H-1B debates overlook talent excluded at home

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:38:39

   they were never getting admitted, right? Almost all the qualified Asians get turned away. So they've been running this. It's a very, very explicit, very, very clear program. This, of course, has been a third rail of things that people are not supposed to discuss under any circumstances. The thing that has really changed the tenor on this is, I think, two things. Number one, those Supreme Court cases, the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that. I will tell you, I don't believe there's a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling. I think they are all flagrantly ignoring it. And we could talk about that. Mostly because of momentum, probably, or what?

2. 2:39:13

   They are trying to make the world a better place. They are trying to solve all these social problems. They are trying to have diverse student populations. They are trying to live up to the expectations of their donors. They are trying to make their faculty happy. They are trying to have their friends and family think that they're good people. Right. Right. They're trying to have the press write nice things about them.

3. 2:39:32

   Like it's nearly impossible for them. And, you know, to be clear, like nobody has been fired from an admissions office for, you know, 25 years or prior what we now the Supreme Court now has ruled to be illegality. And so they're all the same people under the exact same pressures. And so like, you know, the numbers are moving a little bit, but like, I don't think I don't know anybody in the system who thinks that they're complying with the Supreme Court, like who's in charge in the rank ordering of who rules who, the universities rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities, right? Well, another example of that is, I think it's, is that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale, right? Like the level of incestuousness here is like, anyway, so there's that. And so this has

4. 2:40:13

   been running for a very long time. So one is the Harvard and USC cases kind of gave up the game, number one, or at least showed what the mechanism was. And then Number two, the other thing is obviously the aftermath of October 7th, right? And what we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants. And what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants was they were being managed down, they were being actively managed down as a percentage of the base.

5. 2:40:36

   And let's say I've heard reports of like extremely explicit, basically plans to manage the Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the US population, which is 2%. And, you know, there's a whole backstory here, which is 100 years ago, Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions. And then there was a big campaign to get them in. Once they could get in, they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there's so many smart, talented Jews. So it went from 0% to 30%. And then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it down to 2%. And a lot of Jewish people, at least a lot of Jewish people I know, sort of, they kind of knew this was happening, but they discovered it the hard way after October 7th, right? And so all of a sudden, so basically the Supreme Court case meant that

6. 2:41:17

   you could address this in terms of the Asian victims. The October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims. And for sure, both of those groups are being systematically excluded, right? And then of course, there's the thing that you basically can't talk about, which is all the white people are being excluded. And then it turns out it's also happening to black people. And this is the thing that like blew my freaking mind when I found out about it. So, um, I just assumed that like, this was great news for like American blacks because like, you know, obviously if, you know, whites, Asians, and Jews are being excluded, then, you know, the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the black population up.

7. 2:41:53

   And so this must be great for American blacks. So then I discovered this New York times article from 2004, um, called, um, blacks are being admitted into tough schools at greater numbers, but which ones? And again, by the way, this is in the New York times. This is not in like, you know whatever national review this is new york times uh 2004 and the two authorities that were quoted in the story are henry lewis gates who's the dean of the african-american studies you know community in the united states super brilliant guy and then london guineer who was a she was a potential supreme court uh appointee under i think uh she's a close friend of hillary clinton and there was for a long time she was on the shortlist for supreme court so one of the top you know jurists uh lawyers in the country both black um sort of legendarily successful in their

8. 2:42:38

   in the academic and legal worlds, um, and black. Um, and they are quoted as the authorities in this story and the story that they tell is actually very, it's amazing. Um, and by the way, it's happening today in, uh, education institutions and it's happening in companies and you can see it all over the place and the government, um, which is, um, at least at that time, the number was half of the black admits into a place like Harvard were not American born blacks. They were foreign born blacks, specifically Northern African, generally Nigerian or West Indian. And by the way, many Nigerians and Northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful.

9. 2:43:19

   Nigerian Americans is a group way outperformed. This is a super smart cohort of people. And then West Indian blacks in the US are incredibly successful. Most recently, by the way, Kamala Harris, as well as Colin Powell, just two sort of examples of that. And so basically what Henry Louis Gates and Lana Guinier said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either whatever it was, identify, recruit, make successful, whatever it was, American-born Native blacks.

10. 2:43:45

    And so therefore, they were using high-skilled immigration as an escape hatch to go get blacks from other countries. And then this was 2004 when you could discuss such things. Obviously, that is a topic that nobody has discussed since. It has sailed on. All of the DEI programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic. There's large numbers of black people in America who are fully aware of this and are like, it's obviously not us that are getting these slots.

11. 2:44:11

    We're literally competing with people who are being imported. And if you believe in the basis of affirmative action, you are trying to make up for historical injustice of American black slavery. So the idea that you import somebody from, you know, Nigeria that never experienced that, you know, is like tremendously insulting to black Americans. Anyway, so you can see where I'm heading with this. We have been in a 60 year social engineering engineering experiment to exclude native born people from the educational slots and jobs that high skilled immigration has been funneling foreigners into. Right. And so it turns out it's not a victim free thing. There's like 100% there's victims because why? There's only so many for sure. There's only so many education slots.

12. 2:44:49

    And then for sure, there's only so many of these jobs, right? You know, Google only hires so many, you know, whatever level seven engineers, right? And so that's the other side of it, right? And so you're a farm boy in Wisconsin, right? Or a, you know, Black American whose ancestors arrived here, you know, on a slave ship 300 years ago in Louisiana, or a, you know, Cambodian immigrant in, you know, the Bronx, and you're a kid or a Jewish immigrant, or, you know, from a very successful Jewish family, and, you know, your entire, you know, for three generations, you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard. And what all of those groups know is the system that has been created is not for them, right? It's designed specifically to exclude them. And then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say, yeah, let's bring in more foreigners, right?

13. 2:45:36

    And so, so anyway, so the, the, the short version of it is you can't anymore, I don't think just have the, the, the, um, the, the, the quote high skilled immigration conversation for either education or for employment without also having the DEI conversation. And then DEI is just another word for affirmative action. So it's the affirmative action conversation. And you need to actually deal with this at substance and to see what's actually happening to people you needed to join these topics. And I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high school immigration given the extent to which DEI took over both the education process and the hiring process.