> it’s about having another bullet point on some stupid list to please the voters
Agreed.
> some of the same voters that were so disoriented to understand that obamacare is aca.
Disagreed.
The H1B system as it exists is not easily defensible, so Trump is basically unconstrained. It's easier to defend a system against executive abuse when the system is working as intended. There are things that Trump would like to kill by XO but which he will not kill because their popularity constrains his political capital. The less popular/functional a program is, the easier it is to justify screwing with it.
You're saying that other commenters don't realize this is a political issue. I think it's exactly the other way around: you don't realize how much political support for skilled immigration H1B abuse has burned in the past 10ish years.
some of the voters clearly did not understand that obamacare==aca
setting this aside, I don’t think anyone is saying that H1B was a perfect system, but IMHO the benefits from it greatly outweigh the downsides. We’ll see how this unfolds and what the medium and long term impact is (spoiler: people will think twice about coming to work/live in the US)
My favorite example when it comes to what’s going on in the US is the Roman Empire. It lasted for 1000+ years but it did disintegrate when the people in power lost track of what made the Roman Empire great. I am not saying this is going to happen in the next 5, 10 or 15 years, but things are definitely shifting and the world your grand grand kids are going to live in is going to be radically different from what we call normal right now.
Yes, I agree with you on policy. I disagree on political strategy.
I think it's politically disastrous to go on using H1B how it's currently used.
We need to admit that there's a lot of low/midskill immigration happening using H1B and then fix it. If we don't, then we'll lose the H1B entirely. Already you see that the H1B is wildly unpopular because of a few large bad actors. So, we'll lose the baby with the bathwater. As we are now. If H1B were used how it's supposed to be used, then it'd be a lot easier to say "hey why are we kicking out our best scientists, our tippy-top engineers, and our surgeons? It's not like anyone loses by having these people here -- clearly none of us can even quality for those jobs". Right now, that's just not an argument I can use to convince my uncle or grandfather to support H1B visas. That's a problem. Now we're going to lose even skilled immigration because of a few big abusers.
Because of those politics, I would rather restrict H1B to its original intent and then have the debate about low/midskill immigration on its own terms.
My argument is that your political strategy is bad, not that your policy imperatives are wrong :)
it bothers me that we are arguing about this when we know that you and I have probably put more though into this than Trump. I don’t believe a crackdown on H1B abuse would have been half as bad as what is going on now and the “strategy” adopted now is just pure failure. Failure that is going to impact everyone in the long term
Agreed.
> it’s about having another bullet point on some stupid list to please the voters
Agreed.
> some of the same voters that were so disoriented to understand that obamacare is aca.
Disagreed.
The H1B system as it exists is not easily defensible, so Trump is basically unconstrained. It's easier to defend a system against executive abuse when the system is working as intended. There are things that Trump would like to kill by XO but which he will not kill because their popularity constrains his political capital. The less popular/functional a program is, the easier it is to justify screwing with it.
You're saying that other commenters don't realize this is a political issue. I think it's exactly the other way around: you don't realize how much political support for skilled immigration H1B abuse has burned in the past 10ish years.