos. :)
Less excited as well. I don't have any tvs in my house but seems I've heard more than 1 person online say that Trump has flipped on some campaign promises already. Lol, Least that's what someone said. I don't pay attention for a reason and it's why I don't have tvs in the house.
It appears that the MAGA civil war has ended. Musk surrendered. In many ways I'm gratified that these eruptions occur (first the C.R. and now the H-1B visas). These matters need to be hashed out and in public, unlike the Dems who mostly used to move in lockstep and cancelled those who disagreed with them. Only Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden's views were permitted. [Please see Tablet's piece by David Samuels on Obama and permission structures.] While these "civil wars" are certainly discouraging to watch play out, they are great examples of how governing was meant to take place in the U.S.: an engaged citizenry is the key and MAGA is nothing if not engaged. Of course the Dems will celebrate every "civil war" as the end of MAGA; what else can a party of authoritarianism be expected to say? Expect more disagreements like this in the future. I think it's exciting. "A well-informed (and engaged?)citizenry is the best defense against tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson
I saw that Jeff Childers this morning called it a bit of a surrender; I'd label it more of a backpedal... and honestly, should a presidential appointee really be telling people who disagree with him to F*CK THEMSELVES IN THE FACE? I think if you're in a position of power, you can and should do better than that.
Absolutely he should have behaved better. As far as I was concerned, he showed that he fits right in to the spoiled rich kid category who can get his way by stomping his foot and tossing his curls. I regret that he de-monetized Laura Loomer's account. He'll learn. Or he won't. But at least he backed off, while also trying to save face. But I'm still gratified all this happened in public. We, of course, now know how to push back, put him into a corner, and make our will known. So, I'll take the victory even if it didn't play out as I would have hoped. If I could guess, I'd say that Musk will think twice before stepping in it again. My thoughts on Vivek's response are that he was spot on about American mediocrity. I taught U.S. history and political science at the college level for 34 years at one of the country's top 10 research universities. I watched as mediocrity took over more intellectual real estate every year as students arrived every fall who had never studied or learned anything of value. The literary canon was unknown to them; they couldn't find most states on a map; none of them could write a coherent sentence so I finally had to abandon blue book exams. And finally, the triggering in class began, helped along by the Chancellor's suggestion that we give over class time in Nov. 2016 for student grieving the day after Trump won the election, something I decided was a bad idea. We graduated students who never passed Algebra who wanted to go to pharmacy school. We graduated students who wanted to teach history because they really wanted to be the football coach and who never took a history course. Sorry for the rant, but the race to the bottom is still too close for me. 😩
Damn, that's depressing. What do you think (as an academic) was driving the trend though? Was it the No Child Left Behind Act? (Not joking.) Was it a state/school funding thing? How and when did we go from imparting knowledge to simply teaching-to-the-test?
On another note, I agree it's good that this little spat happened publicly and hope (but won't hold my breath) that Musk learned a lesson here.
Oh there were so many things that happened all about the same time. Here are the pieces parts as I understand it now looking back. I may have some of these not in the correct chronological order. First we had the first generation of faculty being hired who had more or less come out of the Frankfurt School and critical analysis of everything. In the humanities we saw the introduction of deconstruction which as far as I could see was just tearing up beautiful literature and poetry for the sake of destroying it and replacing it with stupid stuff that no one had ever read before. Writing classes became courses on describing your worst childhood memories rather than learning how to craft an essay based in logic and sources. At about the same time, the number of kids who should actually go to college began to dry up as the baby boomers were having fewer children. So what to do with all those empty seats that had formerly been used by all those boomers? The answer to the question of "getting asses in seats" (yes, that's how admissions directors talked about it) was to actually "leave no child behind" and open the doors to anyone and everyone irrespective of any standards. Failure rates surged among faculty who still thought standards mattered. Courses like Adolescent Literature and Detective Fiction and Women in Literature proliferated. Behavior in dormitories dropped to something close to cave man levels and administrators couldn't bring themselves to throw those kids out of school. And the number of administrators ballooned. They gave themselves huge salaries. At one point my dean asked me to serve on our "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee"; I resigned from it after the second meeting. Out of necessity, and to preserve my sanity, I not only gave up Blue Book exams, but ended up giving up even True and False quizzes. In the end, I moved to a seminar-based class, gave up lecturing, and graded students based on two things: 1) were you in class? and 2) did you contribute to class discussion in a meaningful way? Except for students who triggered and apparently needed space to grieve this worked for a while. Sort of. Anyway, I'm out of it now and there is not enough money in the world to entice me to return. Besides, I won't submit a statement expressing how privileged my being white has made me. In the end, I see some of what happened as the result of seeing students as "customers", also a term that our Admissions Director used. I'm sure I'm forgetting some aspects of the collapse of higher education. But I do applaud every time I hear of a college closing and I never advise anyone to enroll in college. Both of our grandsons have taken this advice: one wants to be a mechanic and the other wants to be a welder. We're very happy about their decisions.
