Comment by cmiles74

> The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically.

> I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.

Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?

Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.

And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is.

And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.

It's a simple matter of math. The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. It's statistically impossible for that 5% to be the smartest 5% in the world. Therefore, if we want the smartest people in the world, we have to allow immigrants.

I’m not sure US academia is mediocre. It’s more like… normal?

But America being what it is, it attracts those with most potential creating and sustaining a network effect.

But there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad of the US, and it’s quite easy to mess up the equilibrium and go back to the mediocrity you mentioned

Why would I want an immigrant smarter than me? If I have a 120 iq and he has a 130 iq then he is going to take my job. You really aren’t convincing me here.

It's not an ego problem. It's a racial one.

> including our technological lead, is built by immigrants

That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.

I find it a bit hard to believe you actually think such a line of reasoning would be convincing. I think many MAGA voters in fact are aware that many of the immigrants are smarter than them, and hence they do the rational thing of trying to reduce competition. I don't understand why you wrote "taking the jobs" in quotes. That's exactly what's happening- superior immigrant applicants are taking jobs that would have been theirs.

This is a very racist comment, or atleast smells of xenophilia. "Americans are kind of mediocre academically". You can't use the term Americans are [all], followed by a blanket statement.

If that was about any other class of people it'd be downvoted to oblivion, but for some reason Americans and white can always be talked shit on.

This is the kind of shit US AMERICANS are talking about, this xenophilia bullshit that is infecting our nation.

Our lead does not come from immigrants. The American people, who are a distinct people, have shown time and again a potential for great things.

Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?

>Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants.

There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.

And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.

And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.

White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.

[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/199094/dhs-neo-nazi-memes-no...

[1]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nati...

> even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble

I'm not so sure.

I think it would play out like this:

1. 20% H1Bs leave; 2. Those migrants are now in countries of origin, looking for work; 3. Many of the big US tech companies will already have offices in those countries, and those that don't can make new offices if they wanted to; 4. many, but likely not all, of those employees are now working for the same employer (or close enough), just in a different jurisdiction; 5. as none of these employees are physically in US hotspots, all the other stuff that happened in those hotspots because of big tech pay, suffers, conversely all the stuff which was suppressed because of those wages may (possibly) return; 6. two of the things that go down are the number of people transitioning from temporary visa to citizenship, and the available talent pool for the local-to-those-places startup and VC scenes.

Those same tech companies are laying off a lot of people right now. Maybe the skills of the H1B folks they employ aren't actually all that vital to the American economy.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/05/20/...

Certainly a lot of them do. It's also true that having a large portion of them leave will just mean that the company will have to replace them with someone who will require a higher wage, and won't have any issue leaving if the workplace culture degrades.