Dec. 28, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:41
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Good evening, everybody. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| It is the 27th of December 2024, and every now and then, as you know, I will dip into the world of X slash Twitter. | |
| And what did I see? | |
| A mushroom cloud of former credibility in the shape of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk around this H-1B visa. | |
| In the United States, a lot of places have them as a whole. | |
| I was a hiring manager. | |
| I was chief technical officer and director of technology at two separate companies, then a director of marketing. | |
| So I have hired probably a hundred people over the course of my career, interviewed well over a thousand. | |
| And so I have some pretty unique experience about all of this. | |
| So, we're going to go into a little bit of the H-1B history. | |
| This is just sort of a necessary factual basis for getting into the philosophical discussion, so let's dive right in. | |
| So, 1952, there was something called the McCarran-Walter Act. | |
| This laid the foundation for temporary worker visas, including the H-1 visa category, allowing foreign workers to enter the U.S. temporarily for employment purposes. | |
| 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act. | |
| 1965, not a banner year for American immigration policy, in my humble opinion. | |
| The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 shifted immigration policy to prioritize family reunification and skilled workers. | |
| Although the H1 visa category was included, it did not specifically focus on highly skilled workers, right? | |
| So you say, oh, we're going to bring a bunch of workers in, and then you say, oh, but they miss their mommy and daddy, and don't you care about their family? | |
| And then their family comes in, and Daisy Jane, right? | |
| In 1990, the Immigration Act in America revamped the H-1 visa category, creating the H-1B visa program as it is known today. | |
| This was introduced to allow US companies to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations due to a shortage of skilled American workers. | |
| Absolutely false. | |
| There's no such thing as a labour shortage at all. | |
| I mean, smart people can learn just about anything. | |
| I mean, I have been an actor. | |
| I've been a playwright. | |
| I've been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher. | |
| I have been a tech bro, a coding bro, chief technical officer, director of marketing. | |
| I mean, if you're smart, you can learn everything pretty much, and you can learn it fairly quickly. | |
| Outside of, you know, like really, really skilled, like I couldn't learn to be a surgeon very quickly or a pianist or anything like that. | |
| But when it comes to sort of conceptual stuff, smart people can learn just about anything. | |
| And of course, if there's a, quote, shortage of workers, that's what business says when they say, when they really mean to say we don't want to pay people too much, they say, oh no, there's a shortage of workers. | |
| It's funny, you know, when I offered people 50 cents an hour to work at Free Domain, there was just a shortage of workers. | |
| I mean, nowhere. | |
| No one wanted to sign up for 50 cents an hour. | |
| Shortage. | |
| Massive, catastrophic shortage. | |
| No, it just means that you don't want to pay people what the market demands. | |
| And of course, if business runs to Congress, and it takes a couple of years to influence legislation this way, if businesses run to Congress and say, oh, my lovely grime-a-waring-tongue Congress people, we absolutely need to bring in workers from Every of the four corners of the planet, though mostly India, if you've got years and years to do that, why don't you go to universities and say, you know, we have a shortage of these people, perhaps you could crank up the people that are coming out of your programs for this, right? | |
| The idea that there's a skills shortage in the country that put three people on the moon, the idea that there's a shortage of skilled labor in the country that build the first atomic bomb, nuclear power plants, We're second in space after Russia. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| And, I mean, the motivation behind it is much more sinister than most people think, which we'll get to in a second. | |
| So, if you've got years and years to lobby Congress and then go through all the paperwork and make sure you vet all the people overseas, which you just can't do, then you have enough time Since it takes years to get this legislation passed, and even a year or two, at best, for the people to come in, and then another little bit of time for them to be trained, and then you have to figure out their language difficulties, which there often are. | |
| So if you have time for all of that, then you have time to go to the American educational system and say, we need these people. | |
| I mean, a friend of mine became a good coder. | |
| He did a 14 or 16-month program. | |
| I mean, he was a hobbyist beforehand, a 14 or 16-month program. | |
| And when it comes to computer stuff, you just hire the hobbyists. | |
| I mean, I hired the hobbyists. | |
| I, myself, was a hobbyist. | |
| I started learning how to program computers at the age of 11 on a 2K PET computer and then moved to an Atari 400 and then bought an Atari 800, learned how to code on that, and So you've got a bunch of hobbyists, you throw them into an intensive training program, you can get those people into the workforce a lot quicker than you can influence Congress to change legislation and then figure out who to hire from outside. | |
| So it's not a shortage of skilled workers. | |
| And it's kind of funny to me that, well, despite the fact that the government runs all of the educational systems known to man or licenses or has massive amounts of Pell grants and other kinds of grants, The fact that the government spends hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on education, we just don't have the people we need. | |
| Dammit, why are people so stupid? | |
| This is why I'm not on social media much anymore. | |
| I mean, wouldn't this be a massive catastrophe and require a massive revamp of the entire U.S. educational system if The entire purpose of the U.S. educational system is to produce skilled, productive workers. | |
| And then they say, no, no, no, we have to go to Bombay, formerly Bombay, to get workers. | |
| We have to drill through the center of the earth, emerge in some other place in the Sahara to get workers. | |
| Why? | |
| Because there aren't the workers we need here. | |
| Well, why aren't there the workers That you need in America. | |
| I mean, you've got the government running everything from pre-kindergarten to post-graduate degrees. | |
| Why wouldn't there be the workers? | |
| Why would you lobby Congress to get foreign workers rather than lobby the universities to produce the workers that you need? | |
| Makes no sense. | |
| Not even a tiny bit. | |
| Anyway. | |
| 2001 to 2015. Between these years, the U.S. government distributed 1.8 million H-1B visas. | |
| 60% of H1B applicants were for computer and mathematical occupations. | |
| So, it's not super complicated. |
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