The H-1B Question

Should we have pity on our oligarchs? And just what should be the policy for guest workers?

True prosperity makes a sound, and that sound is the wailing and lamentations of tycoons whining about labor shortages.

It's a beautiful sound.

But sometimes we should have some sympathy for our corporate overlords. Elon Musk deserves our gratitude for restoring freeish speech to Twitter and helping Donald Trump win the election. And his spaceships are really cool as well. So let's let him have a few imported workers as a thank you present.

A few.

But what does "a few" mean? And what should be the criteria? I'll get to that in just a bit, but while I have your attention, let's review why we have immigration restrictions in the first place. This brouhaha has roots going back to the fact that Donald Trump never promised to fully crack down on immigration. He promised to crack down on illegal immigration. If you wanted a true crackdown, you should have nominated DeSantis.

Why Illegal Immigration?

Let's go back a couple decades, when immigration concerns were first stirring among grassroots Republicans. I was still an active Libertarian and hadn't fully crystallized my own opinion on the subject. But I could easily tell that the Republican line of the time was woefully weak. All their arguments concerned illegal immigration.

I put the question to a local conservative talk show host one evening over beers: "Why the focus on illegal immigration? Don't you realize that you could fix the problem overnight by simply upping the immigration quotas?" He answered something about the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. That is, you shouldn't reward illegal behavior.

This was technically correct,

but not the best kind of correct.

Yes, the hordes streaming across our porous border are violating laws that have been on the books for decades. And the Democrats are guilty of not enforcing those laws. But mainstream Republicans, including Donald Trump, are doing a terrible job articulating why those laws are on the books in the first place.

When people forget why a law is on the books, the law gets poorly enforced.

Limited Government Democracy Requires Some Equality

If Joe Sixpack cannot afford a doctor, he is going to vote for socialized medicine. It's Rational Self-Interest in action. And sympathetic altruists will vote with him.

In general, when the wealth gap is wide, the temptation to tax the rich and loot the treasury grows intense. Arguing that such taxation and wealth transfer is theft only works if:

1. The People are moral enough to care.

2. The riches of the tycoons are seen as legitimate.

Both constraints are crumbling in the United States. Our choice is between social democracy, populism, or major restrictions on who gets to vote. I'm partial to populism:

One essential component of populism is a high ratio of land with respect to the labor supply. Adam Smith wrote about it in The Wealth of Nations [Book 1, Chapter IX]:

"In our North American and West Indian colonies, not only the wages of labor, but the interest of money, and consequently the profits of stock, are higher than in England. In the different colonies both the legal and the market rate of interest run from six to eight per cent. High wages of labour and high profits of stock, however, are thing, perhaps, which scarce ever go together, except in the peculiar circumstances of new colonies. A new colony must always for some time be more under-stocked in proportion to the extent of its territory, and more under-people in proportion to the extent of its stock, than the greater part of other countries. They have more land than they have stock to cultivate."

Welfare State and Open Borders Do Not Mix

For those who are not on board with populism contemplate this: we have a welfare state. It exists whether you want it to or not. And given that the US welfare state is need based, we need a high market minimum wage or the system collapses.

Most of the planet is poor enough to qualify for welfare if they were U.S. residents. If U.S. citizens compete with world wage levels, then market wages drop to the point where most people qualify for some sort of welfare program. This is not sustainable!

Total Population Matters

The frontier spirit is a large part of what makes America, America. The United States is a desirable place to live in significant part because we have a relative abundance of good land. We have such an abundance of wild areas that lower class people are allowed to hunt. (Contrast this with the stories of Robin Hood, when hunting was a pastime restricted to the nobility.)

A man's apartment is not his castle. It takes elbow room to have a true sense of property. Look at a political map color coded by dominant party. With few exceptions, low population density areas are Red and high population density areas are Blue. And for the racists in the audience, let me point out that Portland Oregon is so whackdoodle Blue that there was a TV series making fun of it.

Portland is the Whitest large American city that I have ever visited.

Anyway, my generation was implored to have smaller families so we wouldn't become an overpopulated shithole country -- like India. India would be a lovely place if it had a population density only twice that of the United States. Instead, India has a population density over ten times that of the U.S.

I cannot blame Indians for wanting to escape to wide open spaces. But I'm loathe to give away my heritage for their benefit. It's their job to learn how to use birth control. Ecotopia and open borders do not mix.

Slack Matters

Scientific progress in the Western tradition came in significant part from giving smart people time to play, and sufficient funds to build their specialized toys. The very phrase "liberal arts" comes from a time when higher education was meant for men with sufficient wealth for leisure. The liberal arts were for people with true liberty.

