Friday, January 03, 2025

Oligarchigal Overdrive.


DogeDiving
InTheShallowEndOfTheSelfDealingPoolVille



By now you may have heard that his most highly excellent and most exquisitely exalted US'ian government-contractor-in-chief, Mr. Elon Musk, has gone to rhetorical war against the looniest of the MAGA goonery that is calling for the mass deportation of skilled immigrants who came to the country on H-1B visas.

Ostensibly, according to Mr. Musk at least, these workers are vital to the interests of the American tech industry because:

...“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote on X on Christmas. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.”...


But is that the real reason why companies like, say, Tesla hire huge numbers of workers through the H-1B program?

Perhaps not, as noted in an NY Times OpEd piece today by Farah Stockman:

...Most H-1B visa holders are lower-paid labor, not top talent. In May, Musk laid off more than 14,000 Tesla workers, including many H-1B visa holders. Reddit threads filled with laments by workers who had moved to the United States from India only to be let go with no warning. They were desperate to remain in the country, but because H-1B visas are owned by the employer, they had few options for doing so...


Imagine that!


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7 comments:

Chuckstraight said...

I really like the part where the employer owns the visa. Sounds kind of “undemocratic”.

GarFish said...

It's little more than indentured servitude...

e.a.f. said...

so they own your visa but not you, however, if you don't own the visa you are at the whims of the employer who does own the visa. Indentured servitude is a very good description of these people's situation. It really is time to ensure the visas are owned by the people and not a corporation. Perhaps some Union might want to see if they could organize matters or better yet, have a .l.aw passed to outlaw this type of activity or the U.S.A. can be added to those lists of countries like they have in the Middle East where they import workers and they have not rights and thousands died while building a soccer stadium.
Perhaps along with the rights the employers have they ought to have obligations because this reads like they get to import labour and use them much like slaves. Ah, the American corporate ethics game.

Graham said...

I believe the system in Canada is a little different but not entirely and that employers here, for some work visas, also “own” the visa. As in the person has a work visa but it’s for a defined company or employer and if the employee, visa holder, leaves that employer they can’t just go and get another job somewhere else.
I know not all work visas are like that but I know some are as I have known people who did not want to sign a two year agreement to stay with that company. Often it meant they had to leave by a certain date or try other options, if any, to stay on.

Evil Eye said...

Elon Musk suffers from two major ailments:

1) The delusions of being very rich and beleiving himself to be infallible.
2) He is South African, which imported their racism from the USA. Like the USA, racism is inbred and by now genetic.

This puts Musk in the "evil" category and when "evil" gains power, the world shudders from the effects. 1939 is a good example of that.

Lew Edwardson said...

Racism flourished in Africa long before Whites showed up, and British and Dutch colonizers practiced racial discrimination in what is now The Republic of South Africa long before the U.S. could be blamed for it. The Dutch especially brought in slaves from other countries to join the indigenous people already subjugated. The racial segregation long in place was codified in 1948 using the Canadian Indian Act as a framework and became known as Apartheid.

In any case, although there is certainly a genetic component inherent in all people that leans towards fear and mistrust of strangers and has stood us in good stead down through the ages when necessary for survival, environmental factors now play the major role. Our natural instincts can be modified by our culture. If you are brought up in a racist society or family, and/or get your information largely from sources that are heavily xenophobic, chances are good that’s how you’ll roll. A person raised in Alabama listening to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News all day will have very different beliefs than one brought up in San Francisco on a diet of NPR and MSNBC.

Some evil people are masters at modifying our natural instincts to their benefit by inventing enemies to be persecuted, just as the Christian church invented witches, and Stalin invented kulaks. Some have acquired the platform and resources to invent and apply false undesirable attributes to existing entities like immigrants, civil servants, or simply the “left” in order to turn them into enemies. In my view, given much evidence, Elon Musk and Donald Trump (Musk’s recent purchase) are two of those evil people. And some, like Mr. Zuckerberg, are responsible for platforms with unchecked algorithms that can and do inflict great harm on whole societies. Just ask the Rohingya that remain.

e.a.f. said...

Thank you Lew, Now I don't have to write it. The Dutch claimed South Africa for themselves and set up their .to reduce costs. Then they and the British had the Boer War, and the Brits got to take a run at things, with no improvement in the lives of the Indigenous People of South Africa. Even though the Brits won the war, the Dutch still controlled the economy, politics, language