The H1-B Controversy

 

A controversy has blown up on the right over the H1-B visa program. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to expand it, to recruit the best talent from overseas, particularly in the tech sector. Other MAGAnauts object that this suppresses wages and takes jobs away from Americans.

I am with Musk and Ramaswamy, if the tech sector is targeted narrowly. The US and Canada need immigrants. We need them because women are not having enough babies. The only question is how to select them. This is about the best way to select them. Being really good at IT, and to a lesser extent engineering, is a good test of raw IQ. This is why, in their hiring, the big tech firms don’t look at formal qualifications, but give prospective employees what is in effect an IQ test.

Aside from needing immigrants generally, the US and Canada need to maintain and expand their advantages in the high tech sector. Both their prosperity and their security depend on being ahead in this race. It makes good sense to use their attractiveness to immigrants to recruit the best talent.

Immigrants with high IQ are most desirable for many other reasons. Besides inventing things, they are likely to contribute greatly to the culture: to the arts. They will make more money than average and generate more revenue to fund government programs. They will start businesses and employ people. People with high IQ are far less likely to commit crimes and especially violent crimes. And hey, they will marry and improve the gene pool.

Those opposed to the idea in the US point to Canada, and say that Canada has tried a similar program, with our point system for prospective immigrants, and it has done nothing for the local high tech sector.

Canada’s system is indeed a cautionary tale. Unfortunately, it does not select for IQ, but for formal academic credentials. When this is applied to the Third World, where most are too poor to get to college or university, let alone a college of university in Canada, and qualifications can essentially be bought, it does not select for high IQ, but for membership in the current ruling class of that country. 

The reason countries in the Third World are poor is that they have a corrupt and selfish ruling class.

Such a system imports this corrupt and selfish culture directly into the Canadian upper classes, thereby importing all the problems of the Third World.

We need to consult the tech industry, and use the tests they have developed for job applicants, to pick immigrants.

On Immigrants and Immigration

Immigrant children, Ellis Island.

Here's a column in reaction to Trump's reference to some countries as $#!+holes. It is, the author says, a rather accurate description.

“Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country. Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.”

I can corroborate her observations as to the pervasive presence of poo. The interior of China was just like that when I first went, in the early nineties. You did not dare to eat a fruit unpeeled—too many microbes. Watermelon was always dangerous, no matter what you did. The water it was grown with was not pure. The catered food at my residence always tasted of urine. So strongly I could taste little else. Kids always relieved themselves in the streets. Public toilets were open pits. No doubt it is much better now.

I must also witness, however, that the author is wrong to say “Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible,” or “The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese,” or “The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite,” or “Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's not. It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.”

Nuts to that. Bollocks. The Ten Commandments were universally understood in their essence long before Moses ever climbed that mountain. I have lived in a lot of places. People are the same everywhere, and they have the same basic values. It is true that people in Third World countries see no point in obeying the law or helping others. This is not because they have a different understanding of truth or of morality. It is because, in such a hopeless social situation, there is no point in obeying the law or helping others. Obey the law when nobody else does, and you starve to death. Expend yourself helping others where there is such pervasive despair, and you kill yourself with overwork or starve to death.

And yes, in most other countries, family is more important, and you are expected to put your family first, often at the cost of any outsiders. This has to do with being unable to trust anyone to whom you are not related, and there being no other functional social structures to rely on.

We should be eternally grateful we are not faced daily with such choices.

Immigrants arrive at Union Station.

Moreover, most people from any of these countries would also be eternally grateful not to be faced daily with these choices. Accordingly, once they get a sense of how things work, they would probably be ideal immigrants, eager to assimilate.

Exactly as were the Irish, fleeing a century and a half ago from the famine. They swiftly became and remain the most patriotic of all Canadians (and Australians, and Americans). They knew a better deal when they saw it.

