Denise Richards from that abortion of a Starship Troopers film adaptation, because b00bs

Longtime reader and friend of the blog Dire Badger had a concise question for me upon reading my Thanksgiving story for this year:

Did you apply for citizenship when you first Came to the US?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: I couldn’t, because that’s not how it works for us non-immigrant aliens. There are quite a few hoops to jump through first – at least, if you want to go about things legally. It’s not as simple as just submitting an application for citizenship.

Also, at least originally back in 2006 when I first came to the US, I had no intention of really staying there long-term.

Full answer: y’all might want to pour yourself a glass of good wine. This will take some telling.

I arrived in the USA in 2006 to start studying for a Master’s degree. By the end of January 2007, I had a job offer in hand and the company in question duly applied for an H-1B petition for me.

Now, before anyone starts complaining about how the H-1B is used as an outsourcing visa, let me say this:

Yes, it often is, and I hate that fact. It is morally wrong, repulsive, and totally unjustifiable.

In my case, though, the H-1B was not used for outsourcing.

You can believe me, or not. I don’t particularly care. The evidence says that I’m telling the truth, since I lived in the US, worked there, paid US taxes, and generally behaved myself for 12 years.

The goal in my case was to bring in someone with some serious credentials for significantly higher wages than the average US worker in that industry, to stay in the US and work there. My starting salary was considerable – almost twice the average annual wage in the USA at the time. (It should be remembered, though, that in NYC, if you’re making 50K a year – and I was making a lot more than that – the cost of living is so insanely high that you have the same standard of living as someone making only half that amount in, say, Minot, ND.)

Now, the way that the H-1B works requires some explanation. It’s a rather complicated visa category.

The H-1B visa process works on a lottery basis. There is a quota of H-1B visas provided to employers every year to bring in foreigners to work in the USA. If the total number of applications exceeds that quota, the visas are allocated in a lottery and if you get one of the lucky “golden tickets”, you are in good shape. You get to live and work in the US for quite some time and, if you’re from one of the world’s many “shithole countries” (I love that term) then you really have won in life.

Back before 9/11, there were always more visas available than people to fill them – the quota was well over 100K. After 9/11, that number got hacked down to 85,000 – 65K for “general-purpose” jobs, and 20K for holders of advanced degrees. And every single year, pretty much, after that happened, the quota was filled on the first day after it opened every April.

For foreign students who graduate from US universities, the system has a few additional quirks.

Foreign students have the ability to use their F-1 student visas to work in the US on the Optional Practical Training scheme. This scheme allows a graduate to work for a US company on the F-1 until such time as they get an H-1B through the system. The whole OPT thing has its own complicated rules; the general rule is that you get 12 months after you graduate to work in the USA, and if you have a STEM degree then you get to extend that out.

Back when I graduated, the total period available for OPT for me specifically was, I think, 17 months. I could easily be wrong about that. These days, for people with STEM degrees, it’s 36 months in total.

(By the way – compare the Infogalactic article on OPT with the Wikipedia equivalent. It’s an instructive comparison. The Infogalactic version is vastly more informative and more detailed. Yet again, it’s a subtle but important sign that the Alt-Tech revolution is advancing quietly and relentlessly. Support it if you can.)

So there I was, in 2007, with a valid job offer in hand – but my H-1B application didn’t get approved. Therefore, I was working in the USA for a year on an F-1 visa. Then, in 2008, my company’s second H-1B application on my behalf got through the lottery and was approved. So, in late 2008 – just in time to watch President Lightworker, Barack Hussein Obummer, get elected, actually – I went to Vancouver to get my H-1B visa stamp.

The H-1B visa allows workers to live and work in the USA for up to 3 years. During that time you can move between employers, as long as they sponsor you, more or less at will – but this also significantly restricts your ability to move, because only a small minority of companies can afford the very high lawyer fees required to get the paperwork done. The H-1B can be extended out for another 3 years, for a total of 6 years of non-immigrant alien working authorisation.

In practical terms, after a maximum of 4 years of working on an H-1B, whoever you are working for needs to apply for a green card for you.

In my case, by that time I was on my third, and as of this writing last, employer. And my H-1B was due to expire by the end of 2014. And that company didn’t get off its butt and actually do anything about applying for my green card until early 2014 – which was far too late.

The company’s lawyers sat down with me and explained that there was a long and complicated process for the green card application. These details are long and quite frankly a bit boring; in the end the conclusion was: “Yes, the company can apply for a green card for you, but you have to leave the USA for a few months while all the details get sorted out”.

That whole palaver worked out quite well for me, as I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post. I came back to the USA in 2015 with the first of three stages of my green card application approved.

It’s important to understand a little bit of how the US green card system works here.

