The Great Christmas H1B War of 2024

A heartwarming holiday migration politics miracle

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,

Not a peep could be a heard, not even a mouse,

For every tech bro and chud, and all the Pajeets,

Were glued to their phones, waging total war with mean tweets.

For the last week the only thing anyone on Twitter – and, by extension, the rest of the Internet – has been talking about is the H1B visa.

The fun started when Sriram Krishnan, brought on by the incoming Trump administration as an Artificial Intelligence policy advisor, mused about lifting country caps on the widely reviled H1B visa. This elicited enthusiastic support from a chorus of tech CEOs, who insisted that there is a severe shortage of skilled engineers in the United States and, presumably, the West more generally, which can only be met by poaching the ‘best and brightest’ of the world’s ‘elite human capital’ and importing it by the imperial ton.

Predictably – predictable to anyone who’s been paying attention, which apparently does not include tech CEOs – the tech bros running with this sentiment slammed face-first into a hard granite wall of

This unexpected collision with political reality knocked the tech CEOs right on their asses, where they sat with halos of little dollar signs orbiting their concussed heads as they blinked in bewilderment that anyone could oppose capitalist meritocracy. Isn’t America basically a Major League Baseball team? Doesn’t America want to win? Don’t Americans understand that winning means hiring the best talent, wherever it can be found, without prejudice for creed or colour or national origin? Don’t Americans understand how the game is played? Are Americans, unlike the tech bros who are all very smart, simply stupid? Are Americans subtarded?

Clearly this must be the case, the tech bros insisted with increasingly naked truculence. America’s culture of valourizing the prom queen over the valedictorian, the jock over the nerd, of spending their childhood doing things other than homework-maxing, is why Americans are so clueless when it comes to engineering, and that general inbred Yankee don’t-know-how is why they’re forced, with tears of regret in their eyes, to recruit H1Bs from the degree mills of the subcontinent, at 60% of the wages an American would be paid for the ‘equivalent’ (i.e., of incomparably superior quality) work.

This tweet, which he appears to have deleted, ended Ramaswamy’s political career (Twitter search didn’t pull the tweet up, so I thought it had been deleted. My bad).

For context.

Predictably, this didn’t go over well.

The chuds, it turns out, understand all of these arguments perfectly well.

They simply don’t care.

The chuds don’t care because, for the chuds, this is not a matter of ‘economics’, of Big Line Go Up. It is a question of their homeland, what is happening to it, and whether they even get to have one. It is about being ethnically replaced. It is about being relentlessly undercut by the cheap labour of bargain-basement aliens, whose presence en masse makes it harder to get a job, depresses the wages of what jobs you can get, and inflates the cost of housing. It is about being expected to work twice as hard as your grandfather for half the standard of living. It is about decades of affirmative action policies which have frustrated young white men at every step of their lives, from being treated like defective girls in elementary school, to being made to affirm that their ancestors were genocidal racists in high school, to being deprioritized for admissions, scholarships, internships, and mentoring in college, to being discriminated against in hiring and passed over for promotions in the workplace, all while being expected to clap like trained seals for their own dispossession while being gaslit that that they are not being dispossessed and if they’re having problems it must be their fault because they just suck and clearly the women and the immigrants are just better than them.

All of this has gone right over the heads of the tech bros, who after all are from a class of people who have done quite well for themselves during the Long Recession, and who generally live as anywheres, as citizens of the world, equally at home in AirBnBs from Shanghai to Seattle. It’s Haidt’s moral foundations all over again: the chuds understand economics perfectly well, but have a worldview that is not limited to double-entry bookkeeping and quarterly investment reports. The tech CEOs are morally retarded: like the blind or the deaf or perhaps most tragically of all like my cousin who was born without a sense of smell, they cannot parse arguments that arise from the evidence of the senses they do not possess. The sense of having a homeland, a place in which you belong, in which you can be surrounded by people like you, whom you can understand implicitly, is full of unquantifiable intangibles that cannot be exported to .csv. Kipling’s Stranger exists to them only as a series of character tokens to be fed into the LLM’s training data.

The Stranger within my gate,

He may be true or kind,

But he does not talk my talk—

I cannot feel his mind.

