One side is right, but not for the racist reason they think they are right.
A civil war is breaking out in right-wing circles. One set of racists thinks the other set is not racist enough, while the other side thinks they are not racist but they still want to own people. It should come as no shock to anyone that this is over immigration.
A specific subset of immigration visas deals with working with or investing in the United States. Since the process relies heavily on dollar amounts as metrics, it comes as no surprise that the system is heavily influenced by people with money. In San Francisco, that means tech barons take advantage of it.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy come out swinging in their defense of H1B visas. The tech industry heavily relies upon the H1B visa, and it is overwhelmingly granted to people from India. The tech industry would have you believe this is because Indian engineers are better than engineers from MIT or Georgia Tech. The sad truth is that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy think they should have indentured servants available to them – people who will work cheaper than Americans and do exactly what they are told to do, because if they do not their H1B status will be revoked.
This is an issue that I and many other people have tried to speak out about in the past, only to be gaslit and told that WE were the ones being racist. In my thirty years of working in San Francisco, I’ve seen many schemes involving visas but none that are so ubiquitous as the H1B lie. Whenever ANY tech CEO argues for the H1B visa, they are arguing in bad faith. Vivek Ramaswamy himself revealed the attitude that these folks have towards American culture – they believe Americans are lazy because they want to have weekends off, a living wage, and full-time jobs with 40-hour work weeks.
This is the real battleground. The real America is a diverse place, with diverse communities and diverse ways of thinking. This is exactly what the tech industry does not want. The Tech industry wants a certain type of person who thinks a certain way and does not do anything unpredictable so they can accurately predict how much money they can wring out of the whole process. This is what the fight for “diversity, equity,m and inclusion” is all about – because these words don’t just apply to the color of people’s skin but also to the thoughts and ways of attacking problems that people from different walks of life bring to a situation. Their solution to this is to outsource the problem to India – an entire continent of people that they believe were baked into a rigid caste system who know their place and are quite happy to be stamped H1B.
H1B Visas are not the only visas being abused. Melania Trump famously got her citizenship via a “genius visa”, the EB-1 visa. I will leave it to the reader to determine if this was the result of a bribe or some other perversion of the process, but it’s a little harder to get this one supposedly. It’s not as widely abused as other avenues that I’ve personally witnessed. Even Elon Musk had trouble navigating the whole system when he first got to the United States, but for people who already have a lot of money, it’s nothing to wrangle an IER (Immigrant Investor Ruling) or an EB-5 – permanent residency for people who invest over a million dollars in companies in the United States. I witnessed a scheme involving this set up by a Russian oligarch here in San Francisco. I pondered whether to report it to the authorities – but a little bit of research led me to understand it was perfectly legal.
This was the Hack Temple, a church in North Beach that was bought by Pavel Cherkashin. At the time I worked for the person who wrote the business plan for this venture. As it was described to me, it was a “citizenship mill” for wealthy Russians. The Russian who wanted citizenship would back a company for $ 1.05 million (the threshold for the EB-5 path to citizenship) and they would set up a company with the requirements to fast-track citizenship for the buyer. This was backed by sanctioned Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimasov so it all collapsed when the Ukraine war began in earnest in 2021.
Should I even address the other side? The racist and classist notion that no immigration should be allowed is almost laughable, but the fact that people believe this allowed this easily corruptible system to be abused for the past 40 years. The California Pirate Party has adopted open immigration as a centerpiece of our platform with the following points:
- We call for an end to immigration detention, to end family separation, and to let our undocumented community members come home.
- We call for the abolition of ICE.
- We call for providing unequivocal support and resources to refugee and asylum-seeking communities.
- We call for investing in multilingual resources for immigrant and asylum-seeking communities.
- We call for a repeal of limits of the number of immigrants the US can accept for visas, residency, and citizenship, and a repeal of basing access to visas, residency, and citizenship on country of origin, except in the case of refugees and asylum seekers.
- We call for the requirements for visas, residency, and citizenship to be made much less stringent, and that undocumented migrants be fast-tracked for approval.