It is true that different cultures have different emphases. Northern Europeans, for example, tend to put a premium on honesty among the virtues. Chinese instead put the premium on kindness. Nevertheless, it is still right to be kind in Europe, and to be honest in China. And some things become socially acceptable, even though everyone known in their heart they are wrong. Abortion is one current Canadian example. Slavery was another. Everyone also knows in their hearts that vegetarianism is morally superior to eating meat, but most folks are not prepared to make the sacrifice. It is not that values are different, but that some sins have become endemic and generally ignored.

What worries me about immigration from $#!+hole countries is just about the opposite to what worries Trump and most others. It is that the Canadian immigration system is built to favour the upper classes from these countries. It is the upper classes, nobody and nothing else, that have made these countries the $#!+holes they are today. It is the upper classes who are most likely, if allowed to immigrate, to arrive in Canada, sniff around, and decide that things would be better if they were more like home. Because for them, they very possibly were. It is irritating to have to accept being treated just like everyone else, when you are used to being able to walk all over people. They may even, faced with this ugly new equality, complain loudly about “discrimination” and the supposed failings of Canadian culture. And it is the upper classes who have proven themselves most adept, and most callous, about exploiting the corrupt system they have left. They have more to unlearn, even if they should want to.

Far better, I suspect, to bring in the poor huddled masses.

If you want to select for only the most productive, and avoid the potential welfare recipients, fine. At least do not do this based on education, or current wealth. Do it on intelligence and hard work, both of which can be easily measured. For example, an IQ test. For example, a period of indenture, as we commonly used to have, even post-World War II, to earn the right to stay.

In other, but somewhat related, news, Kelly Leitch has announced her retirement from politics. A piece by John Ivison in the National Post maintains this is due to her “tactics of intolerance” and suggests she needs to “redeem herself.”

No way. Nuts of the nuttiest sort. There was nothing wrong with her idea of a “values test” for citizenship, and that is about all she said on the subject. She did not even want to reduce immigration. In effect, we already have this: we require an oath of citizenship. It might not do much, but it is hardy unreasonable. Sure, people can and will lie, but for a lot of people, the real issue is to be properly. clearly informed of what the expectations are, and they will be happy to sign on. They cannot be faulted if we do not let them know.

What goes in to the citizenship test? Not a puzzle; not controversial. It can mostly be extracted from the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Prospective citizens should understand that French and English both have special status in Canada. I have heard immigrant complaints: why French and not my language? They should understand the right to freedom to worship—it is often not allowed in Muslim countries, and there is that troublesome injunction in Islam that apostates and infidels are to be put to death. Which, obviously, some Muslims in recent years have been acting upon. Not okay. They should understand that everyone is to be treated equally by government in Canada, that there is no respect of classes or race. This is unusual, in world terms. It is even questionable in Europe, and still partly aspirational in Canada. But surely it is a bedrock principle. It should be explained that it is not okay here to beat your wife or to force your child into a marriage. Importantly, immigrants must be made to understand that the laws generally mean what they say and are actually enforced. In other countries, they are often window dressing, and everyone nods and winks. This is indeed a bedrock principle in Canada.

“Whereas Canada is founded upon the principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

We even love our Mounties. That is shocking and hard to credit for many foreigners, accustomed to see the police as instruments of oppression or as “crocodiles” to be paid off. Even in the US now, it seems.

There are actually other parts of the Charter than many Canadians would probably be upset about. They have no business or right to be, but they would be.

Canadians have freedom of speech, and you have no right to try to silence others because you disagree with them.

“2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:


(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other means of communication.”

This is in fact no longer honoured in Canada, with hate speech laws, speech codes, shouting down speakers, and political correctness. One even often hears Canadians these days, including some in government, claim that freedom of speech is an American, not a Canadian, value and not in the Canadian constitution.

This obviously needs to be made clear to immigrants, because it is obviously hard to understand and to accept. It is a problem in many cultures, because in many cultures, a word is considered equivalent to a deed. So that calling your mother a dog is as serious as punching you in the face. So the demand for blasphemy laws and so forth.

Also note that “supremacy of God” bit. It is right there in the preamble. Sure, you have the right to be an atheist, but do not demand secularism from your government. That's not Canadian.

Canada's Immigration Policy

What emigration to Canada used to involve.

