And sooner rather than later, One MAGA guy following on from Trump would vote for legalizing abortions and that would sink the democrats and their campaign fully. It’s a non issue for most republicans.
He misspelled “lax immigration policies which permitted an illegal overstayer such as myself to be eligible for a visa, as well as my white male privilege that enabled me to get noticed by potential investors/patrons”.
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Don’t worry, Trump will be a tariffic president 
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A shame you did not post the tweet. The comments would have been popcorn worthy and I didn’t eat that since last night. 
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I knew we should never have ended the Whisky War…
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Tech doesn’t NEED Indian immigrants. The issue is the H1B has become an exploitive program to give these companies cheaper labor with a workforce with less power than if they filled their teams with the available Americans. Tech has long advocated for an expansion of the H1B program for this reason, but have to make up reasons for it because “we want to exploit our workers” isnt politically viable in any environment. Those argument have always been antithetical to the heart of the MAGA America First movement, which is why they kept them quiet during the campaign, but the arguments have typically been more politically palatable than the “Americans are lazy and retarded” they have decided to air out now.
The H1 program was started post-war as a small program to bring in highly skilled workers in areas of national interest as pretty much a cold war program. It developed into the primary pathway for international students who graduate from an American University to get some work experience here while exploring opportunities for permanent residency. The issue that makes it so attractive to tech is that that the visa is granted to the employer not the employee. If you want to leave and take a better opportunity you cannot take your visa with you. That means there is a lack of power to resist exploitive workplace practices. In addition, while there is a technical requirement to pay a fair market wage, the benchmarks that are taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are very generalized and so rarely reflect the real expectations for a specific role. My job title does not even exist within the BLS database and just experimented and found a way I as an employer could probably get away with benchmarking the salary for an H1B worker for my role at about 60% of my salary. These two things are why the tech sector loves the program so much.
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Good points, all of it. I was just semi-quoting the horrible discourse and Elon’s arguments, mind you.
An immigrant and the son of immigrants trashing All-American culture and the MAGA crowd is funny as shit though. Unelected bureaucrats really are coming for them.
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They should just scrap it. But big shareholders at tech companies will probably baulk at having to pay market rate for US professionals.
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I agree with your take on the fatuousness of the advice being pushed in the piece, but caution conclusions like this. I think people put too much emphasis on campaigns rather than political environment those campaigns exist in. You cannot convince someone of something in a campaign they were not previously inclined to believe and so the margins for moving people with a good campaign are, I think, much smaller than the debate around election wins and losses would suggest. Take for instance the podcast appearance debate where Trump reached a lot of politically disengaged people with appearances on podcasts that are ostensible apolitical but have a PoV on the cultural discussions they have that lean right, and people question why Harris did far less of this. What has since come out is not just that outlets like Rogan were incredibly happy to have Trump or any of his people on while making less room for Harris people. But we have now also heard from the Harris team that the equivalent left leaning podcasts with a left skew wholescale rejected the opportunity to have her surrogates on for fear of the heat they would get from their audience for “becoming political.” That isnt about campaigns, it is about what people had come to think about the Democratic party in general.
The hill I will die on is that Dems lost this election in the messaging vacuum they allowed in the first 2 years of the Biden presidency, not in what Harris did or did not do in the 100 days or so she was in charge of the messaging.
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It is the pathway I used to start work here after I graduated. It has tremendous value for being a tool to help keep the educated, aculturalized group of foreign students who have bought into the American opportunity story, which is the immigrant group pretty much every agrees should be prioritized. There are tweaks that can be made to the criteria to keep that open as a pathway while closing down the opportunities for exploiting temporary foreign workers working in tech to make a better checkout shopify experience and silly non-national security areas like that. MAGA may agree with that, but the SV loons who helped Trump win this election wont.
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Maybe the best thing that will come out of this is the MAGA Republicans opening the door to regulating social media in a meaningful way.
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This whole thing is so dumb.
Elon the free speech warrior is out here cancelling everyone speaking out against him
https://x.com/CantEverDie/status/1872800983547560061
This moron seemingly ignored half of the campaign. Stephen Miller is Trump’s primary immigration guy and he has repeatedly spoken about the need to drastically curtail all forms of immigration with special attention on the H1B program. One of the main rally cries of the campaign was attacks against a legal immigrant community telling lies about the ills they brought to the community and rejecting their legal status. And now she is acting surprised and offended that this part of the movement is coming for her type of brown people
https://x.com/AnnaGorisch/status/1872810587274506412
There was another post I cannot find now from an Indian guy saying that while the rhetoric right now is heated, at least there is a place for him in the Republican party whereas the Dems only pander…“who was the last Indian the Dems had in a leadership position?” he sincerely asked
Uh…
- Surgeon general
- Chair of the house progressive caucus
- Nominee of head of the OMB who was rejected by the Republicans and ultimately made senior advisor to the president
- While not overtly political, Obama appointed an Indian to be head of the SDNY, before Trump fired him for investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
- The much heralded chair of the FTC is Pakistani (which is not a distinction these MAGA types currently engaging in this fight think is meaningful)
- The vice fucking president and presidential nominee
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Yeah… Nah.
It is absolutely amazing, the inclination to attack all immigration has been in plain sight for at least a year. You can find dozens of commentaries tracing through the implications of Project 2025 specifically on the H1B program.
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I know tons of immigrants here, like me, from all around the world. Engineers, doctors, IT related fields… they are a great strength to the country.
MAGA is having a war over this because they have not even begun to grapple with what a racist shit-show much of the base is.
The people at the top, with the money, get it. Bring skilled workers in. It’s good for business, good for the economy, good for the country. The underbelly of the MAGA movement - the part with the most people, is racist and nativist, so a clash is happening.
I’ll throw out a lazy prediction, just to stick some chum in the water:
Elon Musk will be a Democrat again by the time of the next Presidential election.
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