Absolutely the president and his team are destroying America's leadership. That explains it all, if you see he is in thrall to Russia. It is not misguided; it is not a mistake. At least Nixon, though corrupt, did not hate the US. The current president does.
I don’t think he hates the USA any more than he hates other things. His set of emotions and behaviour is almost completely binary, and predictably capricious: If it feeds his ego, helps or enriches him in anyway he loves it. If it does the opposite he hates it. There is little subtlety between the two polar opposites. The middle ground is simply the staging area - things that he is ignorant of that have yet to be sorted into hate or love categories.
Well put. It’s tempting to overanalyze Trumps behavior - I do it myself. There may be nefarious underpinnings to some of his decisions but in the end it usually comes down to what’s best for either his pocketbook or his ego, or both.
Trump doesn’t hate America; he is afraid of what Putin has on him plus he believes in his right to extort everyone for his and his family’s benefit. He is a godfather wimp is owned by another godfather in the country that wants to own us.
Germany’s 150 year global lead in the sciences and mathematics up until about 1933 was shredded by the Nazis and it has never recovered its past status. America has a date with destiny next November. It will suffer the same fate if Trumpian forces prevail either through the ballot box, or because the midterms have been cancelled through some Presidential sleight of hand. After that, the torch is probably returned to Europe and we also see China’s continued rise as a science and technology powerhouse.
There's a lot of good science being conducted in Europe - it just isn't as well-funded as it has been in the US in the past. What Europe does have on its side are its historical and cultural ties to the US, making the move for US-based scientists much easier. But Europe is not without its problems, as the right-wing anti-science crowd is here as well - they as yet don't wield the kind of power MAGA does in the US. Hopefully it will stay that way. Hopefully, America comes to its senses.
China already has programs to incentivize overseas Chinese scientists to return. They also have successful programs to attract non-Chinese scientists.
Here is a headline from May 2025: Charles Lieber, ex-Harvard chemist convicted of lying about ties to China, joins faculty of Chinese university.
The US political climate is so bad that I doubt that foreign scientists will be overly concerned about Chinese political restrictions as long as they can pursue their projects.
Europe has a great deal of regulation that makes it difficult for foreigners to migrate there. The Chinese already have programs to recruit foreign scientists, and they have no shortage of money, especially in fields like AI or biotech.
You are perhaps unaware that according to Nature magazine, not exactly a hotbed of commies, rates 9 of the top 10 research universities as being in China. Harvard's the other.
While Trump's doing his best to fix that statistic by destroying Harvard's research capabilities, this precedes his current regime. There's been a bipartisan trend for decades across administrations of trashing education in this country.
Don't wait until November. EVERY election is important. So many local elections where the Republican incumbent is running unopposed are happening all the time.
Over 100,000 elections in 2025 with turnouts under 25% in almost all of them. It is vitally important to recruit young Democrats to serve in ALL of these positions.
Much as I admire the Prof’s writing (and his eclectic musical taste), stating “America took the lead in world scientific research during and after World War II with critical help from refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, who helped build everything from the atom bomb to the space program” probably glosses over the fact that many of those “refugees”were actually escaping from Nuremberg…
There were many scientific refugees who came to the US before the war. Would the US have been better off imprisoning Werner von Braun or taking advantage of his scientific expertise?
If I was going to destroy the United States without firing a shot, I'd being doing just what Trump and his followers are doing. None of them individually or collectively are smart enough to do all this intentionally, but they're still capable of destroying the country without meaning to. And in the end, intent doesn't matter.
Do not underestimate the intelligence of the Project 2025 crew - or their malignity, or their ambition. Just because Trump is a very street-smart moron ("he's an idiot, but he's very good at it", as someone said during his first term) does not mean that evil plans are not afoot and being achieved, sometimes several times a day.
While the concept of H-1B visas is great - there was also a lot of abuse of them - with tech companies coming up with bogus "requirements" so that they could bring in cheaper labor that was essentially indentured to the company that brought them over. Used as designed - great. Used as a tool to get cheaper labor - just more enshitification of our system.