It has been a while since my kids were in high school and college. But I had a sad moment of realization years ago when helping my daughter study for an exam and quizzing her on a topic she said to me, " Oh, I don't need to know that." The teacher had already spoon fed them the items to focus on for the test. There was no implicit need to know anything else about the subject or to think about it in an analytical way.
Teachers too are being graded on their test results. There might be some temptation to prep the results so that "everyone is, always, well, above-average" just to keep up with inflated averages of other cheating teachers.
I . too, was a teacher during the 60s and 70s when more and more mandates came down from upstairs into the curriculum.
Phonics went out and took grammar and spelling with it.
The new math replaced multiplication tables. Teachers had to be retrained to comply.
More and more kids learned less and less about history and geography. Social studies became empty conversations about nothing.
To anyone who had been educated prior to 1960 even magazine articles were full of errors after editing.
When the push came to add real job training in the vocational era,it appeared to separate the college bound from the worker bees who just wanted a job and money . That must have worked too well because the regular schools lost kids and funding … so I guess they tried to reverse that trend?
When government loans for college arrived it meant all the ill-prepared students could sign up for basket weaving classes and get degrees in woke culture?
By now I’m not surprised that young adults don’t know who’s buried in Grants tomb or can no longer write their name in cursive!
It was all preplanned and carried out in plain sight .
If the Department of education is
Dissolved, no one will even notice?
Wow. I hope you've sent this in as an 'op-ed' to the WSJ and NYT.
Absolutely agree. The Feds took over education in the 70’s, and then there was the whole union thing. So now we basically have a corrupt as hell union,dealing with a corrupt as hell government, controlling who and what gets discussed in schools, and it appears we’ve pretty much been forced to see the results of what happens when you get down down to teaching kids what a penis and vagina are for, at the fourth grade. And everyone gets a trophy because competition is so unfair! Democrats have pretty much ruined the country.
I think Bannon was correct in viewing it all as a childish tantrum on the part of Musk. As to a possible reason that he blew up so much like a two year-old -- the guy is taking Monjuro to lose his flab and here is a description of its prominent side effects: https://neurolaunch.com/mounjaro-emotional-side-effects/ He'd be much better off getting on -- and staying on -- a low-carb diet. Safer weight loss, more level mood.
Another on X asked if Musk was “ drunk posting” after his crude comment & threat of war over the visa topic. All in all maybe it showed both Musk & Ramaswamy that there are boundaries & to spect push back to their power. I noticed after Musk acknowledged that there is a problem after all with the current corrupt visa system, he published a very pro American, pro Trump vid montage on X.
Burned their fingers (like inexperienced toddlers).
That sounds like a very reasonable explanation for becoming unhinged. Sh*t happens to well-intentioned people too. Adults apologize and clean it up.
That's really crude (at best) and utterly uncalled for in what is a reasonably debatable matter. Let's act like adults and have a meaningful conversation rather than dismiss with expletives those who disagree with us.
I totally agree with that.
It's fixed!!! Both your substack comments and all the drama that plays out on the polticial theater!
American culture is defined by American institutions and American institutions are unfortunately controlled by the psychopathic parasitic class that has been dumbing down American education for the last 50 years. An education in America used to mean something. What happened? Was it purposeful? Of course it was.
Musk is a welfare baby of the government. Every business venture that he has supposedly been successful at is because of the billions of dollars that the federal government pumps into his ventures. It's ironic that he and Vivek are supposedly supposed to clean up government inefficiencies when they both became billionaires because of government inefficiencies.
