I am on LinkedIn for professional purposes under my real name and as a result I get LinkedIn news alerts from time to time. One of these alerts caught my eye because it presents perhaps the best news for the American tech sector – or rather, for American tech workers – in a very long time:
With the United States government becoming tougher on immigration rules under Donald Trump’s rule, several Indian IT companies including Infosys and Wipro are having a tough time in sending their employees on H-1B visa to work in the US, according to a latest report.

Even as the denial rate for new H-1B visa applications was as high as 45% for India’s IT bellwether Infosys, Google was somehow lucky as only 3% of its petitions were rejected by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), according to National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).

The data pertains to the first three quarters of FY 2019 (October-June). In the US, the financial calendar runs from October-September.

For American multinationals like Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Apple and Facebook, the rejection rates varied between 2% to 8%. Employees of Apple and Facebook had the lowest denial rate.

The NFAP report, which provides a detailed break-down of company-wise rejection rates, shows that when it came to Indian IT companies, the rejection rates went up manifold. [sic]

In 2015, 4% of all H-1B visa applicants sent by Tech Mahindra Americas were rejected but the figure shot up to 41% this year. For TCS, the denial rate was as high as 34% this year, Wipro 53% and Infosys 45%. In 2015, during the earlier dispensation, the rejection rates varied between 2%-7% for these Indian companies, according to the report.

A change in US policy is also reflected in cases where an existing H-1B visa holder applied for a renewal of his or her work visa. Infosys employees faced the highest rejection rate of 29%, according to the report. For Wipro, the figure stood at 19% and TCS 22%.

What is happening here is very straightforward: the Administration of His Most Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, is FINALLY doing its due diligence and rejecting workers from outsourcing firms.

For those of you who have not had the, uh, “enhanced user experience” of dealing with Indian IT workers, let me take a moment to explain how this racket works.

The H-1B visa was not originally supposed to be used to outsource jobs. It was supposed to be used to bring foreign talent into the USA for highly skilled professional occupations. Any company that applied for an H-1B visa on behalf of an external worker needed to prove to the American immigration authorities that said worker had significant qualifications and was going to be paid at a level at least as high as the “prevailing wage” of a given industry. If these criteria were met – which is to say, if the foreigner had at least a bachelor’s degree and a job offer in the USA, and was going to be paid above the “average” or “prevailing” wage in a given sector – then the petition would be granted and all would be well.

It is not very difficult to see where the loopholes are here.

Start with the notion of “highly skilled professional worker”, which is what the H-1B is supposed to bring into the USA. It is VERY easy to present a random Indian with a BTech from some bullshit technical college in India as a “skilled worker”. In reality, said worker is very unlikely to be able to write good code and will barely speak English.

Now look at the notion of a “prevailing wage”. In theory, this means that workers in the banking or tech sectors will need to be paid at least US$65,000 a year. In reality, they get paid a LOT less than that, because those H-1B workers are often brought in for just a few months to get trained in the USA – and are then sent straight back to India, to be paid Indian wages, in order to do the jobs of American workers that they sat beside and observed every hour of the working day while they were in the US.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is exactly what happened to hundreds of workers at the Devil Mouse a few years back.

Now, does this mean that everyone given an H-1B visa is a grifter coming to the USA to replace American workers?

No.

A decent chunk of the workers who get H-1Bs every year actually studied at American universities (and paid the exorbitant tuition fees charged therefore), graduated with good degrees, and speak English as a native language. I am an excellent example of that group – two degrees in mathematics, perfect native command of English in both written and spoken forms, and very well traveled.

A reasonable, though not large, percentage of the annual applicant pool for both the “general” and “advanced degree” H-1B lotteries did graduate from elite universities in their native countries – the 5 original Indian Institutes of Technology, for example, are still considered to be among the top schools in the world for engineering, mathematics, and computer science, and there are several universities in China which produce stellar graduates in technical fields.

However – it is important to remember that these subgroups are distinct minorities among the applicant pools.

And of those workers that actually are brought in to fulfill the original purpose of the H-1B visa, only a tiny percentage actually cares about and believes in American values, identity, the Constitution, and the nation.

Most of the roughly 85,000 or so workers who are pushed into the applicant pool for H-1Bs every year are radically underqualified, on a like-for-like basis, relative to their American counterparts. Most of them have poor skills in their chosen professional areas. Most of them have a quite poor command of English and are difficult to understand properly because they have rather thick accents.

They should not be allowed to replace American workers for peanuts. Not now. Not ever.

Now, the H-1B racket in the USA gives the Indian economy an ENORMOUS boost. Indians benefit massively from this very one-sided arrangement. Indian tech workers end up going to the USA and either bring back jobs to India or stay there and send money back to their families.

Furthermore, are something like 120,000 Indians and Chinese waiting on green cards in the massive backlog of applications, which at this point is something like 8 years long, at minimum, for natives of those countries. Once they get those green cards, they get a gigantic benefit. They can now access the American welfare system. They can move around with impunity within American borders. They can travel much more easily overseas because many Western and some Asian countries make the acquisition of a visa vastly easier for green card holders.

And, of course, they can start bringing their family members over using the notorious “chain migration” system. They can apply for American citizenship after 3 years and thereby get access to one of the best and most powerful passports in the entire world.