I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,

But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock

They may do ill or well,

But they tell the lies I am wonted to,

They are used to the lies I tell.

And we do not need interpreters

When we go to buy and sell...

- Kipling, The Stranger

For several long days the tech bros cluelessly carried on debating the question on grounds that are wholly irrelevant to the concerns of people who could not care less about the bottom lines of the tech sector, because one does not debate the continued existence of one’s homeland, nor does one accept the premises of those who posit that continued existence as a question to be balanced against short term pecuniary interests.

An important component of this is simply trust. H1Bs, the tech bros insist, are only for bringing over top talent – a few thousand of the world’s smartest engineers. What could be wrong with that? And the truth is that there is very little wrong with that, and almost no one actually has a problem with that ... but absolutely no one believes them when they say that. Long and bitter experience has demonstrated time after time that small concessions invariably become the camel’s nose of demographic change. From the 1965 immigration act that Americans were promised would not alter the country’s demographics to Reagan’s amnesty for illegal immigrants that categorically did not lead to either E-Verify or a closed border, Americans have been lied to time and again on this question. To say nothing of all the wonderful design and engineering jobs that Americans were promised would replace the manufacturing jobs that were shipped across the ocean, when what they actually received was rust and oxycontin. Trust is nonexistent.

The chuds may not particularly care about the economic arguments for H1Bs, but they were perfectly capable of dominating that part of the debate. When tech CEOs tried to argue that there are vast economic benefits from all of the innovation that their elite human capital would bring to the US, people pointed out that what they really meant was ‘indentured workers who can’t change jobs and are employed at well below market rates’.

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Others pointed out that the supposed shortage of skilled engineers is belied by years of tech layoffs.

Other anons spammed screenshots from the federal H1B database showing case after case of H1Bs being brought in as janitors, cooks, secretaries, administrative assistants, 7-11 cashiers, even pickleball coaches, along of course with every entry-level intern position you can think of. This is very familiar to Canadians, who were told we were getting doctors and engineers, when what we actually got were Tim Horton’s workers, Uber drivers, truckers tikka masala (who cannot drive and have turned our highways into death traps), and real estate scams.

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Now, one can say that such examples are mere anecdata cherry-picked from the H1B database, and certainly there’s something to that – the pickleball coach was a solitary and particularly egregious incident, which is why it got shared around as much as it did. Fortunately, Robert Sterling went and performed a quantitative analysis of the full H1B database, and the results were actually quite shocking.

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It turns out, for example, that despite being capped at around 85,000 per year, the Biden administration was routinely bringing in ten times this number applications for ten times this number are routinely approved¹. Since we have been assured that the H1B program is only bringing in the top 0.01% of the best and brightest of the planet’s elite human capital, we come to the remarkable conclusion that the Earth contains an incredible eight billion software engineers. Who knew? The analysis also finds that H1Bs are paid well below market rates, are predominantly concentrated in entry and mid-level positions in a tech sector which has been undergoing rounds of mass layoffs (with financial services as the runners up), and that while most of the companies using them are household names (Google, IBM, Amazon) quite a large number are awarded to Indian-run ‘consulting’ firms such as Cognizant or Tata which exist solely to profit off of the skim from labour arbitrage.

While the nationalist right and the tech right were debating the economics of H1B labour, the elite human capital that the tech CEOs were defending decided that this would be the ideal opportunity to boast about how they are, in fact, replacing the inbred lazy ungrateful stupid white people, that this is conquest, that it is revenge for the British Raj and the theft of 45 trillion dollars and the uneven and unwelcome adoption of flush toilets, that America doesn’t really belong to you because you’re an illegal immigrant too, that white girls love the giant brown cock, and that they WILL NOT REDEEM. The outpouring of resentful vitriol from Hindu Hasbara that the Internet was treated to was particularly psychotic even for a mob that has gotten a reputation as the Internet’s flock of noisome seagulls.

POV your tweet has gotten shared in a Gujarati group chat.

This reaction of the elite human capital was gasoline liberally squirted on a raging dumpster fire, which was extremely unhelpful to the case the tech CEOs were failing to make. Among other tactics, the tech bros tried calling their opponents ‘racist’; the slur has almost entirely lost its power, but it’s especially difficult to feel the sting of it when the people against whom one is being accused of doing a racism are observably saying the most vile things about you.

