By ilana mercer
Billionaire businessman Marc Cuban insists that the H-1B visa racket is a feature of the vaunted American free market. This is nonsense on stilts. It can’t go unchallenged.
Another billionaire, our president, has ordered that the H-1B program be reformed. This, too, is disappointing. You’ll see why.
First, let’s correct Mr. Cuban: America has not a free economy, but a mixed-economy. State and markets are intertwined. Trade, including trade in labor, is not free; it’s regulated to the hilt. If anything, the labyrinth of work visas is an example of a fascistic government-business cartel in operation.
The H-1B permit, in particular, is part of that state-sponsored visa system. The primary H-1B hogs—Infosys (and another eight, sister Indian firms), Microsoft, and Intel—import labor with what are grants of government privilege. Duly, the corporations that hog H-1Bs act like incorrigibly corrupt rent seekers. Not only do they get to replace the American worker, but they get to do so at his expense.
Here’s how:
Globally, a series of sordid liaisons ensures that American workers are left high and dry. Through the programs of the International Trade Administration, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the International Monetary Fund, and other oink-operations, the taxpaying American worker is forced to subsidize and underwrite the investment risks of the very corporations that have given him the boot.
Domestically, the fascistic partnership with the State amounts to a subsidy to business at the expense of the taxpayer. See, corporations in our democratic welfare state externalize their employment costs onto the taxpayers.
So while public property is property funded by taxpayers through expropriated taxes; belongs to taxpayers; is to be managed for their benefit—at least one million additional immigrants a year, including recipients of the H-1B visa, are allowed the free use of taxpayer-supported infrastructure and amenities. Every new arrival avails himself of public works such as roads, hospitals, parks, libraries, schools, and welfare.
Does this epitomize the classical liberal idea of laissez faire?
Moreover, chain migration or family unification means every H-1B visa recruit is a ticket for an entire tribe. The initial entrant—the meal ticket—will pay his way. The honor system not being an especially strong value in the Third World, the rest of the clan will be America’s problem. More often than not, chain-migration entrants become wards of the American taxpayer.
Spreading like gravy over a tablecloth, this rapid, inorganic population growth is detrimental to all ecosystems: natural, social and political.
Take Seattle and its surrounding counties. Between April 2015 and 2016, the area was inundated with “86,320 new residents, marking it the region’s biggest population gains this century. Fueled in large part by the technology industry, an average of 236 people is moving to the Seattle area each day,” reported Geekwire.com. (Reporters for our local fish-wrapper—in my case, parrot-cage liner—have discharged their journalistic duties by inviting readers to “share” their traffic-jam stories.)
Never as dumb as the local reporters, the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Cuban are certainly as detached.
Barricaded in their obscenely lavish compounds—from the comfort of their monster mansions—these social engineers don’t experience the “environmental impacts of rapid urban expansion”; the destruction of verdant open spaces and farmland; the decrease in the quality of the water we drink and air we breathe, the increase in traffic and traffic accidents, air pollution, the cellblock-like housing erected to accommodate their imported I.T. workers and extended families, the delicate bouquet of amped up waste management and associated seepages.
For locals, this lamentable state means an inability to afford homes in a market in which property prices have been artificially inflated. Young couples lineup to view tiny apartments. They dream of that picket fence no more. (And our “stupid leaders,” to quote the president before he joined leadership, wonder why birthrates are so low!)
In a true free market, absent the protectionist state, corporate employers would be accountable to the community, and would be wary of the strife and lowered productivity brought about by a multiethnic and multi-linguistic workforce. All the more so when a foreign workforce moves into residential areas almost overnight as has happened in Seattle and its surrounds.
Alas, since the high-tech traitors can externalize their employment costs on to the community; because corporations are subsidized at every turn by their victims—they need not bring in the best.
Cuban thinks they do. High tech needs to be able to “search the world for the best applicants,” he burbled to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Yet more cr-p.
Why doesn’t the president know that the H-1B visa category is not a special visa for highly skilled individuals, but goes mostly to average workers? “Indian business-process outsourcing companies, which predominantly provide technology support to corporate back offices,” by the Economist’s accounting.