The green card process for non-immigrant alien workers requires three phases, as I just mentioned. The first, and most difficult, is getting your application approved. This always requires quite a bit of fancy footwork. The idea is to show the US Department of Labour that you are such a unique and special snowflake, with such epic and perfect qualifications, that nobody else in the US can possibly do your job better than you.

This inevitably leads to some interesting legal jiggery-pokery. The employer has to advertise your job opening for something like 3 months and must interview any American-born applicant for it – but the job description can be tailored to be so incredibly specific and demanding that literally only you can fill it. And that, of course, is exactly what happens. It is certainly what happened in my case.

Anyway, once the US DOL issues its approval, you’re through the first and most difficult stage.

The second stage involves a protracted case of “hurry up and wait”.

The green card system for employee-sponsored applicants has some weird rules here. The speed at which your green card petition gets approved, depends entirely on your nationality.

If you are from a country that does not send a lot of people to the US for green cards, then your petition gets approved pretty damn fast. I had a colleague who was ethnically Chinese, but was born in a South American country, and he got his green card in 9 months – start to finish. Similarly, if you are from, say, Singapore or Japan or Western Europe, you can get your green card approved in, I think, under 3 years – especially if you’re from the first two, which are very strong allies of the USA and have treaties concerning immigration and work visas with America.

But if you’re Indian or Chinese, you join the back of the world’s longest queue. That is because hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese workers apply for green cards every single year – far, far more than all other countries combined. If you are from either country, you can sit and wait for your application to be approved for the better part of a decade.

I was about 3 years into that queue, and had many more to go, when I lost my job. And I lost it when the God-Emperor’s Administratum made it vastly more difficult for companies to get their H-1B applications approved.

I’m not complaining about that. As I’ve stated many times in the past, I agree entirely with the God-Emperor about his criticisms of the H-1B. Unlike many of my fellow foreigners, I have the ability to separate out what is good for me, from what is good for America.

Now, as I mentioned right at the beginning of this whole thing, originally I had never intended to stay in the USA. I had never intended to become an American citizen.

What changed? Two things.

First, I came to respect, admire, and eventually love what America was, and what it stood for. The American ideal was not just some nebulous idea to me. A lot of factors played into this. I began to see pretty quickly that I was surrounded by Leftist fruitcakes, whose values were diametrically opposed to my own, and started to move naturally to the right. Over time, my atheism eroded away and eventually disappeared altogether – thanks in no small part to the deeply religious and Christian nature of the people that I came to know outside of the New York “bubble” that I came to detest over the years. The more that I learned about how America truly came to be, the more I respected it, and saw that my values were becoming more and more “American”, in the best possible sense.

And second, I found a second family at my martial arts school in 2013.

Up until that point in time, I thought that I would probably return to Asia at some point and simply live and work in one of the more advanced Asian nations. That is, or at least, it used to be, where I more naturally belong. But when I started learning Krav Maga under one of the very, very few truly originalist practitioners of the art, I realised that I had finally found a place where I truly belonged. I earned my place in that family – through extremely hard work, bloody knuckles, bruises, contusions, ass-kickings, and lots of other kinds of pain.

I loved them, and they loved me. I could see myself staying and obtaining my black belt with them.

Sadly, it was not to be – at least, not for the moment. Circumstances somewhat beyond my control made it impossible for me to stay.

There are a few things to take away from this long story.

For starters – the civic nationalists among you Americans and Westerners really need to understand that I am very much an exception to the rule when it comes to immigrants. Civic nationalists substitute the state, or the government, for the nation. They are foolish and naive enough to believe that, as long as any foreigner swears allegiance to the state, it does not matter that said foreigner is not part of the culture, history, tradition, language, genetic inheritance, and identity of the nation.

This point of view is flat-out wrong. And just because a very tiny minority of foreigners who come to the USA end up appreciating American values and traditions even more than Americans do – like I did – that does not mean that it is a good idea to let in hordes of other people from the Dirt World.

They are not Americans. They will never be Americans. Don’t be stupid enough to pretend that you can change this. Civic nationalism has failed, completely and totally. Stop pretending otherwise.

It also bears repeating that the H-1B visa is a very stupid idea. While I do not have any particular problem with bringing in very, very small numbers of exceptionally talented individuals to add to the economy of any given country, and pay them anywhere from three to ten times what you would pay an American to do their jobs better than they can, there is absolutely no moral justification whatsoever for outsourcing tens of thousands of white-collar jobs to India and China so that the work can be done at one tenth of the cost – and one twentieth of the quality.

