The computer was invented in the USA. Admittedly, the design came from a foreign-born scientist, John von Neumann, but he found his talent was given fertile ground in the USA.

The Internet was invented in the USA. I witnessed the early moments of the Internet’s emergence. While I personally had immigrated from India, Indian immigrants were a rarity in the USA. At most places I worked while the modern software and internet world was being built, there were no Indian people besides myself. Later Indians became actively sought after and recruited from India. India responded to the opportunity, and teenagers competed very hard to get into computer courses, in particular the IITs from which their chances of going to the USA were maximized. It is not very unusual in India for teenagers to commit suicide upon learning they failed the IIT entrance exam. Entire small towns have grown up with one purpose – coach high school graduates to pass the IIT entrance exam. IIT coaching is a very lucrative field, parents spend their life savings on these coaching institutions.

As late as the 1980s, there was no software education in Indian universities. In 1990s that started to change. Within a few decades, India went from having almost zero software talent, to having massive software talent for export.

In the world I grew up in, USA attracted top science and technology talent from around the world and knew how to give them a playground where they could be at their best. This was not everybody, not everyone was a science genius who felt the attraction of USA.

At the same time, USA also imported labor which was not very intellectual, and which the local population did not find too competitive because the work was not attractive. African slave labor was imported to do farm labor. Chinese labor was imported to lay down railroads.

These two trends – importing high talent vs. labor – overlapped to some extent in the middle. Competent engineers were required to follow-through on scientific and technical revolutions. While the Steam and Electrical and Electronics revolutions all had required massive number of non-genius-but-competent intellectual laborers, the US local workers had been able to come up to speed and provide what was necessary. A small number of outsiders were always encouraged to join these technological revolutions, and many of them provided important breakthroughs. But the majority of the workers were local.

In software, the local workers seem to be failing. As a result, we have mass importation of software workers, higher than was the case in the earlier technological revolutions.

With immigration, there has always been some conflict with local workers. With African and Chinese (and now Mexican) low level labor, the conflict has been relatively low intensity, for the simple reason that many local workers do not find those kinds of labor very attractive.

With software, the money is quite good, and therefore it is an attractive field for local talent. As it happens, this coincided with the Autism epidemic. If you were to believe the medical establishment (and even the victims) there is no such thing as an unusually large number of autistic people, it is all conspiracy theory. Well, conspiracy theory or not, the fact on the ground is that the local US workers, who had been able to compete in the earlier technological revolutions, seem to find it difficult to match the IIT-trained Indian software staff. While personally I have not been very impressed by the IIT output myself, the local levels have comparatively fallen.

But autism epidemic or not, it should be kept in mind that the playing field is not level. Indian teenagers grow up knowing that they have it made if they are able to join IIT and get an IIT Software education. Their whole life is oriented towards that. That is their dreams, hobbies, hope, chance, interests… everything. They have nothing else in life. If the field of software were to implode – e.g. due to Artificial Intelligence – the resulting culture shock would be faced much more keenly in India than anywhere else.

In this background, H1-B visas have become very powerful. When I arrived, I had a Green Card – a permanent resident visa. This was rather common. I had not heard of H1-B visas, though within a few years I did hear about them. When I did hear about them, I learned of them as these very short-term work visas. They were not bad for the employee – they gave you a chance to try out the new country. They were good for the employers – they weeded out the incompetent. But they were not meant to be a permanent situation, this was just a probationary period. Mostly they resulted in a permanent visa for the competent employees, within a very few years.

At this point, the H1-B visas have become instruments of indentured servitude. It has reportedly become impossible to turn them into permanent residency, they are lifelong indentures.

Perhaps predictably, the commercial interests would prefer slavery-like-conditions, where they are free to exploit the labor as much as possible. What protected the workers from excessive exploitation, was the free market. If you didn’t like the conditions of employment, you were free to seek other employers. With H1-B visas, this is not the case. The employer can demand you work around the clock and sleep at work – and this has been done by Elon Musk with no outrage anywhere. This is not the exception, but the norm. I found Amazon has similar extreme-exploitation policies and given the lack of pushback I suspect this is becoming the norm in the industry.

American Management personnel usually had come up from the ranks, and had the normal respect for talent. The management was done via respect. With the H1-B culture, the management is forced to realize they have essentially slave labor, and the culture of respect is going away.

The employers have pushed policies that have turned H1-B visas more and more draconian, but the resulting exploitative practices have become common in the industry and are not solely limited to H1-B visa holders. The H1-B visa holders, being highly productive and yet highly exploitable, set a bad example for everyone. They change the workplace culture. Normally, highly productive workers are entitled to some respect. Colleagues witness the productivity and are respectful. But if you see someone you highly respect as a fellow coworker, always asking how high to jump whenever the management croaks frog, it reduces your own self-respect. It makes talent utterly subservient to hierarchy and thereby increases exploitation of talent to increase billionaire wealth. People such as Bezos and Musk understand these dynamics, and therefore they will go to war in support of more and more H1-B visas with more and more restrictive rules.

In this context, some racism is normal. A small number of degenerate locals always have been racists, but the majority is descended from immigrant families themselves, and there are strong values of acceptance. (Even in Civil War, the South wasn’t just degenerate racists – there were serious issues of property law. Money had been paid to people in Africa to buy the slaves, and Africans and Arabs and Europeans alike considered slaves to be property. This view of slaves as property goes back to the Bible and the Quran. It wasn’t really racism as such.)

Racists are the problem in this situation, though. Such analysis as above is not only much beyond their understanding, but the racists stand smack in the way of taking the billionaires to task. The issues are beyond their understanding, but they can see and understand skin color, so they fire on the friendlies and the hostile entirely on skin color, muddying the actual battles. But racists have been easily put aside by Musk – it became exposed that while racists would love to censor others, when they themselves are being censored suddenly they start respecting the Constitution.

Still, the racists and Trump and Musk notwithstanding, there is a serious issue – of preserving American culture that has given us so much, the airplane, the computer, the internet… While creating good lives for a large part of its population. That creation of good lives is now in decline. It is under threat. The land of the free is turning into the land of the burned-out.