Of course, you can see why this would be opposed by both of the current political parties, much less by factions within a single right-wing party. The truth is that an open immigration policy would serve the United States much better because we are a nation of immigrants. We must fight people like Elon Musk at every turn – these are people who wish to bring back slavery to the United States of America.
One side is right, but not for the racist reason they think they are right.
A civil war is breaking out in right-wing circles. One set of racists thinks the other set is not racist enough, while the other side thinks they are not racist but they still want to own people. It should come as no shock to anyone that this is over immigration.
A specific subset of immigration visas deals with working with or investing in the United States. Since the process relies heavily on dollar amounts as metrics, it comes as no surprise that the system is heavily influenced by people with money. In San Francisco, that means tech barons take advantage of it.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy come out swinging in their defense of H1B visas. The tech industry heavily relies upon the H1B visa, and it is overwhelmingly granted to people from India. The tech industry would have you believe this is because Indian engineers are better than engineers from MIT or Georgia Tech. The sad truth is that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy think they should have indentured servants available to them – people who will work cheaper than Americans and do exactly what they are told to do, because if they do not their H1B status will be revoked.
This is an issue that I and many other people have tried to speak out about in the past, only to be gaslit and told that WE were the ones being racist. In my thirty years of working in San Francisco, I’ve seen many schemes involving visas but none that are so ubiquitous as the H1B lie. Whenever ANY tech CEO argues for the H1B visa, they are arguing in bad faith. Vivek Ramaswamy himself revealed the attitude that these folks have towards American culture – they believe Americans are lazy because they want to have weekends off, a living wage, and full-time jobs with 40-hour work weeks.
This is the real battleground. The real America is a diverse place, with diverse communities and diverse ways of thinking. This is exactly what the tech industry does not want. The Tech industry wants a certain type of person who thinks a certain way and does not do anything unpredictable so they can accurately predict how much money they can wring out of the whole process. This is what the fight for “diversity, equity,m and inclusion” is all about – because these words don’t just apply to the color of people’s skin but also to the thoughts and ways of attacking problems that people from different walks of life bring to a situation. Their solution to this is to outsource the problem to India – an entire continent of people that they believe were baked into a rigid caste system who know their place and are quite happy to be stamped H1B.
H1B Visas are not the only visas being abused. Melania Trump famously got her citizenship via a “genius visa”, the EB-1 visa. I will leave it to the reader to determine if this was the result of a bribe or some other perversion of the process, but it’s a little harder to get this one supposedly. It’s not as widely abused as other avenues that I’ve personally witnessed. Even Elon Musk had trouble navigating the whole system when he first got to the United States, but for people who already have a lot of money, it’s nothing to wrangle an IER (Immigrant Investor Ruling) or an EB-5 – permanent residency for people who invest over a million dollars in companies in the United States. I witnessed a scheme involving this set up by a Russian oligarch here in San Francisco. I pondered whether to report it to the authorities – but a little bit of research led me to understand it was perfectly legal.
This was the Hack Temple, a church in North Beach that was bought by Pavel Cherkashin. At the time I worked for the person who wrote the business plan for this venture. As it was described to me, it was a “citizenship mill” for wealthy Russians. The Russian who wanted citizenship would back a company for $ 1.05 million (the threshold for the EB-5 path to citizenship) and they would set up a company with the requirements to fast-track citizenship for the buyer. This was backed by sanctioned Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimasov so it all collapsed when the Ukraine war began in earnest in 2021.
Should I even address the other side? The racist and classist notion that no immigration should be allowed is almost laughable, but the fact that people believe this allowed this easily corruptible system to be abused for the past 40 years. The California Pirate Party has adopted open immigration as a centerpiece of our platform with the following points:
Of course, you can see why this would be opposed by both of the current political parties, much less by factions within a single right-wing party. The truth is that an open immigration policy would serve the United States much better because we are a nation of immigrants. We must fight people like Elon Musk at every turn – these are people who wish to bring back slavery to the United States of America.