Absurdus

Several years ago, @paulg made such an assertion on here, and we tried to have a serious discussion about the fact that the visa programs he favors aren’t principally mechanisms for identifying extraordinary talent, but a convenient tool that allows employers to recruit foreigners whose need for immigration benefits gives employers leverage over the price of their labor, thereby interfering with the operation of the very “meritocracy” he’s trying to defend. The dirty little secret of early-stage startups (that Paul was a part of funding during his Y Combinator days), especially the immigrant-founded ones, is that they often can’t afford to hire the best engineers because those engineers go to work for the FAANG companies, which pay higher salaries than early-stage startups can afford. So they rely on visas because foreign workers may be willing to accept lower wages in exchange for the immigration benefits attached to the job. There’s also a noticeable tendency for immigrant founders to hire their own because of commonalities of culture and language, so in-group preferences can keep Americans out of jobs at their startups. Google “Forbes The Russia House” to understand this dynamic. And the FAANG companies are interested in a compliant workforce that remains loyal to them. What keeps them up at night is the prospect of a competitor offering a better financial package to poach their engineers. See the Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe class-action settlement over employee no-poaching agreements. The H-1B becomes a useful tool in preventing this because moving to another company on an H-1B involves immigration paperwork and creates additional risks and friction, which means a lot of H-1B workers won’t move to another company to seek a better financial offer. No matter how much counterevidence we provided to Paul (60 Minutes investigations, Apple and Meta’s DOJ settlements, stagnant STEM wages, etc.), his answer, in essence, was that if importing a handful of exceptional geniuses also meant importing a much larger number of ordinary workers who would displace Americans, that was a price worth paying. He eventually blocked us. There is a useful analogy in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie ‘Unbreakable’. Samuel L. Jackson’s character deliberately orchestrates catastrophic events knowing that people will die, because he’s searching for the exceptional person who can survive them and thereby prove that person possesses superhuman abilities. When Bruce Willis’ character, who possesses those abilities and was the sole survivor of a horrific train accident, realizes that Jackson deliberately caused the accident, he’s horrified and disgusted by what he’s done. Jackson’s character nevertheless continues to defend his actions as necessary because they ultimately led him to discover Willis’ superhuman abilities. That is essentially @paulg’s position. The exceptional immigrant is worth the price, even if it comes at the cost of displacing American workers by bringing in much larger numbers of ordinary foreign workers, along with the permanent demographic changes that result from such a policy. No argument about who bears those costs, or about the basic principle that a sovereign nation has the right to determine who enters its labor market and becomes a member of its society, seems capable of changing his mind, not even when someone like @PalmerLuckey makes it. China is allegedly our arch-nemesis in the AI and technology competition, and Paul’s solution is to fast-track green cards for every Chinese STEM graduate because he somehow believes this will prevent China from succeeding. He chooses to ignore the fact that we’ve been allowing Chinese students to come here for decades while continuing to confront concerns about IP theft and espionage, as well as numerous cases demonstrating that acquiring an American passport doesn’t necessarily erase a person’s ties or loyalties to China. The best thing policymakers can do is ignore people like him.