Excellent point (the irony of Musk bit) and I agree we have very intentionally been stupidified (*not a typo). And THANK GOD FOR YOU a) being here and b) letting me know when I'm an idiot [I BLAME MY SHITTY EDUCATION HAHAHAHA] and publish with dumb default settings. :)
Totally agree with Vee. As Catherine Austin Fitts says, Elon is a defense contractor and a billionaire only because of the largess of the fed. His role is to help institute the control grid with surveillance satellites and electric cars that can be switched off the moment the driver “misbehaves.” Elon should be viewed with extreme caution on everything.
Vee, thanks for the comments thing. I think Jenna would have figured it out when she wasn't getting very many comments despite her shitty American education.
I dunno, Vince. I went to private Catholic school, so it was especially shitty. (In high school, literally the ONLY sports equipment we had were lacrosse sticks, so it was that or running SHOOT ME. We also had no computers--those actually did exist in the 1980s--so we took TYPING every year. I *can* type like a mofo, so there's that. ;)
SOMEBODY is going to suck on the free government teats all-over-the-place. In my opinion we should count ourselves lucky that ANY of those suckers show any conservative tendencies.
Typical behavior for the sycophant class is to cozy up to the government "wet nurse" and then work with her to build legislative walls to ensure the continuance of the program and that the number of future sucklings on TPT (this particular teat) is greatly reduced to near-zero.
The answer is to reduce the number of "programs." Musk can at least point to real, actual, things that exist now but didn't before he took the grants.
I think the government gets better bang-for-the-buck by buying from competitive private companies than from creating yet-another "agency" filled with non-competitive bureucrats concerned about minimizing effort while maximizing benefits.
I think we need to listen to each other and see where we agree and be able to disagree without disparaging each other. RFK Jr knows this and is a good model for it. We have a lot to accomplish and need to use our energy in the right direction, otherwise, we're just caving into the establishment control that wants us to be at war with each other so they can continue their wealth/empire building.
I'm left wondering how to contribute positively to the movement that we voted for. Keeping the eye on the prize.
BTW, I did like your Trump Speak graphic!
That guy should be blown up, dragged behind a pickup, covered in biting ants, and then shipped to Afghanistan. Do you even know what a young Turk is? God. How to piss me off in one sentence.
It was the principle expressed and not the man who expressed it that was important to me.
In a country as large as ours, to say that we need to import talent is a falsehood. We have plenty of really smart and talented people here.
This issue is about $$$ and driving down wages for American workers. Look at the OPT program. Please consider writing a Substack on that program. It will open your readers eyes to a lot more issues with respect to bringing in foreign workers.
Further, we went from roughly 500k foreign students in academia in 2006 (or so) to 1.5 million a decade later. Most are from India and China.
This all goes hand in hand. But few are truly aware of all of this.
I HATE when terms are changed to avoid the unsavory truth, ie “illegal alien = foreign worker”. They avoid illegal alien because the answer to the question is in the name; ILLEGAL.
But also, I totally agree with Vivek’s comment about the US raising lazy workers, and focusing on the wrong character traits. Totally reminds me of something CS Lewis wrote as an addendum to “The Screwtape Letters” in 1959. Its called “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”, and includes these words, said by a head demon to young demons at Tempter’s Training college:
“The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to industrious and intelligent people. That would be ‘undemocratic’. At universities examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance exams must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power, or wish to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages, and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and Collett modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially, kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind.”
Yikes!!
Double Yikes!!
So we aren't talking about immigration without visas (Biden method), but we are talking about hiring the best talent in the world and that some how that should be prohibited?
When you work with people who are much better than you, you get better yourself. This isn't about 'taking jobs' it is about 'improving workers we have'.
I often say that "half of all professionals are below average". Going to a doctor because they have a degree doesn't mean they are good at what they do, just that they passed a test. It doesn't mean that being able to recite what was in a text book or on a test makes you qualified to be exceptional at your job.
Those that are self taught have a much better understanding of science than those that echo what academia has told them to. America is starving for experts who really understand what they do.
By the way... do you know what an expert is?
An ex is a has been and a spurt is a drip under pressure. ;-)
From what I've seen online, it seems as if this visa program is being seriously abused for the purpose of cheap labor--and NOT simply to "hire the best talent in the world." I agree we shouldn't necessarily throw the baby out with the bath water, but something needs fixing here, no doubt...
