Homework
By Mitch Berg
Vivek Ramaswamy ruffled a whole lot of feathers over this past weekend with his comments about the culture of South Asian immigrants.
Stipulated in advance – there is a lot of abuse of H1B visas, to provide a relatively cheap and, by modern standards, just a little indentured labor force. That may need some fixing.
But when you start comparing second-generation Indian immigrants?
He’s not really wrong.
You should open and read the entire tweet – but I’m going to pull this quote:
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers…[Families should emphasize] movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
That drew some, er, sporty responses from what media calls “MAGA”. No doubt you’ve heard ’em.
But if you leave aside the abuse of H1B visas, and the pretty spotty record of outsourcing engineering and software development to India (whose engineering culture is often well-credentialed but stiff, hierarchical and frequently more focused on legalistic i-dotting and t-crossing than results), he’s not wrong.
This guy – one of the less-useless voices in academia – puts it well (and again, you’d do well to read the entire tweet):
But again, I’ll pull the quote:
An entertaining aspect of the past few days’ race war is that the elite Asian/Indian immigrant critique of middle-class white American scholastic culture (“You guys are lazy af, and focus totally on playing football and getting laid”) is IDENTICAL to the middle-class white American critique of Black and Mexican scholastic culture.
As a political scientist, there’s an important point here: bigotry doesn’t just go in one direction. For most people, the more forward-caste person – the bastard ahead of them in society – will always be a ruthless, stiff, amoral, dead inside, thieving, SOB who is a trash lover. But, the more poor and rural person? A dumb, inbred, animalistic, backward, criminal, low-IQ, ridge-runner.
And it should hardly bother “MAGA” too much to notice that Ramaswamy agrees with them – modern American academic culture in general would have to stand on tiptoes to get to “mediocrity”, and that pathology is even leaking into the once-sacrosanct “STEM” fields.
But it’s not just academic culture.
Immigrants, as Reilly notes, have always had to kick it up a notch to get to “even” in America. Indians – like Chinese, Koreans, VIetnamese, Philipinos, and before them Italilans, Jews, Germans and all the others, all the way back – have done it exceptionally well.
The concentration of Indians in technology (and, this past few years, politics) should be taken as a challenge – to our education system, sure, but to our family culture as well.
December 27th, 2024 at 7:11 am
Another angle, https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1872404345003692207
Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.
When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.
I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.
December 27th, 2024 at 8:15 am
I would add that it is blindingly apparent that Indian culture (well, only that of the Brahmin caste) is being promoted as somehow superior to that of dumb Americans of today. I would ask then if India were so much better, why isn’t India a tech powerhouse? Or more precisely, why is it that Indians need to come to America to be successful?
The same stupid judgmental BS was said about American kids who grew up with sock hops, comic books, the Beatles and Laugh In. Somehow, those same kids managed to grow up and create the Internet et al
Here. Here’s another question. China (the PRC) is seem by many as the epitome of this tiger mom approach to child raising. Not only that but the PRC cheats in all sorts of ways to gain tech advantages. So, how is it then that this other oh-so superior culture, can’t catch up to the West – you know, white people – in semiconductors.
Hand-on-chin Reilly’s comments are just a more cleverly packaged (and tedious) you white middle class people should shut up. Change my mind.
December 27th, 2024 at 8:54 am
It isn’t so much the H1B visas as the idiot managers who bring them in. In the late 80’s, I was hired to maintain a package developed by four engineers from TATA, name Ravi, Ranu, ROKU and I duuno, who all spoke different dialects of English and hated each others guts.
The code reflected it.
There were four different versions of the primary key in each module and obviously the modules worked together about as well as their authors.
Of course, the manager who “managed” the project was promoted to fly all over the country and attend conferences where she extolled the virtues of off-shoring.
It took about six months to rewrite the code and two years later, we tossed it.
December 27th, 2024 at 11:57 am
Based on the replies to Vivek’s post, the culture isn’t going to be changing any time soon…nothing but defensiveness and rationalization.
One is incapable of self-improvement until capable of admitting that there is something in need of improvement.
