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Expect this to be rolled back fully on January 20


Unclear. They're not going to be consistent or competent, and the intent of everything they do will be to either part out the government to their friends, weaponize the US government against perceived enemies. And they might reward people who kiss the ring by granting exceptions.

Really, given the premise, anyone sane should kill H-1B entirely for tech:

"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States"

There is no shortage of qualified US software engineers. CS schools are full. The very concept is ridiculous. Kill this law, liberalize immigration instead.


> CS schools are full

I guess you never paid any attention to the nationality of students enrolled in CS classes.


The undergrads at my university were mostly US-born. I believe that's the case most places, even elite universities. The more expensive universities are incentivized to take more international students for the money though -- and obviously there's enough wealthy people globally to fill whatever slots they offer. There are plenty of good engineers from the US who simply weren't lucky enough to be born to rich parents in CA. It turns out moving 2000 miles from home for a worse quality of life isn't super attractive to people born in the US when your whole family still lives in the same region. Of course, if you're born in India or China, the value proposition is a bit different.

Perhaps geographic restrictions on H-1Bs would spread the wealth: force these companies to prove they can't find engineers in the US by looking outside the wealthiest enclaves in the country, where even FAANG engineers complain about cost of living. We'd ease the Bay Area housing crisis, lift up other regions of the country, and provide more domestic-born citizens a path to good jobs while maintaining their own communities.


Also, there are going to be endless, endless lawsuits on everything, because everything they do is going to violate either the Constitution or existing US law. I'm not sure how much that will slow them down.


... not that it was _ever_ used that way, since its inception.


Unlikely. Elon heavily favors more H1-Bs. If they roll it back, they'll introduce their own version that is even more favorable to those that gain by suppressing tech worker salaries.


He ran on a platform of easier legal immigration.


I think you are excessively credulous and that’s the most polite I can be.

I’m a natural born citizen that’s the wrong skin color and I’m planning on carrying my passport everywhere come Jan 21 - I’m not going to chance being thrown into the back of a BORTAC van.


I have a mixed race family, and am scrambling to get passports in time for people in my family with darker skin, and we will 100% be at least carrying good quality copies of them at all times.

They are claiming to start mass deportations next month, and profiling based on skin color is absolutely the only way that can be possible. Moreover, just like the Nazis discovered, both deporting people and indefinite detainment are impossibly expensive- leaving only one option. This political movement is already based on the idea that people different than them don't deserve to be treated like human beings, and will not be.


I think a natural born citizen carrying their passport everywhere starting Jan 21 is even more credulous in the other direction.


I don’t think you’ve thought through the downside risk. A coworker - himself of my ethnicity - assumed I was foreign born, I’m not going to leave it to chance when the promised deportation dragnet starts up.


Your concern is reasonable, and I've thought about it myself. The Wikipedia article linked downthread by int_19h notes: "Up to one percent of all those detained in immigration detention centers are nationals of the United States according to research by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University." There are specific cases mentioned in the article, and the case of Mark Daniel Lyttle was pretty alarming. It was written up in: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportatio...

On the other hand, you can't be detained without probable cause, and race/ethnicity alone isn't enough. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (https://case.law/caselaw/?reporter=us&volume=422&case=0873-0...): "In this case the officers relied on a single factor to justify stopping respondent’s car: the apparent Mexican ancestry of the occupants. We cannot conclude that this furnished reasonable grounds to believe that the three occupants were aliens. At best the officers had only a fleeting glimpse of the persons in the moving car, illuminated by headlights. Even if they saw enough to think that the occupants were of Mexican descent, this factor alone would justify neither a reasonable belief that they were aliens, nor a reasonable belief that the car concealed other aliens who were illegally in the country. Large numbers of native-born and naturalized citizens have the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry, and even in the border area a relatively small proportion of them are aliens. The likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens."

I second the recommendation to get a RealID. You're going to need one eventually for domestic flights, among other things. When I got mine at the DMV renewing my driver's license, they asked for a birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, and proof of (local) residency (e.g. utility bill). So why not get one and carry that as additional proof?


I'd recommend carrying a passport card instead of the actual passport. A REAL ID would be helpful as well.

I don't think the chances of something that drastic are high, but it doesn't hurt to err on the side of caution.


Problem with the passport card is it requires me to send my existing passport for several weeks. In the event of a government shutdown I'd be SOL.

REAL ID is plausible but I don't really trust it, given that illegal immigrants can get identity cards in my state.


> I don't really trust it

REAL ID is a bare minimum. It shows that you at least have legal residency.

FWIW it's trusted by DHS so that's all that matters for your usecase or assumption.

If you are worried about the risk of being hauled by ICE, then you should get a REAL ID.

> it requires me to send my existing passport for several weeks

Last I remember, you can do it in person.

Here are the passport offices - https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/get-fas...