It really would have been a very good time for them to be quiet. Unfortunately, the elite human capitalists could not help themselves, because they come from a culture in which the mental habits inculcated by thousands of years inside a brutal caste system (what was that about racism?) force everyone into the role of either abused or abuser. One is either in an inferior position, in which case one is expected to be obsequious, servile, slavish, bootlicking, and sycophantic; or one is in a superior position, in which case one must be tyrannical, sadistic, and rapacious. There is no in between. If in an inferior position, one can only survive the impositions of the superior by being crafty, by lying, by being lazy – doing as little as one can get away with, exaggerating what one has done, obeying instructions to their strict letter while ignoring their spirit, and never, ever taking initiative. If in a superior position, one knows implicitly that all of one’s inferiors are backstabbing, shiftless, deceitful little wretches, and treats them accordingly. That may have sounded harsh to you. If so, read this from Jayant Bhandari, an Indian who’s lived in the West for some time: It’s Worse Than You Think. All of the above is lifted straight from his description and diagnosis. If anything, I toned it down.

Outsourcing, DEI preferences, immigrant tax breaks, ethnic hiring mafias, and all the rest of the little advantages that have enabled Indians to gain a foothold in Western countries have given them their first taste of power and success in several centuries, and the few drops of this sweet, intoxicating nectar that they have been allowed have apparently sufficed, sometime in the last few years, to flip the switch in the collective brain of Bharat vis a vis its relationship with the West from ‘abused’ to ‘abuser’. As a result they have been rampaging across the Internet, blithely unconcerned by the fatal damage their horrifying behaviour is doing to both their national brand, and to the discursive influence of the only people who are keeping the migration pipeline open.

This made the debate even more rancorous, widening its scope from the conflict between private economic interests and the dignity of the nation’s workers, to include questions about the desirability of demographic change and the cultural change that invariably follows. Does America want to become more like India? Is that in anyone’s best interests? Is India anyone’s idea of an improvement over, well, anywhere?

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect clusterfuck.

Or, for that matter, a more inspiring Christmas miracle.

The immigration debate changed this week, not only in the US, but everywhere in the English-speaking world, and I think that change will be permanent.

For years now the immigration debate has circled almost exclusively around undocumented, irregular migration: border-jumping illegals in the US, asylum seeking sub-Saharans and Arabs in Europe. Supporters of irregular migration usually invoke humanitarian concerns – the poor children are fleeing war, or crushing poverty, or climate change, or whatever – while opponents contrast this with the humanitarian interests of the natives, whom the “humanitarians”’ guests have a tendency to rape, assault, rob, murder, and otherwise terrorize, occasionally with actual terrorism, most recently less than two weeks ago at the Magdeburg Christmas market.

He was literally a doctor, by the way. Video is crazy if you haven’t seen it.

Opponents of illegal immigration would also point to the economic costs imposed by large numbers of uneducated, illiterate, and frequently criminal migrants. The humanitarians would then respond that they’d pay for themselves one day, since they would all become rocket surgeons and brain scientists just like the doctor in Magdeburg, and it was racist to suggest otherwise, and that furthermore security concerns were all overblown, nothing more than thin camouflage for the real motivation for opposing irregular migration: racism. Nonsense! Opponents of irregular migration would say. I’m not a racist! I don’t oppose immigration! I just want them to come here legally! Why, look at these model minorities, they’d insist, gesturing at immigrants from China or India, they came here legally, they work hard, and no one has a problem with them!

In the aftermath of the Great Christmas H1B War, that phase of the debate is officially over.

Legal immigration is on the table now as a topic of discussion. Cutting it off entirely is inside the Overton Window. In fact, judging by sentiment on X, a total immigration moratorium is a broadly popular stance.

As a Canadian, I’m thrilled to see this. Illegal immigration has never been much of a problem in Canada. There’s a small amount of it, either coming across the land border with the US or, more often, via visa overstays, but it’s really a rounding error. The vast majority of the immigration into Canada has been entirely legal: permanent residencies, new citizens, student visas, and temporary foreign workers have collectively summed to well over a million new arrivals, every year, for years now, and before that they were coming over at the rate of hundreds of thousands a year – roughly one percent of the population annually – for decades.