The knee-jerk defensiveness is sad to me. It’s like the alcoholic who really, really doesn’t want to admit that they have a problem: “I can quit any time I want…remember that time three years ago when I was having surgery and didn’t have a drink for two whole days???”
Maybe it’s just my age and the culture I grew up in. I’m technically a boomer (by one year) and grew up on a farm. My mother was a schoolteacher with a Master’s degree and my Dad was a factory worker/farmer with a high school education. The best of both worlds. Dad made sure we learned a work ethic and to “work first, play if there’s time for that later”; Mom made sure we employed that work ethic in educational pursuits as well as pragmatic ones.
I started doing chores as soon as I was big enough to walk and follow simple instructions. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to feed the chickens and gather the eggs in the morning.
I started actually “working” on the farm and getting paid for it when I was about 10…we never got an “allowance” we got paid for work we did.
Got my first paying job outside the family farm (on another farm) when I was 15. Got my first salaried part-time job at 16 (McDonalds) and transitioned to working full time there as soon as I graduated high school at 17…until I went off to boot camp at 18. I’ve never been without full time employment for more than a couple of weeks since I was 17.
I’m not saying that to “toot my horn”. Everyone who grew up when and where I did had a similar experience. We weren’t abused, we were blessed to have learned the value of education and hard work from such a young age.
That’s a lesson that’s missing in the past few generations who are treated as if they’re incapable of anything productive until they’re almost 30.
Most Americans these days grow up in urban or suburban settings and parents shield them from any real struggle for so long that by the time they reach an age where they have no choice but to dig in and work, they flat don’t know how.
Immigrants who come from countries where they aren’t pampered and coddled until middle age come here with the huge advantage of having a work ethic that puts young Americans to shame.
That’s a fact whether Americans want to admit it or not and until we can admit that we have a problem that needs to be addressed, we’ll continue to suffer from it.
December 27th, 2024 at 6:21 pm
As someone who’s seen entire departments of IT folks laid off to be replaced by H1B’s from Tata, let’s just say I have a very jaded view of the matter.
Many businesses will claim they can’t get American workers. Let’s fix that. A Dutch Auction of H1B visas where the minimum salary is 150% of the median tech worker’s salary in that field. If they really need these foreign brains, paying that much extra in salary shouldn’t be an issue. If demand for H1B visas dry up because of the expense, we’ll know that what the tech bros are demanding is bullsh*t.
Yes, technically a Boomer, and definitely a techie and still employed, but I’ve seen too many H1Bs come in as lackluster company slaves to replace expensive older Americans to have a whole h*ll of a lot of sympathy for tech executives.
December 28th, 2024 at 12:24 am
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December 28th, 2024 at 6:28 am
You’d think so many Smartest Guys In The Room could actually read a room.
We just won an election based on a swelling anti-immigration sentiment. People aren’t quite ready to discuss the nuances of immigration yet.
Couldn’t this discussion have waited a few months?
And, the tactical mistakes were just . . . basic. I was initially on the side of Ramaswamy (he made perfect sense, plus I have no factual knowledge of, or any dealings with, H-1b), but as soon as people started posting the H-1b registry pages – effin’ janitors? – the argument collapsed.
Stupid chapter, one that risks us losing Musk, who has turned into the greatest Republican resource since sliced bread.
December 28th, 2024 at 6:45 pm
“engineering and software development to India (whose engineering culture is often well-credentialed but stiff, hierarchical and frequently more focused on legalistic i-dotting and t-crossing than results)”
And, just how do you know that? We must have missed your internship in Tata Inc. No problem, we’ll come back to that.
Engineering, especially software firms started outsourcing work to Indian code farms 30 years ago. They quickly became dininchanted when the cost savings got chewed up with the costs of fixing the bug ridden shit that they recieved. ow do I know that? Because I worked for a company that tried it. 6/10 times, we had to re-do the whole thing rather than try and figure out what the fuck they were thinking; they almost never followed the template we sent them.