For some bizarre reason, it is not obvious to everyone that Canada's current immigration policy is a bad idea.

The Canadian government prides itself on the idea that it selects only the best class of immigrants. Its point system ensures that immigrants are already well-educated and, most likely, well-heeled. The idea is that they will be able to immediately contribute to the society economically, and will not become a burden on the public treasury.

This is an obvious reversal of the old idea, in which immigrants were commonly and without apology the poorest and most destitute in the lands they left: the Irish of the famine years, the Eastern European refugees after the Second World War, the Ukrainians and Poles on the Prairies, and so forth. Recall the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,”

To some extent, no doubt, this reversal of policy has been prompted by the growth of the “social safety net.” In the old days, if immigrants came to Canada and did not do well, it was their own problem. Now, if they do not do well, it is everyone's problem.

But there are several problems with accepting only “high-quality” immigrants. And we ought to pause to ponder, when we are reversing a policy that served us for so long so well.

The first is the moral problem. In accepting the poorest of the poor, Canada and countries like her were doing good in the world. In seeking to skim off the cream elsewhere, to alienate wealth and expertise from other lands lacking in both, she has no intention of doing anybody else any good. This does not endear her to anyone, including God.

And the converse of this is: because she is not acting in charity, her newest immigrants have little reason to feel grateful for Canadian citizenship. It is just a business transaction. At the same time, they obviously need it less. Accordingly, they will appreciate it less. Instead of developing a real attachment to the new nation, they will view it, in the words of Yann Martel, as “a great hotel.” They will hang around so long as it seems to their advantage, and so long as nothing in particular is asked of them. But if anything is, if Canada ever really needs them, they will be on the first plane home.

This matters; much has been asked of our ancestors. This is no way to build a nation.

The politicians argue that poor immigrants take jobs away from poor Canadians. But by the same token, wealthy immigrants take jobs away from the wealthiest Canadians. Is that better? Doesn't it amount, over time, to importing a new, non-native ruling class? Which is to say, in effect, to reconverting Canada back into a colony? Is this what we owe our ancestors?

Nor, for that matter, is it clear to me that poor immigrants really do take jobs away from poor Canadians. On the whole, poor Canadians do not have jobs. They are able to choose not to work, and to live on social assistance. Poor immigrants, on the other hand, long held back in their own countries, are far more likely, I suspect, to take the dirty and the dull jobs that native Canadians scorn, in the hopes of moving up and ahead in future. Improving the overall economy, and helping pay for those benefits for the natives.

A more troubling consideration is this: poor Third World countries are almost always poor for one reason, and one reason alone: because they are burdened with a selfish and corrupt upper class.

Can you see the problem with carefully selecting only members of this Third World ruling class to emigrate to Canada? They will bring with them, firstly, their assumption of privilege, and so will generally be discontented with Canada's egalitarianism. They will bring with them, secondly, their culture of corruption, and introduce it directly into the Canadian ruling class. In moral terms, we are cherry-picking the worst. We are mainlining social HIV.

I am educated here, in part, by personal experience. My first wife, now deceased, was from an upper class Pakistani family. My second is from a poor Filipino family.

The friends and relatives of my first wife were uniformly hostile to Canada and to Canadian culture. They considered themselves cruelly discriminated against. Why? These are their actual answers: because they were not members of the Granite Club. Because they were not full partners in their accounting firm. Because their Oxford accent was called non-standard in Canada.

About half of them have since moved on, although of course they retain their Canadian citizenship. In case it comes in useful.

By contrast, all my Filipino wife's friends and relatives think quite highly of Canada. I can think of only one of her Filipino-Canadian friends who was content on the public purse. She was legitimately retired, and happy as a clam on a pension of $800 dollars a month. Everyone else was working hard in jobs like cleaning houses, security, clerking corner stores, minding carnival concessions. The kind of jobs, in short, the Canadian poor mostly don't seem very interested in.

It is the children or grandchildren of these Filipinos who will be the doctors and lawyers. And they will be committed Canadians once they are.

I envy the Americans their undocumented Mexicans.