And it has been a disaster.

The argument for bringing in all of these people has been entirely economic. These hard-working, innovative immigrants, carefully selected to represent only the absolute creme de la creme would, we were told, increase Canada’s GDP, making us all wealthier. Sounds familiar, no?

In fact, this hasn’t happened: Canada’s GDP has indeed grown, but Canada’s per capita GDP – which is what actually matters – has declined since the hypermigration began. Canada is currently at the same level of per capita GDP as Mississippi, and Big Line Go Down is continuing.

Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, by the way. Source

Falling per capita GDP has occurred alongside one of the worst real estate bubbles on the planet, effectively pricing young Canadians out of the property market, and yes, that’s largely because of the massive increase in demand for housing.

Canadian fertility has fallen to one of the lowest levels in the developed world, which is of course a function of absurdly unaffordable housing and lack of economic opportunity, but may also be directly related to the increase in ethnic diversity.

At the same time that the Canadian economy is falling apart, so is the Canadian state. Infrastructure and social services are groaning under the strain of the increased biomass, which requires additional debt and additional taxation, at a time at which the tax burden already swallows half the economy, while the country just posted a deficit of over $60 billion, with Prime Minister Trudeau having already increased federal debt by more than all previous prime ministers combined.

Canada is a country on the edge of collapse, and it is entirely due to mass immigration.

There is a pattern here. One can point to the failure of mass immigration to pay off in economic growth in other countries. Great Britain and its long malaise is an obvious case in point. Australia has pursued a similar policy to Canada’s, with similarly dire results. In Denmark a recent study demonstrated that non-white immigrants are net lifetime tax burdens.

But the case of Canada, with virtually no illegal migration to blame the problems on, and its famous ‘points-based’ immigration system supposedly designed to allow entry only to the most meritorious and productive, is decisive. Even in Canada, the poster child for immigration, immigration from non-European countries has been an unmitigated fiscal and social disaster.

The economic argument for mass immigration was already looking rickety. The Great Christmas H1B War bombed that facade to ruins and then kept bombing until the rubble bounced.

The fallback position is the need for talent: for America to compete with China, it needs to scour the world for the very best. That naturally raises the question of why America’s companies need to recruit the people who built a country that looks like this:

In order to compete with a country whose people are doing things like this:

Source. Video at the link, it is very cool.

Particularly when the country putting on light shows with thousand-drone heavenly swarms is recruiting zero Indians, but to the contrary is making use almost exclusively of its native talent (with considerable assistance from the industrial espionage performed by native talent embedded within the West’s companies, which the West can’t do anything to stop, because stopping patent theft is racist. But that’s a different rant). If immigration is essential to innovation, why isn’t China falling all over itself to attract the best Indian talent?

One by one, all of the economic arguments in favour of mass migration from the third world to Western countries have been dismantled, leaving the pro-foreign labour side sputtering to a deeply unsympathetic mob about how their business model requires them to close off entry-level employment opportunities while under-investing in education and training at home, eating the seed corn of future prosperity in order to fatten the stock portfolios of foreign-born executives, and that this is what is called ‘America winning’.

With the conversation having finally moved on from the ridiculous dichotomy between ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’ immigration ... with humanitarian arguments for the former, and economic arguments for the latter, having entirely lost their force ... it is finally, at long last, possible for us to begin having an adult conversation about hypermigration. Economics and legality are distractions, chaff thrown up by one side or the other to keep attention away from the primal psychological forces that are actually at work:

The territory of one people being given to others.

In particular, the white peoples of the world being displaced and disinherited, as their lands, their institutions, and their infrastructure are taken from them lot by lot and job by job by colonizers from the global south.

That is, in the end, what it comes down to.

Some are doing this out of pure short-sighted greed. Others are animated by barely-concealed ethnic resentment. Both of these motivations are ignoble and ugly, and the people of America – and increasingly, the rest of the world’s besieged white peoples – are done with all of it. You don’t get to spit in our faces and tell us it’s raining.