Moving on from there, they realized they could import the substandard talent into the US and improve the product with supervision while still saving money, by having their US engineers train the H1-B imports on how to do their jobs and then shitcanning them. The losers did this to keep fairly generous severance packages. How do I know this? I did it, more than once.
Proportionally, dot Indians are no more intelligent than white Americans; in fact they average almost .5 a decile lower. After all, we would be remiss not to mention a sizeable population over there still enjoy squatting next to one another to shoot the breeze and sh1t in the water they drink. The thing is, when you’re picking out of a basket of 1.5 billion people, living in a shit hole, you’re going to find more smart people desperate to GTFO of there.
The people Elon says he is referring to are eligable for an O-1 visa; extrordinarilly gifted people. Not H-1B cube farm level critters, like me, and Berg, I guess.
If Elon wanted to start a discussion regarding the destruction of the American educational system, that’s a discussion worth having and he could have done a better job. And Vivek should have just kept his butt hurt about jocks to himself.
There is no doubt that the skill level of America is on the downturn. but there is still plenty of top notch talent out there, and a supposed lack of suitable US (white) STEM applicants is bullshit.
I can’t post it, because Wordress doesn’t accomodate pics, but there is a graphic on X that suggests only 6% of new jobs went to white men from 2021 to 2024. That’s not how you build the kind of tech prowess Musk and Vivek say they are looking for.
All that said. we still owe Musk for saving us from that 85IQ nitwit and your governor. If Trump causes 1/2 the chaos for the status quo he’s capable of, it will be worth it.
December 28th, 2024 at 7:05 pm
And, just how do you know that? We must have missed your internship in Tata Inc.
Same way you say you know it, Tom. What, you think I’ve never dealt with the Tatas before? Or with offshored development?
I keep my work off of here, and I keep my blog and show out of my day job .
We’ll come back to that
Huh.
December 29th, 2024 at 7:13 am
Everything that ArthurRadley wrote is true.
I tried to find that “6% of new jobs went to white men” graphic because I’ve seen it too. Not successful. On the other hand, ZeroHedge has been harping on this closely related finding: not only has all job creation in the past 4 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers, but there has been negative job-creation for native born workers since December 2019! Those numbers come from our own government.
December 29th, 2024 at 7:17 am
I guess I forgot the opening quotes on that link
http://www.zerohedge.com/markets/inside-most-ridiculous-jobs-report-years
December 29th, 2024 at 8:22 am
Curiouser and curiouser.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bombshell-report-that-only-6-of-new-corporate-hires-are-white
December 29th, 2024 at 9:13 am
I have no experience or credentials relevant to the conversation. I don’t know anything about it at all, which makes me like a juror in a court case… especially well qualified to post a comment.
Reasoning from first principles, public policy should put the interests of American citizens ahead of the interests of foreigners (refugees) or corporations (not citizens of any nation). Immigration should be allowed only If the individual immigrant is a benefit to us as a nation.
Like who? Medical doctors. Rocket scientists. Inventers. People we need. The O1 Genius visa people. They get permanent status. Just them. Not their extended family clan.
Who don’t we need? Migrant workers. Cube dwellers. Roofers. People willing to work for peanuts just to escape their shithole countries.
Don’t have enough citizens to fill those jobs at present wages? Citizens prefer to sit on their asses watching MTV on welfare? Make the jobs a more attractive alternative. Maybe pay more. Maybe end welfare. Maybe something else. How did we manage before 1964?
December 29th, 2024 at 9:40 am
Big,
I don’t disagree.
Know who else doesn’t disagree? Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, Norway – basically all the countries that our leftist cultural ballast keeps threatening to move to, until (occasionally) they learn that they’ll be waiting at the end of a looong queue since none of those countries needs HR drones, non-profiteers, influencers, C-list actors or the like. They DO need people with technical and business talent.
Best way to jump to the front of the queue in Canada – start a business that’ll employ Canadians.