Cheap labor is when you employ people in other countries (like Nikki shoes or iPhones). If they are employed here, aren't they paid US wages (which are too low, but not pennies an hour)?
I grew up in a Mennonite commercial beekeeping family. My father ran over 2000 hives of honey bees for 50 years. My nephew runs the business now. We are not honey producers, but commercial honey bee queen breeders and pollinators. This is a very specialized niche at a critical nexus in agriculture and planetary ecology.
Even when I was a child ( 60 years ago!), it was virtually impossible to find experienced workers within our agricultural specialty.
Somehow, my father connected with a family of Hungarian beekeepers who escaped Hungary during WW2 and landed in Toronto. These 3 men, 2 brothers and a cousin, joined us every spring for 3 months during our " queen season" for many years. They ate at our table 3x a day and my father paid them as skilled workers. They became family and even showed up to say goodbye to my father before he died decades later.
Now, my nephew scrambles for competent employees. The H2-A visa program is so cumbersome and has so many employer requirements it is essentially unrealistic and unaffordable to engage even though there ARE qualified, willing beekeepers from places like Argentina and Venezuela, where political instability has ruined their lives and destroyed their businesses.
For example, just this year, farmers are informed they cannot house visa workers in trailers. They must rent or build conventional housing! Rental housing is non existent in our area and what little is available in nearby towns is prohibitively expensive. And the travel trailers I've seen are nice! Clean, roomy, and inspected regularly by the powers that be.
Having engendered such a physically and psychologically weak, lazy culture, few white guys will even apply for a job that requires long, hard days in the field, much less commit to the 2- 3 year training period necessarily to create a qualified technician. So, we usually end up hiring 2nd generation Latinos for field work and Latinas for technician work.
I have a friend here who farms 2000 acres of rice. Her primary concern is employees at harvest time. Nobody wants to work! Nobody even applies! ...and if they do, they're usually soft, plaintive, incompetent, and flighty. H2-A visa employees break the budget and are beaurocraticlly/logistically unattainable.
Yes, the visa system is broken, but from where I stand, not in the ways being discussed. It's too difficult and expensive for small to midsize farmers to bring foreign workers in!
The old saying " Time waits for no one", is exceptionally true in agriculture. Seasons change. Plants must be planted and harvested. Animals, birds, and insects breed and reproduce in a cycle. Without workers to accomplished critical tasks, our food production suffers and farmers go bankrupt.
How do we fix THIS problem?
Take away smart phones, junk food, and cannabis?
Wow, thanks for the powerful perspective. I don't have an answer, but I see your points and your family has my utmost respect and sympathy. And you are correct; THIS is the problem that needs fixing: "Nobody wants to work! Nobody even applies! ... and if they do, they're usually soft, plaintive, incompetent, and flighty."
Hmmm...as I sit here, hypocritically even, pondering "social media" (of which this is the most "social" I care to engage in)...could society give up social media??? Social media is the GREATEST drug of allll drugs...Instant information...that eventually comes to truth or fraud. Interesting...isn't it??? It has made people become so fierce and let go of any kind of "self control". The world loves controversy...in any form. The worst is people who record crimes occuring and do NOTHING to help except get it on social media ASAP. Very very sad. These people IMO, are worse than the perpetrater. Further more, we who watch...well, what does that say about us??? Just imagine...if everyone said NO to X, Youtube, etc...how much would we love one another again??? Could we???
As always Jenna...you are my favorite☺️
Awe, thanks Veronica... and I for one would love to see that experiment! :)
"IF everyone said NO..." the sheer number of people we _could_ 'love' would go wayyyy down. Just sayin'.
There are so many twist and turns on this H1B issue that I'm not sure what to think anymore.
At a 10,000 foot level I agree with Mr. Musk that importing bright, competent talent makes America stronger but drop down a couple thousand feet and you see this is just another government program being abused to lower wages (mostly in STEM fields) to increase corporate profits. On the other hand, I've witnessed the degradation of the workforce; current new hires can't stay off their phones long enough to do the work they're being paid for, when they run into an issue they can't solve they'll sit and wait for the deadline to come instead of asking questions, and the company hires people based on what's between their legs or the color of their skin instead of who is the most qualified. My estimate is the current workforce is producing about 50% of the work that was produced 15 years ago.
