Comment Re: seems like a back door (Score 1) 566
BTW, do you realize that the term "the best and the brightest" is ironic, right? It was the name of a book by David Halberstam explaining how the vaunted geniuses in the White House got us sucked into the Vietnam War. You may want to find another phrase to modestly describe yourself.
No, it's not ironic. Halbertstam didn't coin the term, so it is only ironic in his context, but not in this one, nor is it in most other contexts. Not only that, but you can't expect every foreigner to know the etymology of every English word or idiom. I don't know GP's credentials, but I honestly doubt you'd be what we call insightful for thinking that, so please don't talk down to him.
Of course not, but the only people we genuinely need are those who are tops in their fields. Otherwise we have plenty of home grown talent, and the H-1B program exists to suppress their wages. I assure you that most H-1B's are very far from the best in their fields.
No, it doesn't. The H1-B program specifically forbids it as a tool for lowering wages, and even has provisions permitting civil and criminal suits against those who do use it for that purpose. Most H1-B recipients get paid about the same rate as everybody else.
And before you confuse me with being an immigrant fresh off the boat and attacking me for similar reasons you attacked GP, my lineage in the US traces back to prior to the Revolutionary War (two ancestors fought in that war, and later one in the civil war) and I am in favor of H1-B while also staunchly opposed to illegal immigration. I get called racist all the time for the later (even though it has nothing to do with race, forgetting entirely that Mexico isn't a race and some Mexicans are whiter than I am) and somehow I'm just a fascist for supporting H1-B, regardless of the reasons I support it.
I favor things that strengthen the economy. H1-B definitely does that, and I work in one of those careers that's supposedly "threatened" by it, but I don't feel threatened, nor should I. Illegal immigration on the other hand typically creates an economic burden by stressing the welfare system (which we already spend over a trillion dollars a year on) and rarely adds to it. Whether or not somebody is from another country doesn't impact my opinion of them (if anything I may be slightly biased against a lot of fellow Americans because of how twisted their sense of entitlement is compared to the rest of the world.)