December 29th, 2024 at 10:30 am
What I am seeing here on this comment page is what I would like MAGA to model. Reasoned discussion. Defining terms, gathering facts to all be on the same page then discussions and negotiations to find common ground. WE do not shout at people calling those others racist, white supremicist knuckle draggers when we disagree. NO! We rationally talk about our differences. Let’s model that please.
December 29th, 2024 at 10:57 am
Mr Jones, good comments. I agree.
Mitch, I don’t know about New Zealand, but those other five countries are obsessed with bringing in as many useless (and quite dangerous) Muslims as possible, in the form of young men who have no skills and no interest in assimilating. Still.
As a Danish immigration skeptic put it:
And here we are at the end of 2024 with a totally broken integration of Muslim immigrants. More than 300,000 Muslim residents who will either live here or else where they came from with a Danish passport and Danish welfare payments, but absolutely not be part of the Danish democracy and national fellowship. Danish voters are fortunately easy to fool with “tightened immigration policies” and “policy conversations” which look good on TV. But everyone is still welcome. None are sent back because we are all here together.
Oh, and from that same article:
An analysis performed by the German Bundesagentur für Arbeit showed that 80% of immigrants are single young men without any skills that might lead to employment.
December 29th, 2024 at 7:44 pm
Trump was elected first and foremost to get rid of as many of the 20+million border jumpers as possible in 4 years. That’s job 1, and if he gets 1/2 way done with it, and in combination with sending that 85IQ cackling wombat into oblivion I’ll be very satisfied.
Did Musk’s H1-B diatribe disturb me? Yeah. Did Ramaswami’s attack on wholesome, mid American traditions piss me off? Yeah.
But I heard Tucker Carlson interview Tom Homan today, and if Trump gets Toms back, I’ll take few thousand imported code jockeys in exchange for the kind of mopping up he has planned any day.
December 29th, 2024 at 9:19 pm
JDM,
Right – most of those countries have changed their asylum laws, almost as absurdly as the US has (in the case of Germany, maybe moreso).
But legal immigration is cnot easy at all.
December 30th, 2024 at 8:38 am
Arthur;
To your point about the intelligence level of the H1B workers, a senior VP with Cognizant, admitted that they are no more intelligent than U.S. workers. It’s all about paying less than the market rate, for usually less talented people and DEI. This ties into your comments about crap code being delivered. Saw plenty of that going back to the start of the H1B craze in the early 90s.
One more this that infuriates me, is the abuse. At that time, the rules of H1B visas, stated that once the project the visa holder was brought in to do was completed, they were supposed to go back to their home country. Of course, this is where the abuse came in. Four contract houses, including Tata, would rent apartments or houses to stash the workers until they could find a new project to put them on. These companies made so much money off or these people that they could afford to pay their rent and give them a stipend. In many cases, several weeks or months passed before they were reassigned. Of course, this led to trying to put square pegs into round holes, just to get them back to work. These workers were no better than chattel slaves, but then, most of them were used to the caste systems of their home countries, so they didn’t know much different. They didn’t raise a fuss in fear of actually being sent home.
December 30th, 2024 at 11:05 am
Mitch, you’re right. I regret taking the bait, so to speak, and commenting on Euro immigration policies because those policies are really a horse of a different color compared to the US. The impression I have is that few immigrants to Europe, legal or not, are arriving to work and that is (not totally but pretty much) the opposite from those coming here.
December 30th, 2024 at 11:16 am
ArthurRadley, my one big problem with the H1-B discussion is that, as a number of people here have mentioned, Indian engineers are just not that good. I don’t understand why they’re so important and that makes me suspicious.
My other problem, of course, is that the H1-B program is totally corrupt(ed). The hand-waving, “yeah, yeah, we need to improve it” comments tells me it won’t be.
Meaning that young white engineers who are capable and hungry for work aren’t getting and won’t get jobs because they want to be paid enough to have a family and not just live with 9 other Indians in skid-row hotel rooms in Santa Cruz.
December 30th, 2024 at 11:45 am
” not just live with 9 other Indians in skid-row hotel rooms in Santa Cruz.”
Oddly enough, that’s not what they do. They get together (usually with family or family friends), buy a really nice house and pay it off. Then they buy another, pay it off and so on until everyone has a nice house. Then they start buying nicer houses.
