The H1B Question, “high skill” immigration, and the purpose of the modern state

We’ve got a growing rift on the pre-inauguration maga right. Elon and the silicon valley techlords want massively increased “high skill” immigration. The maga base and intellectual vanguard are done with immigration and want mass deportation of foreigners.

There’s bad arguments all around. For one, the kind of “high skill” immigration actually on the table is not a bunch of humble einsteins willing to switch allegiance to the american nation, but the product of american firms committing h1b fraud for cheap labor and indian immigration fraud rings with fake degrees, fake skills, and unprecedented ethnocentric hustle.

And on the anti-side, we have some basically low agency resentment driven fears about muh jobs and demands to be implicitly subsidized despite lack of skill or work ethic. But the bad version of the arguments or how we might make fun is actually not that interesting. There is a much more interesting matter here which is the moral nature of the modern state. Putting the corruption dimension aside, there’s two virtuous poles: is a country like the US the meritocratic center of an international labor market where anyone can come hustle their way to success, or a political union for the collective benefit of “ourselves and our posterity”.

The challenge for the borderless meritocratic special economic zone view of a country is the question of who should actually put their lives and power on the line for such a thing? Meritocracy can only exist if subsidized by a powerful elite consensus that is protected from it somehow. Politics and power are prior to any system of rights or economic purposes. Otherwise it becomes dominated by anti-meritocratic ethnic nepotism (which beats meritocracy). So you actually do need some nonmeritocratic protection of the state-forming people. The question is the extent and rights of this true citizenry over the meritocracy class.

The nation-state is an answer to that last question: you have a broad nation of people with common culture and history, and you give them the right of citizenship which is to say to not have to compete with foreigners in their own country. If they invest in their own virtue and talent, this political union achieves the best results for them. But the problem for the nation state is the state part. The state itself becomes stronger if it can renege on these rights and set up a meritocracy that includes foreigners, as long as it can count on the support of enough of its traditional state forming population.

So neither pole is a stable settlement. State forming peoples might try to be anarchist with respect to the state, and constantly innovate in organizing for their own ethnic self interest against the false path of a professional state with meritocracy. But this creates another problem which is the ethnic free-rider (consider the stereotypical resentment-driven white nationalist). So whatever innovation in state-forming nepotistic politics one cooks up against rootless meritocracy must have some way to exclude these dregs from the spoils.

Curious for your takes on this complex issue.

This is not a complex debate. Skilled workers ≠ Einstein. If there was an Indian Einstein that we really need, there are ways to bring him in. But for coders and corporate drones, Americans, Anglos or Europeans are good enough. America does not need more Patels. Period.

>>2327
Sure thats the ideal if the broad nation and state elite were unified in their interests. I too think state policy should serve my interests as a member of the nation. But the complexity is like it says in OP: the state elite takes on a logic of its own and defects on that arrangement. The ability to democratically rein in that defection is only partial. I want better answers than wish fulfillment politics that amount to mere opinion (even if i share that opinion).

The simple part is that we need to engage in organized nationalism to hold techlords etc to account so they know they cant get away with blatantly defecting against the core raison d’etre of their nationalist political coalition. But how is that sustained in long run political economy? This matters for strategy.

>>2328
>I too think state policy should serve my interests as a member of the nation.

Not many modern states entirely serve the national interest in the sense of representing and promoting the national culture. The ones that appear to be more competent, South Korea and Japan, still haven't figured out a solution to the birth rate problem in industrial society. But they are creating a Korean/Japanese fanbase, and a fan is a patriot, even if only a wannabe one. America has been efficiently creating a fanbase as well (see the attempts by the Chinese government to crack down on Halloween celebrations in China's tier-1 cities, for instance).

America's culture industry, like it or not, is mostly controlled the fashions and trends of Los Angeles and New York. Let's face it, for all the control that the techlords think that they have over the information superhighways of the modern global culture industry, they just don't set these fashions and trends.

Can San Francisco actually become the city that the american nation (and from there, the nations of the world) looks up to? Perhaps this quote about the Voyager Golden Record will prove useful:

>The greetings [on the Voyager Golden Record] are an aural Gestalt, in which each culture is a contributing voice in the choir. After all, by sending a spaceship out of our solar system, we are making an effort to de-provincialize, to rise above our nationalistic interests and join a commonwealth of space-faring societies, if one exists.

>>2329
Im glad you bring up fertility. It is evidently difficult and beyond the capabilities of the modern nation state, even when it isnt trying to replace its base population, to replace its population in the other sense. But maybe the pun is revealing. There are modern states that are trying (mass immigration states) and modern states that are not trying (everyone else except israel). This tells us something about the modern nation state as it has come down to us. Nothing has a will to live except the post-national state.

But there are historical examples of high fertility nation states, even ones that were rapidly economically developing. Whats up with that?

San francisco is already upstream in many ways. London Breed declared nationwide covid lockdown. Other cities aspire to have the same homelessness problems as SF, and if that got solved in SF the other cities would also aspire to solve it. If SF radically changed its built environment to successfully favor children or something i think the rest would follow. The problem isnt that san francisco has no power, its that they have no solutions.

The voyager golden record unfortunately seems to be temporally very provincial. In the 1960s and 1970s the intellectuals thought some kind of star trek UN globalist one world government was a good idea. In practice the struggle between nations is crucial for the development of aspirations, maintenance of cultural health, and innovation. We will never be rid of it, nor should we aspire to be. The question is how we as a nation can organize our collective will, harden our convictions, diverge from the global slop culture, and achieve bio-economic success.

>>2330
> San francisco is already upstream in many ways. London Breed declared ... The problem isnt that san francisco has no power, its that they have no solutions.

This is an argument for a new, radical ideology beyond the legacy stereotypes of left and right: a Schelling point around which a future government of San Francisco could be organized. There are present efforts to reform San Francisco government, but they are moderate small ball. I'm thinking of something more radical than what the left came up with, but very different.

>>2331
Yes i have been considering this as well. If i were to do it i would start running monthly or even weekly political meetings with philosophers, tech entrepreneurs, and civic organizers. It would be kindof fun to develop a bold new ideology and movement. I think the thing to do would be to be hyperspecific to SF. Immigration and racial stuff would be basically off the table for example; as important as it is, its not san francisco’s problem.

My first pass would be to just put together a clear platform of the absolute basics of good citycraft and then focus on organizing muscle and will around that: housing, street order, industrial space, transit, anticorruption, government streamlining, etc. Give it bold symbols and make it fun and social. We basically know what it takes to make a world class city. The hard part and the center of innovation would have to be the organizing methods. The medium is the message. This deserves its own thread.

>Immigration and racial stuff would be basically off the table for example; as important as it is, its not san francisco’s problem.

Immigration policies could be set at the city-corporation-nation level in some future state of the world. But perhaps less bureaucratically and more like, your experience in this city may be poor if you are not contributing to its development, in a broader sense than GDP numbers. As was the case in other port cities in the 19th century one might need specific ethnic group representatives to deal with group-specific issues - or risk having other people deal with them for you (the Waymo getting set on fire in Chinatown, for instance). "Legal" or "illegal" is probably less important than what they are actually doing in the city - selling pupusas on the street vs. selling fentanyl on the street.

Again taking inspiration from port cities in the past the religious/philosophical institutions of the elite were situated near the city governance institution. Having a meeting place near city hall and having it not be dominated by slop ideology would be a massive improvement over the status quo.

>>2333
>>2332
>>2331
New thread on san francisco reform aspirations: >>2336

The big question is the Indians and all their political power in the West. There was a thread about it, but it was deleted.