Overall, the work done by the H-1B intake does not require independent judgment, critical reasoning or higher-order thinking. “Average workers; ordinary talent doing ordinary work,” attest the experts who’ve been studying this intake for years. The master’s degree is the exception within the H-1B visa category.
More significant: THERE IS a visa category that is reserved exclusively for individuals with extraordinary abilities and achievement. I know, because the principal sponsor in our family received this visa. I first wrote about the visa that doesn’t displace ordinary Americans in … 2008:
It’s the O-1 visa.
“Extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics,” states the Department of Homeland Security, “means a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.”
Most significant: There is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed. Access to this limited pool of talent is unlimited.
My point vis-à-vis the O-1 visa is this: The H-1B hogs are forever claiming that they are desperate for talent. In reality, they have unlimited access to individuals with unique abilities through the open-ended O-1 visa program.
There is no limit to the number of geniuses American companies can import.
Theoretically, the H-1B program could be completely abolished and all needed Einsteins imported through the O-1 program. (Why, even future first ladies would stand a chance under the business category of the O-1A visa, as a wealth-generating supermodel could certainly qualify.)
Now you understand my disappointment. In his April 18 Executive Order, President Trump promised to merely reform a program that needs abolishing. That is if “Hire American” means anything to anybody anymore.
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ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer and thinker based in the US. Her weekly column was begun in Canada in 1999. Ilana is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016) and Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011). Follow ilana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer , Gab: https://gab.ai/ILANAMERCER, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PaleolibertarianAuthorILANAMercer/.
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To me use of “fascist” or “fascistic” outside the context of National Socialism in Germany greatly devalues whatever is being asserted, as it gives me the impression that the writer is foaming at the mouth whilst typing.
If I’m not mistaken, I think it was Orwell who wrote (in a Tribune article of 1944) that the pejorative usage of the word ‘fascism’ (and derivatives) was even then so broad as to render the term meaningless. Ironically, Orwell could be seen as the literary father of anti-fascism. I often find that when the term ‘fascist’ is used, it bears the exact opposite meaning to the circumstances being described.
The author here uses the term ‘fascistic’, which as I understand it has a closer meaning to a right-wing authoritarian situation rather than fascism proper.
Well that would also be an exact opposite because Mr Hitler and his pals were of course LEFT wing.
Bit of a clue in the party name. National SOCIALISTS.
Isn’t nice Mr Corbyn a Socialist?
National Socialism has always been a syncretic philosophy, with elements of the Left included, but the use of the word ‘Socialist’ in the name was for rather complex reasons. It is true that it was partly to attract workers and communists to the Party, but National Socialism was always of the Right in that it is and was, in a nutshell, a belief that society should be based on the Natural Order of things – a position that is quintessentially right-wing. Where the ‘Socialism’ comes in is that the National Socialists believed that society should work symbiotically, with the classes united in a single purpose, which is the furtherance of the ethnic nation, which would become a “Master Race” (that is to say, a free people with charge of their own destiny). In short, the ‘socialism’ involved here was more like a type of distributism in which mass democracy and mass industrialism would be replaced by a yeomanry class of Germans and other Germanic and closely-related peoples.
Hitler would often refer to the Third Reich as “Socialist Germany”, which was meant to emphasise a contrast to the “democratic states” and the Soviet Union, which were seen as inimical to the sort of traditionalism and freedom that the Third Reich sought for its own people.
National Socialism was not strictly fascist, as fascism is (to simplify hugely) not based on ethnic chauvinism and is practised as an extreme form of statism in which all classes work corporately for the furtherance and greater glory of the political community.
The term ‘fascistic’ is, according to dictionaries, just a loose term for any situation seen as authoritarian and right-wing, or intolerant – which in fairness, could pretty much cover anything, and so on that basis, I think the author of the piece is not incorrect in her usage of that language, though I would also agree with you that it does stylistically prompt an image of somebody who is rather vexed and hot under the collar.
Well, when I went to live in the USA back in 1990, my visa was an L-1. I’d have liked an O-1, though.