The American education system is substandard, pushed there by the Department of Education, No Child Left Behind Act, participation trophies, grade inflation, teacher unions demanding work from home because of covid (I know, that was a couple of years ago but it had a major impact on learning loss of our children). It will take years to correct just this one issue.
Quick example: We hired this one employee, recent college graduate with a degree in finance, who didn't know how to use Excel. Seriously, finance degree and couldn't use a spreadsheet. DEI compliant though.
I do believe our decline will not be solved by more government programs.
/rant off
Basically agree with all of this (although I do think there's the HUGE issue where the program is abused--for the purpose of securing lower-wage labor--and until that's addressed, it will continue to be a problem).
For decades I've run an engineering services business serving the needs of the cell phone chip industry. Early on I sponsored an H1-B visa for an exceptionally talented Canadian engineer. The restrictions then were clear:
1. Must offer skills not readily or easily available
2. Must be compensated to US standards as documented by industry surveys for example.
My experience was that my clients used these visas extensively as well though in recent years the internet has allowed the use of technical labor directly, overseas. In San Diego, the majority of technical labor seemed to be of foreign origin. The idea that such a workforce could be sourced from US citizens seems unlikely. The wages at these sites don't seem to indicate an erosion of pay and benefits as will be supported by a survey of upper middle class neighborhoods in cities such as San Diego.
Is the system being abused? I don't know but I do know of a British national who 25 years ago formed a services corporation and then had that corporation sponsor his own H1-B visa. He was an apparently talented software developer though. If the image listing a ranch hand position is actually an H1-B visa then that is definitely a problem.
An apparently greater problem is the lax and widespread declarations of individuals as independent contractors. I've witnessed many instances of construction labor being paid directly as "independent contractors" to avoid payroll taxes. I know of an organic berry farmer who boasts of treating an entire staff as independent contractors.
One of my dearest friends was recruited by a Canadian company in the 1990s. She lived in Quebec for a few years until they tapped her as part of a team to open an office in Paris. (She was bilingual, which was part of the reason she got the job.) She ran that office for 6 years until the company decided to close it. She wasn't even really aware that the company had been paying her work visa (which I guess was substantial). She tried for weeks to find another job, but nobody wanted to pay the extra, exorbitant fees to hire a foreigner when they could get a French citizen for so much less. Obviously I was heartbroken for her as she loved it there and really wanted to stay, but in reality, that just makes sense. It should be harder/more expensive to "import" talent than to hire domestically IMO.
"... the lax and widespread declarations of individuals as independent contractors"
Yes, I'd like to hear the full debate on this practice. I'm sure some people want the freedom to work that way, and others want to be able to buy the milk from the independent cow fending for herself.
The amazing thing to me is, in this day and age—and it’s been going on for many years now—how willing some people are to utterly embarrass themselves in public.
There is no such thing as shame anymore.
Haha 🤣 brilliant observation
a great article
W many laughs and catching me up w the the latest thing
Feels to me this brouhaha is an intentional publicity stunt to put a spotlight on something - e g what IS a sound immigration policy; Highlighting censorship; shadow banning; national our poor education policies.
My money’s on “stunt”
The case for the US shifting to a secure border and a sane immigration AND DEPORTATION policy has been made and has been predominantly accepted. This is a REMARKABLE accomplishment …
And there’s more info coming.
I’m with David Z Joseph It’s gonna be a great 2025! Buckle up !!!
Sorry for the errors above - accidentally posted itself during an edit …
Only half of my posts are intentional.
Ha!
And it appears to be happening through Europe as well(c.f. Peter Immanuelson)
I believe Musk is correct re the visas. However, he is neck deep in the political pool and needs to state his case and move on. Squabbles on X do nothing but provide fuel to the Dims.
🎯
They've (Musk, Ramaswamy, Trump) all said silly things. [Musk took the stand for infamously calling a cave diver involved in the 2018 Thai rescue a "pedo guy." The jury found him "not guilty," of malice at least. He was guilty of thoughtlessness too, but he was able to cough up an apology before the suit.] They will say more, and I wish they wouldn't, but I do hope they'll always feel free to speak their minds, to let us know what they're thinking.
I wish Soros and Gates and The Unseen Powers would tweet in frustration more often.