The Mission San Jose district of Fremont California is absolutely awash in pajeets; it’s by far and away the premeir area, and I’d guess there are more MD’s there than anywhere else in Cali.
https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/immigrants-give-fremont-a-makeover-4636727.php
My moonbat sister lives there, and before she (thankfully) ghosted me on November 6th, 2017, I used to get a real kick out of listening to her whine about all the Indians taking over, whenever she took a break reminding what a virulent bigot I am.
December 30th, 2024 at 12:04 pm
I believe you, ArthurRadley, but I also saw messages like this
https://x.com/stclairashley/status/1872671451163087150
The economics of it: These body shops are headed by former hiring managers from Big Tech companies. They bring people to America, rent apartments for them, and house about 10 together in one apartment.
That tweet link came from an article on revolver.com, “turns-out-the-h-1b-lotto-system-is-totally-and-completely-rigged”.
December 30th, 2024 at 2:55 pm
Hmmm. My 8:38 a.m. post is still in moderation. The mod bot is totally irrational.
December 30th, 2024 at 3:43 pm
Bettyboop had a good point yesterday about this discussion here. She isn’t the only one who noticed. From Ace, Elon Musk and Vivek Appear to Step Back From Foreigner Triumphalism im Fight Over Immigration
There are two pieces of very good news that have come out of the infighting over H-1B visas for foreign skilled workers in Trump World this week. The first happy accident is that tensions are already easing, much to the chagrin of liberals who hoped they were witnessing a permanent schism.
The second, even better development, is that both sides of the admittedly zesty debate have listened, compromised, and arrived at a better and clearer set of positions for the Republican Party moving forward.
I’m going to wait and see how this all goes when the rubber hits the road on the 20th or so, but yeah, not including DemoCommies in policy discussions does seem to be productive.
December 31st, 2024 at 8:46 am
Well now. Here’s a timely related article.
https://thedailybs.com/2024/12/30/tech-giants-secure-work-visas-for-tens-of-thousands-of-foreigners-while-kicking-existing-employees-to-the-curb/?utm_campaign=james&utm_content=12-31-24%20Daily%20AM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=Get%20response&utm_term=email
December 31st, 2024 at 2:16 pm
My take about H1-B is borrowed from an Indian-American (now U.S. citizen) I used to work with. The subject of work visas came up, and I braced myself for a huge argument, and then he basically said my point; it’s like slavery. So my overall take is that the way to fix things like H1-B is to allow workers to go from company to company like any other worker, and then the attraction of indentured servitude goes away.
And the Indians I’ve worked with? Some were great, some not so much, just like any other ethnicity or race, I guess. I’d guess that many being on H1-B visas makes them more compliant–“do what I want on my schedule or you go back to Bengaluru” and all that. Another reason to make H1-B independent of the employer.
January 3rd, 2025 at 7:57 am
BH that was an interesting article, especially singling out three of the arguably most worthless corps in the country.
Google’s product is spyware, Amazon doesn’t really have a product unless you count delivering cheap Chinese shit you don’t need as a product.
Microsoft hasn’t come up with anything innovative for 20 years. While the platform is arguably more solid, new releases main feature is still sucking up as much of the available RAM as possible.
Looking for smart, white programmers? They’re writing open source Linux code for free.
I gave up on Windows 15 years ago for Linux. The latest Ubuntu distribution (24.1) runs at least twice as fast on my 10 year old dell laptop as Windows does on my brand new machine for work. (I am forced to run windows for work because the programming software I use for PLC’s don’t run on Linux) My cell phone runs on Linux (Lineage) as well.
Guess who doesn’t write code for Linux? Indians.
The industrial West wastes an enormous amount of brainpower creating apps for kids (and adults) to mindlessly amuse themselves with on cell phones (pocket spies). Where are the guys out there working on the flying cars we were supposed to have by now?
America isn’t suffering a lack of brains; we’re suffering a shortage of testosterone and a surplus of estrogen.