They get all of those benefits while having little, if any, loyalty to the American Constitution and way of life. Keep that in mind for what follows.

Given these facts, you would imagine, then, that Indians in India are incensed at the fact that the American government is stopping them from getting all of these wonderful things.

You would be wrong.

The reactions from Indian workers to this news have in fact been quite supportive of American policy. I took some screenshots of the comments to the original LinkedIn post to give you some idea of what people in India think:

You see, even Indians recognise that their own people behave rather abominably overseas. Even Indians, who are absolutely notorious for flouting basic rules of civilised behaviour in other countries, think that America should act in its own national interest, and not in the interests of other nations, in deciding who should and should not get access to the Land of the Free.

(It’s not nearly as free as Americans delude themselves into believing. I would know. I’ve lived in the USA and in Russia. I am more free in Russia than I am in America, in a lot of ways. But that’s a rant for another time.)

Those who believe that the Western world should simply prostrate itself before the Dirt World and allow the endless hordes to trample over their borders and into their countries, will have a very hard time accepting that said Dirt Worlders actually do believe that America is its own country.

But it’s not in the least surprising once you understand something about those same Dirt Worlders.

I disparage the Dirt World on a regular basis, and with good reason. I don’t much like or care for it, other than for short trips to some of the more scenic locations. I like the food, up to a point, but I generally find it noisy, crowded, extremely hot, very uncomfortable, thoroughly dyscivic and profoundly irritating.

However – as annoying as Dirt Worlders can be outside of their own countries, they do have a considerable amount of good sense within their own lands. And they understand what American business elites quite evidently do not:

Nations are not simply abstract entities. They are not made up of producing-consuming economic animals. They are not easily exchanged like-for-like.

Instead, nations are made up of PEOPLE. And those people have an absolute right to decide for themselves who is, and is not, one of “them”.

Dirt Worlders are past masters at figuring out who is “us” and who is “them”, and they apply that distinction with astonishing speed when it suits them to do so.

Be under no illusions that when Dirt Worlders come to Western nations on work visas, they absolutely do discriminate against those who do not share their ethnicity and skin colour. They always show a strong hiring preference for their own kind.

This tendency is not unique to Dirt Worlders. It is common across races and ethnicities. In fact, the only group of people that I have ever observed in more than 12 years of working that bucks this trend is, in fact, white people.

During my time in consulting and banking I repeatedly found myself working for and with whites, Jews, Indians, and Chinese. I observed a very peculiar and clear pattern. Whenever I worked for white bosses – specifically, white male bosses in the 40-55 age range – they simply didn’t care about skin colour or race when hiring. They only cared about hiring the best person for the job, and that is precisely what they did.

By contrast, the Jewish managers exhibited a strong preference for Jews. The female managers, of any race, exhibited a strong preference for hiring women, of any race. The Indian managers always tried to hire Indians. The Chinese managers didn’t even bother disguising their wish to hire Chinese people.

That is the kind of discrimination that Americans are willingly letting into their own borders through incredibly stupid visa policies that allow hordes of Dirt Worlders to enter their country without regard for whether or not those same people can actually contribute properly to the American economy.

And I genuinely do mean that they cannot contribute. Anyone who has had to work with Indian programmers knows full well that the vast majority of them who are not from top-flight technical schools, such as the original IITs, are subpar at best. In my experience, you can hire three Indian programmers for the cost of one Ukrainian, and five for the cost of one Russian – but the Eastern European guy’s code will be of far better quality, his ability to understand what you want will be much greater, and his willingness to take customer feedback will be considerably higher.

In the end, outsourcing is a mug’s game. It breeds massive discontent in the country that does the outsourcing, and it doesn’t really result in long-term economic gains for the country that receives those jobs. All you have to do is look at the massive differences between America’s tech sector and India’s to note the difference in both quality and innovation levels.

America created tech titans throughout Silicon Valley and elsewhere: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and easily a dozen more. That many of these companies are now profoundly evil, Satanic, and anti-American to their core is somewhat beside the point – the fact is that America created the conditions for Americans, many of them from (((one ethnic group))), to innovate and hire and create to their hearts’ content.

India created a bunch of outsourcing companies to take jobs from America and put them in India, but without the innovation and creativity necessary to create equivalents to those American behemoths.

The Russians, for instance do a better job of innovation than Indians do. Russia is home to Yandex, a company that has taken on and comprehensively beaten Google in multiple areas – and that is merely the tip of Russia’s technological lead over India and other countries.

Hell, if Americans actually want to outsource their jobs, why not send them to the Russians? At least the Russkies are culturally somewhat similar and actually make an effort to speak good English.

The Western culture of innovation is not accidental. Indians would do well to adopt the same. But they cannot and will not do it for as long as they can take the easy way out and get Americans to outsource tech jobs to them so that they can be done slowly and badly and at a very low level of quality, all while using English idioms and syntax which sound downright weird to Western ears.

Ultimately, though, the Indians understand something that American business leaders do not. America is its own nation with the absolute and incontrovertible right to set its own immigration policies. Indians do not and never did deserve to get a free ride from Americans for any reason, and it is a very good thing that America is now pushing back against the tide of those who seek to come into their country and take their jobs.