I speak from personal experience when I say that the work that gets outsourced is usually done at a lower level of quality and with far less attention to detail than it is done in the USA by Americans. There are many things to dislike about American corporate culture – but in my experience, the people who really knew what the hell they were doing, were always Stateside, not in India or the Philippines.

It needs to be clearly understood that you get what you pay for – always. Here is a simple example, borne out again from personal experience. You could hire three Indian programmers for the price of one Ukrainian DEV – and maybe five Indians for the price of one Russian. But the amount of time that you would spend on teaching the Indians what to do, and going back to them and bawling them out for their shitty code, and fixing the bugs that they introduce, would on average completely negate the cost advantages.

Furthermore, it really needs to be clearly understood that if you insist on importing lots of people from the Dirt World, you get the Dirt World. We are already seeing this in parts of America that used to be lily-white, Christian, and thoroughly American.

One more thing: people like me, who came to America, followed the rules, integrated completely, always tried to be good house guests, and generally kept our noses clean, absolutely HATE illegal invaders.

There is a very simple reason for that. It has to do with the “followed the rules” part.

The fact that there are large parts of the country, which appear to have become completely and totally batshit insane, that are allowing illegals to come in and dusting off the best furniture for them, giving them large amounts of free shit – from OUR MONEY, mind you – and other freebies, is extraordinarily galling to us.

We find it utterly disgusting that we have to follow the rules, and often get kicked in the face by them, but human trash from all over the Dirt World can cross into the USA and get a more or less free pass for breaking the law the moment that they enter. This infuriates us in ways that have to be seen to be believed. If you have never seen someone like me talk about illegal invaders, you should try bringing it up at dinner sometime – like my aunt once did, much to her immense surprise.

Now at this point, I guess the natural question is, would I like to become a US citizen today, especially given that I hate what America has become, and given all of the negative things that I have to say about it?

Well, yes. But with caveats.

I do believe that citizenship must come with a price. Being a citizen has to cost a man something – he has to have skin in the game, and he has to know and believe that his right to vote has value.

I also believe that America, as we know it today, is headed for a cataclysmic rupture within the next 15 years. The country as we understand it will tear itself apart in our lifetimes. The fault lines are already there. I’ve described them at length and repeatedly right here.

I believe that “American” citizenship will be worth almost nothing, at least on paper, within a generation. Today an American passport is incredibly valuable; but in 20 years, when America breaks apart, I think that it will be far less so.

What, then, is the point of any foreigner trying to get American citizenship? Other than access to the American welfare system – the existence of which I hate, and into which I have paid enormous amounts of money that I will never see returned to me, and that I have never actually taken advantage of?

The point is that the founding values of America are worth defending. Her spirit is worth fighting for. I believe that in the same way that I believe in God the Father.

I must note here in passing that most American citizens really do not understand or appreciate just what a wonderful gift it is in life to be born an American. They really do not appreciate the fact that American citizenship is – for the moment, anyway – a literal golden lottery ticket for the rest of your life. They do not see just how valuable that citizenship is – and far too many of them seem far too keen on throwing away that value on hordes of Dirt Worlders intent on turning America into the very hellholes that they tried so hard to get away from.

And I also note that far too many foreigners who come to the US adopt a very mercenary attitude toward attaining American citizenship. They think of the benefits that they get and lust after those things – but never once stop to ask themselves if they are willing to pay any kind of serious price to get them.

Some of you might argue that foreigners should never be granted citizenship. I’d actually agree with you, mostly. I think that the “magic dirt” problem has to be solved, for all of the West, not just America.

Are my solutions the best? Probably not, but they are a start, and they are almost certainly a damn sight better and more honest than anything almost any other “naturalised” American (*cough Dinesh D’Souza cough*) will offer you.

Am I American? Nope. Don’t pretend to be. Never did. Can’t be.

I am certainly not a genetic descendant of the English and Dutch Protestants who originally founded the country. Nor am I Western European by ancestry. I am not (yet) even Christian – though at this point I guess that is merely a technical distinction, a question of “a cup or bowl of water”, as LTC Tom Kratman once put it in a comment here.

Do I hold American values to be nearer and dearer to me than most native-born Americans? Yep.

Does that mean that, in view of all of the evidence both for and against, I should be granted citizenship by an impartial jury of American peers?

I cannot answer that question. I do not have that right.

Only real Americans can – and, just like what happened in the Roman Empire 1,600 years ago, and the Spartan polis another 700 years before that, there are far too few real citizens left to make that determination.

Ultimately, America will carry on doing whatever it does either with or without me. I’m just some shlemiele writing blog posts on a laptop. I just happen to think that America as an ideal is worth fighting for. Maybe I’m stupid, naive, or both, for thinking that.

But when you love a country and its people, all you can do is hope and pray for the best for what you love.