There are a couple of other aspects of the Great Christmas H1B War that are worth touching on.

First, the legacy media was nowhere to be seen. The same was true of academia. These establishment institutions watched, impotent and ignored on the sidelines, as a political earthquake shattered a narrative framing that had been carefully built up over decades. I feel that this is an important turning point. Those institutions are now essentially irrelevant as mechanisms for enforcing social consensus. As Elon Musk loves to tell his users on X, ‘you are the media now’.

This has been coming for some time. A decade ago, social networks, alt-media, call it what you will, were in a reactive state, responding to official deceptions by critiquing them. COVID was probably the last great hurrah of the legacy institutions as consensus-makers. They bullied and manipulated the world into lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and all the rest of their destructive and unnecessary nonsense, and along the way a critical mass of the populace simply developed herd immunity to the mind viruses the media specializes in spreading. Sometime during COVID, amidst all the official censorship and the rising elite panic of ‘disinformation’, it started to feel like the legacy media was reacting to the social networks, with the latter increasingly driving the news cycle, deciding what would be discussed and what the frame of that discussion would be. Now, we’ve entered a time in which the legacy media simply doesn’t matter.

The most notable impact of the absence of the legacy media and its virtue-signalling academic pets was that we got to have an actual, robust, masculine, no-holds-barred debate for the first time in at least a decade. The familiar shame-and-ostracize tactics were tried – mainly by centre-right classical liberals who have been trying to force-meme ‘woke right’ for months now – but fell entirely on deaf ears, and served mainly to marginalize the people resorting to such tricks. Instead, the debate focused on verifiable fact, on peoples’ direct experiences, on logical argument, and yes, on rhetoric and memes. Ordinary anon accounts with a few hundred followers were ratioing some of the worlds’ most powerful people, without any intermediation by gatekeepers.

It’s worth pointing out that none of this would have been possible if Musk hadn’t bought X and turned it into a genuine public square. He may have been on the wrong side of the debate, but we should not forget that he made this possible in the first place. It also shouldn’t be overlooked that he took his lumps like a man. A few people got deverified after ratioing him (it is dangerous to strike at the king, and hit...), but so far as I know the only mass banning was of groyper accounts who (allegedly) got caught botting.

Second, there were a lot of people screeching that this was a fatal MAGA crackup, that the coalition of populists, nativists, and tech elites that had placed Trump in the White House was over, that now that the tech bros had purchased MAGA Trump had betrayed his base yet again, that even if the tens of millions of illegals that were brought in get deported, they’d just be replaced with huge numbers of Indians that would be brought in ‘legally’, that this was the plan all along. A lot of this kind of talk seemed like it was almost gloating, as though they were at some level happy to be betrayed ... they were expecting to lose, hoping to lose, and oh, look at this, thank God, we’ve lost, we told you, there’s no hope!

So far as that goes, it’s too early to tell, but frankly, I think this is simply wrong. The Christmas H1B War was essentially a negotiation between two factions, and over the course of the debate, the tech bros got routed. They lost every single argument they tried to make, even as political opposition to the continued existence of the H1B program – and to the usage of foreign labour in general – snowballed to monstrous proportions. They failed to read the room, and when they finally did, they found the people in that room to be universally hostile. They squared off against MAGA, which quite clearly had not been bought, and they lost. Decisively.

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It’s worth pointing out that the alliance between the tech right and the new right is one of both convenience and necessity. The left offers the tech bros mandatory DEI and ESG that will destroy their companies’ productivity, and unrealized capital gains taxes that will annihilate whatever’s left of the tech ecosystem. The right is happy to let them keep their money, to run their companies as they see fit, indeed the right is broadly in favour of massive deregulation, and the right asks in return only that the American tech industry employ Americans, pay them well, and not serve as a vector for unwelcome demographic change.

The coalition is far from a perfect one. No coalition is ever frictionless. That’s what makes it a coalition. The tech bros want to build, they want to get rich, and they want to go to Mars. The nationalist right wants its country back. The goals of tech and of the right are not identical, but they are also not necessarily opposed. In principle they can be brought into alignment. After all, the chuds would prefer to live in a wealthy, powerful country, while the tech bros need at least one functioning country to work in. On the other hand, the left wants to destroy civilization and replace it with Global Zimbabwe, making it the irreconcilable enemy of both.

