Data on How America Sold Out Its Computer Science Graduates

Immigration and guest worker programs aren't the only reason, but they're a big reason. It's been happening since the 90s, when the neo-conservative Bush Republicans and the Clinton "It's the economy, stupid" Democrats really agreed for the first time on making the economy the issue that overrode everything else. Unfortunately, by "the economy" they meant Wall Street and global corporations, not small businesses and workers. So they pushed for any trade deal or migration or in/outsourcing that meant more money for their corporate friends and more graft for themselves. Ross Perot was right, but he greatly underestimated what they would do.

If you've been in the business long enough, you've seen it happening. I've heard managers talking about how they're sick of citizen employees with their unreasonable demands about health care and vacation time, and how those hard-working foreigners don't annoy them with such nonsense. I've seen the gleam in owners' eyes when they talk about how they can hire ten nameless cogs through some company that will bring them in for the same price as one native, and as long as they're at least 11% as productive as a native worker on average, hey, profit. And that's not just in software; that's in everything from construction to food processing to service work.

Several years ago, a client asked if I wanted to join his startup that was going to sell foreign tech services to US companies. I would have been the "face" who sold our services to US executives and collected the money, and then passed the work on to $1/day workers he'd found somewhere. Were they well-trained? Who knows; he didn't care and I wasn't supposed to either. I passed, but that offer was a microcosm of what's been happening to the US software industry for the past few decades, and the US job market in general.

> If it tears the nation apart what does it matter?

If it does what now? Fearmongering that intentionally whips up nativist xenophobia might do that. I'm not seeing how work visas in themselves would do it.

> Second, even when they do have US degrees enriches institutions and people that at best about half the country approves of and approximately nobody not getting paid by them approves of the economic model of.

I honestly don't know which institutions and people you're talking about. I can think of several fundamentally different candidates.

> This nation is in the shit is is because of you and people like you who adopt or condone policy positions based on something other than principals.

You're being self-contradictory. Either you have principles to which you hold regardless of whether "this nation is in the shit", or your only "principle" is "do whatever works to keep you out of The Shit(TM)". Which isn't really a very inspiring principle. Anyway, as soon as you start doing things for instrumental reasons, you lose your deontologist card.

If your principle actually is "stay out of The Shit by any means necessary", then you have to prove that what you want to do actually works to keep you out of The Shit. Starting by defining what "The Shit" means to you. Maybe what works is building up industry.

What you've offered only works on exactly the same kind of "principles" as doing things "to build up US industry".

An actually principled approach to H1Bs might, for instance, be to convert them into permanent residencies or citizenships, because indentured servitude is ugly on principle. That'd also have the practical effect of making people less beholden to specific employers, thus reducing the negative effect on anybody they might be competing with, but that's not the principled part unless you can say what actual, specific principle it serves.

... and, by the way, for any actually reasonable definition, your nation (no longer mine) wasn't particularly "in the shit" until recently. Just normal fluctuations. It hasn't actually even really landed in "the shit" yet, although the people running Trump have succeeded in breaking its last hold on the the catwalk over the shit vat.

They can't vote in Federal elections if they're not citizens.

In practice, H1B is a pipeline to citizenship, not just for the worker but their immediate family and extended family (due to family sponsorship). One H1 visa to my dad resulted in seven additional Bangladeshis in the U.S. And my dad did not sponsor a fraction of the family members he could have.

Moreover, foreign mindsets are durable over generations: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran... ("In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth.").

> "Demographics is destiny" seems to be a quote from a french philosopher from the 1800s, while "coalition of the ascendant" seems to be a description of the coalition Obama sought to build in his second term, an idea swiftly dismantled in 2016.

But what was the nature of "the coalition Obama sought to build in his second term?" Normally, political coalitions are based on things like geography or economic classes. But Obama's coalition was based on ethnic groups. Specifically, it was based on winning supermajorities among demographic groups that were rapidly growing due to immigration. Indeed, the results of the 2016 election were portrayed in U.S. media as being the last gasp of the old America before it was washed away by demographic change.

Respectfully, maybe this would be clearer to you if you lived here, and spent the last 15 years reading countless headlines and articles about demographics, which were relatively rare before 2008. And those headlines and articles suddenly stopped last November, when Donald Trump won a narrow majority of naturalized citizens. None of that is a coincidence.

> The articles I can find discussing these things don't contain any democrats scheming about using immigrants to overtake the republicans... I don't think republicans would disagree that part of their coalition is built on higher income individuals, which they hope to grow by raising incomes.

That's a good comparison. But I think it's totally fair to say that Republicans have a policy of giving tax cuts to rich people because it inures to their political benefit. Republicans obviously never say that in those words, but Democrats certainly characterize Republicans that way. And I think it's a fair criticism.