Our universities are supposed to supply that leisure of the theory class, but mostly fail these days. Competition for sinecures has given us Publish or Perish. Our scientific journals are overflowing with nitnoid papers. In physics, our core theoretical framework appears suspiciously Ptolemaic. And with the federal government providing most of the funding for our universities, university life has gone from creative to conformist.

One option to fund truly creative research is to pay the technically talented well -- to overpay them by Elon's standards. Let them earn some slack in order to pursue their theories. Don't limit the slack to just those with technical talent and business skills. America is willing to pay big salaries to athletes, performing artists and strippers. Why not top tier technical talent as well?

Peace Requires Limited Immigration

When we let too many people in, the world's problems become our problems. Foreign meddling generally follows. For example, one way to fix our Venezuelan refugee problem would be to take out Venezuela's socialist dictatorship.

Or consider 9/11. If we had been more racist and kept a suspicious eye on Saudis in this country, or even banned all visits from radical Moslem countries, hundreds of thousands of Moslem lives would have been saved.

Rethinking Imported Labor

With all this written, it is also true that the United States has benefited at times from imported talent. Part of our superpower was that as a meritocratic society those with exceptional talent and drive were drawn here like a magnet.

And maybe a bit of diversity is a strength. White people can become wacky conformists when left completely alone. While the Scandinavians have managed to make socialism work, their arrangements strike me as awfully oppressive. And then there is Portlandia. Conversely, note how some of the Reddest states in the US are also the Blackest.

So let's work out a reasonable framework for letting people into the country.

First, charge admission. If your corporation wants to import labor using H-1B visas, you need to pay a flat fee per person admitted, enough to ensure that they are a net taxpayer. The United States has a progressive tax system; not everyone pays their "fair share." This is a benefit meant for citizens. Guests should have a starting federal tax rate of 25% with no standard deduction. They should also pay FICA taxes, but they can get a refund on FICA when/if they go home. When guests bring dependents, the company needs to pay the local school district the full cost of each student. And they need to provide gold plated health insurance so all the guests can pay for medical care if needed.

As for non-sponsored immigrants, the same tax rules should apply, except the immigrant pays. Maybe replace the flat fee with an escrow deposit to ensure no welfare dependency, and you have to buy a gold level health insurance plan to enter.

Limit tax deductions for imported labor and outsourcing. When a corporation pays American workers, it is raising overall wages and thus lowering the welfare caseload. Also, said American workers are paying taxes here in this country. When a corporation outsources, the money spent does not get taxed as much here unless we have tariffs comparable to what the local workers would have paid. So we should either jack tariffs up to 30% across the board, or disallow expensing outsourced labor and imports.

I'd allow partial expensing of H-1B labor, since I already put them in a decent tax bracket. But I'd make it partial, because US citizens should have a home court advantage. No bringing in foreigners just to save a bit of money. Bring them in if you truly need them.

No anchor babies. We need to change the law on birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment was written to give full citizenship to ex slaves. Period. No guests of childbearing ability without guarantees from their home country that the children will be accepted as citizens of said country.

No affirmative action. Affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws should be limited to the descendants of American slaves and members of the First Nations. It's the job of visitors to make themselves welcome, not the other way around.

Clamp down on chain migration. Immigrants who want to bring in relatives need to sponsor them in a manner similar to H-1B. To bring in an elderly relative, one should have to prove that they have a retirement fund sufficient to avoid going on our dole.

America Has Talent

There is no raw talent shortage in the United States. There is a shortage of will on the part of Corporate America to develop talent. Musk wrote that he wanted talent above the 50th percentile on the GRE. Hah! There is plenty of 90th+ percentile talent here in the US that is going to waste.

In my own case I found that getting a theoretical physics doctorate was a terrible career move. I was far more employable as an undergrad. Once I got the doctorate, I had the Scarlet S (for specialist) tattooed on my forehead, limiting my options to moving to Arizona or New Jersey, sticking with a specialization which I grew to dislike. So I ended up working for defense contractors. Unlike the completely private sector, Uncle Sam is willing to develop talent.

My whiny tale of woe is not unique. I have top tier physicist friends who ended up doing sysadmin work. And judging by the grumbling here on Substack, a fair number of people here have similar tales of woe.

Let Corporate America be willing to hire imperfect skill matches which have the raw talent, or pay a premium to find that perfect match abroad.

Or, move SpaceX to India. India needs Martian real estate more than we do...