For now the furor has died down. Musk – who burned through a lot of political capital in a very short period of time – signalled that hostilities were over by publicly defenestrating a reptile posing as a right wing public intellectual, who also happens to have been one of the only non-tech bro voices supporting the Infinity Indians side of the debate.

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It is widely suspected that he got a call.

Smoothing things over will take more than a few tweets, however. The rage that exploded all over the Internet last week has been simmering for decades now, and it is far from exhausted. Grievances have been articulated, but not addressed. Moreover, just closing down the H1B program isn’t really sufficient – it’s almost certainly true that there really is something of a skills shortage. Decades of systematic neglect of America’s human capital has discouraged many otherwise promising young men from even bothering to develop their skills. After all, what’s the point if the jobs are just going to be allocated on the basis of identity markers? Might as well start a TikTok channel and pump shitcoins.

My humble suggestion is that peace can be made for the low, low price of a billion dollars. Maybe a few billion. That’s a ballpark figure, about what I would imagine it would cost to set up a national network of training campuses designed to teach young Americans the skills they need for employment in artificial intelligence, aerospace, automation, 3D manufacturing, and whatever other emerging industries the tech sector is hoping to get rich on.

Why new institutions? Well, because the existing ones are weighed down by decades of affirmative action. They’re rotted out through and through by gay race communism. Both administration and professoriate are lousy with ideological fanatics. By all means, purge them, but this will be a long and gruelling process. Easier to just start fresh, with instructors who aren’t ideological and actually know what they’re doing, inside an organizational culture that’s laser-focused on merit, with a remit to scour the country for talent, develop that talent, and then – via direct connections to the corporate sector – provide a pipeline straight from high school, through engineering boot camp, to well-paid entry-level positions.

The institutions don’t need to a follow the usual four-year undergraduate degree model. That’s slow, outdated, expensive, and mostly pointless. Just teach the kids the skills they need, as fast as they can learn them, to get them up to the level where they can be minimally useful. Then make use of them, and let them develop further, organically, naturally, on the job.

Oh, and don’t fire them on behalf of cheaper foreigners (H1B needs to go).

One of the things employers like about H1Bs isn’t just that they’re cheap, but that they’re trapped: an H1B can’t change jobs without losing his visa. These new training institutions could offer a similar deal: tuition is free of charge, contingent on not failing out ... but when you graduate, you’re contractually locked into an employer for a certain amount of time. That might seem exploitative but a lot of young people would jump at the job security.

It’s worth pointing out that SpaceX already hires an almost 100% American, supermajority white male workforce, since ITAR regulations prohibit them from hiring non-citizens. SpaceX works with the military, and the military is leery of foreign nationals getting up in its business, for very obvious reasons. The unintentional result of forcing SpaceX to hire American has been the single most innovative and impressive corporation America has produced in decades. It is almost universally inspiring. Unlike, say, Google, everyone loves SpaceX.

SpaceX shows that young white American boys can still do incredible things, if they’re given half a chance.

Source

If the tech bros give them that chance, the shaky coalition that got stress-tested last week can evolve, probably very rapidly, into a transformative symbiosis that can do a whole lot more than just put an old man in the Oval Office.

Tobias Roetsch

Thank you for reading my ranting recap of the remarkable debate that exploded across the Internet last week. I probably could have written this up faster, but to be honest I was too busy engaging in the debate myself. Several of my tweets broke the million view level, and if my X account was monetized I’d probably have a nice little payout coming. However, it is NOT monetized, because I’m reluctant to give Twitter my ID, and because free speech platform or no my account has been suspended a few times for intemperate speech. What I’m getting at is, I rely entirely on your generosity, dear reader, to support both my writing habit and my functioning alcoholism (every writer should be an alcoholic, I’ve heard).

As always, I would like to thank my patrons for their ongoing support. You’re the secret nobility who make all of this possible. I could not do this without you. And so, to all of my readers, but most especially to my supporters, I wish you the happiest of New Years.

1. That tweet is somewhat confusingly worded.