> In the event of a government shutdown

The US Passport Office remains open during the commonly termed "government shutdowns"


If it's the same process as getting a passport in the first place, you have to give them the documentation proving that you're a citizen, and they sit in it for a while before eventually mailing it back to you.


more people will become billionaires in the next four years than get deported :)


A useless statement because I'm much closer to an legal-to-become-illegal than a multi-millionaire-to-become-billionaire


I wasn't talking specifically about you... there are campaign promises "we are going to deport _____ people" that you should know by now are just shit politicians say so that they get the votes in South Dakota, Alabama and shithole places like that. We heard in 2016 "build the wall, repeal ACA, lock her up..." and whatever BS was spewing at that time. the only policy that you know for sure will be in place for the next 2 to 4 years will be there to make sure that richer get richer - hence my statement that we'll see more people become billionaires than people that we will actually deport :)


> deportation dragnet

Do you know how insane that sounds in this context? I absolutely despise Trump, make no mistake; but if you think Trump is rounding up any of the 40+% of the USA's non-white citizens and deporting them, you have been deluded by widespread FUD.

The "deportation dragnet" might apply to illegals, sure. Will any meaningful amount of US citizens get scooped up in that, if any? Highly, highly unlikely. You're probably more likely to be murdered.


All evidence points to first week being dedicated to flashy arrests in blue states with Tom Homan previously bragging that they would deport both illegals and their citizen family members with no regard for the obvious illegality of the concept.


I think he poorly phrased deporting "anchor babies" by ending birthright citizenship. Since then, he's directly or indirectly claimed multiple times that he doesn't plan on deporting USCs. There's no telling whether he wants to deport USCs deep down in his heart, but he knows that's not going to happen.

https://www.newsweek.com/tom-homan-family-deportation-undocu...


Wait until Stephen Miller gets the denaturalization squad back



This is a movement based on extreme hatred and dehumanization of anyone different from them, and most of the time such movements have taken control anywhere historically, it has resulted in mass murder/genocide. We underestimate what atrocities they are capable of at our own peril. I am hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

I feel like I - and a lot of people I know - have been in denial of what is happening for a while. It is terrifying, and I don't want it to be true, but it is undeniable. I don't want to be one of those people that says "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "We knew nothing about that."


Read the RAISE Act if you think that the incoming administration is going to be easier on legal migrants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act


No he ran on an explicitly racist and ANTI Immigrant (yes including legal immigrants!) platform.

See https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko


Funny I see this kind of misguided comments all the time.

Their immigration policy is never only about illegal immigration. Do you actually think it is possible to tighten immigration policy without affecting H1B?

If you need evidence, just look at what happened between 2017-2021. H1B denial & RFE rates were way up, and the administration tried multiple times to roll out policy that significantly restrict the eligibility of H1B visas. They even used coronavirus as an excuse to issue travel bans on H1B. How is that making legal immigration easier?


Trump has said he’d like to “staple green cards to diplomas”. Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.

He’s owned by a different slice of the parasitic ruling class that, while opposed to some of the goals the Biden admin was for, still share a common theme of not caring about the average American at all. He has probably the most pro Israel cabinet we’ve ever seen and appears to be cozying up with big tech (thiel, musk, zuckerberg, etc).

If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.


Wouldn't attaching green cards - or at least temporary work permits - to US university degrees be a positive change compared to employment agencies / contractor firms trying to sneak in piles of people without such degrees and screening? That would be a good response to the issue of training (ideally) highly qualified smart people and then kicking them out.


Except he was president for four years and did the opposite - remarkable that people want to forget 2017-2021


There is that. And the idea of trying to retain new grads would already have worked 30 years ago and yet here we are.


Didn't Trump try to prevent even greencard holders from returning if they were from overseas from the wrong religious area of the world, after promising a Muslim ban? And was then only stopped by courts? Or am I misremembering that?


Yes, he did, it affected greencard holders for a brief period because it was a poorly designed idea thought up by malicious and stupid people.


Thought so. From what OP said:

> Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.

Going after a religious/ethnic minority legally holding United States greencard status... Even if he tried to hide it in regions and not a DNA or religious test, he did it immediately after campaigning on a Muslim ban in those words. Sounds quite in line with those terms except it is actually anti-American if we take a huge part of 'pro American' to mean valuing the First Amendment.


I mean, that's how you end up with Qian Xuesen and every high-tech chinese program succeeding


> If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.

This is exactly right and exactly why Trump won't do anything about it... when you surround yourself will billionaires you'll want to make this that this tiny population of capital holders prospers even further :)


Why?


Trump in term 1 was the most hostile to legal immigration President in decades and that was before he started slandering Haitians with legal status


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Silly name calling isn't how grownups should discuss politics. If anything, it makes it harder to agree with any point you're trying to make.

Edit: I had no idea it was controversial to say that name calling makes an argument less convincing.


What's grown up about people who say they don't care if their candidate murders someone on the white house steps, they'd still vote for him? Insanity needs to be derided.


What does this have to do with what I said?

Name calling is not a way to make a convincing point. That's the entirety of my comment.


The point is that making convincing points is the old way. We have a commander in chief that has elevated name calling to the new normal.


Trump can’t speak about anyone he opposes without giving them a childish nickname, seems fair to reciprocate. Going further, it appears that the leader of the nation modeling this behavior also normalizes it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Dona...


Please do! Would make for some great merch. https://publicintegrity.org/politics/mitch-mcconnell-senate-...


While it might be fair, I'm saying that using childish nicknames does no favors if you're trying to make people agree with what your saying.

I don't think following Trump's footsteps with tit-for-tat name calling is beneficial to anyone.


While I agree with you in spirit, it seems to have worked completely fine for Trump.


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Can you explain this image and how it relates to my comment like I'm 5?




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