I would love to see the data and analysis of the impact of h1b visa's on workforce training of BS level scientists. The public is constantly reminded that STEM careers are the future... blah blah blah.. NSF reports that half the STEM BS graduates are out of the field within 8 years. This is a long standing reality. Skills get dated so rapidly in tech and science that it must be cheaper and efficient to hire H1 staff and turn them out when they get stale then constantly train your BS grad level staff. "Training should mean part of your 40 hour work week... and not ... we will pay for a course at the local college so that you can be credentialed!"
Being married to a woman who started out with learning COBOL on punch cards in the 70s, and finished her career writing code to make mammoth "off the shelf" apps do things they were never built to do (Don't ask me how, I was just a lowly doctor/administrator that was happy every day the systems worked and didn't blow up), I think there are two true parts to what you said. The first relates to people getting out of the field within eight years. That is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the things my wife saw over and over was that there were people in IT that really had no business being in IT - they didn't like it and/or they weren't good at it, and it was good for them to leave the field and find something they enjoyed and were better at. The second point about skills getting rapidly dated actually relates back to my first point. For my wife, her underlying "skill" was the ability to think incredibly logically, in really small steps, and then de-bug her work. That remained the case whether she was programming in COBOL, derivatives of COBOL, or whatever the languages she had to learn in order to work with and reconfigure "off the shelf" applications. Where she worked was wise enough to make sure she was given the time and opportunity to learn about the new apps and the languages they were written in so that she could continue to exercise her real skills. Tying this all back to the H-1B visa issue - I doubt that there was much that you couldn't rapidly train up a good US IT person to do. It just cost the company more and the company wouldn't have an indentured servant working for it, but rather a highly skilled and highly mobile professional that you'd better pay well and treat right.
You sound like my wife. When confronted with "this is written in 'X'," she'd just say - "give me the manuals for the weekend and I'll be ready on Monday." Obviously not totally fluent, but as she also said "I was raised a good Catholic, I know how to follow the rules and also know when you can get away with not following the rules, and programming languages are just different ways of telling you how to follow the rules."
I disagree. Telcordia paid for my wife's Masters degree and it is a widely recognized asset for her in later job searches, as well as earning her a better salary during the remainder of her time at Telcordia. The equivalent "in-house" training would've left her hunting for low paying jobs with a BS and probably would not have earned her much more money at Telcordia.
yeah, I would like to hear Paul's thoughts on this. I don't believe the criticism of H1B1 bringing in a tonne of foreign IT workers for cheap was made up ...
I’d like an analysis that, even if it critiques the idea or its conclusion, at least recognizes that the original motivation or concern behind the idea (as it emerged on the right) might be valid.
Yea, as someone in IT...I'm sorry to say the H1B is heavily abused. A good IT worker is expensive, but worth the quality; however, with the modern business idiots running companies, what they optimize for isn't a balance between quality and cost.
They just assume people are fungible and optimize for cost only. And IT is notorious for having certain abusive consultancies that serve as H1-B mills. They aren't bringing over top of the line workers, they're bringing over people who will work for peanuts, which drives down wages, makes it harder to find jobs as an American, and also gets you an indentured servant since if the H1B quits they get deported.
My friends in the coding end report seeing this in engineering spaces as well.
I normally agree with Professor Krugman on most things, but he's overlooking a massive amount of fraud and abuse in the system here.
LOL, I got off X with a post that suggested that the US would benefit if the current FOTUS had "something" happen to him. It wants me to delete that post but hell no!
I got off X as soon as Musk took it over, started firing the staff, got rid of content moderators. The misinformation and spreading of conspiracy theories increased exponentially. Anyone on Truth Social also need to get off of it.
It seems almost redundant to repeat the opinion of many in the intelligence sector (or formerly in its employ) that Mr. Trump is a wholly-owned asset of Vladimir Putin, which would be one explanation of all this. Another might be his profound ignorance, stupidity, and history of enriching himself via flouting the law, over and over and over again, without paying much of a price for it. (Hence the name Teflon Don.) Or maybe he's the tool of a shadow cabal of autocrats around the globe who'd be rubbing their hands in glee to see the US crumble. That he should be impeached for these and innumerable other acts is beyond doubt. Will it happen? No. And there is where we need to steer our attention. Why is no one in the Federal government, the military, and other formerly trusted institutions willing or able to act as the Constitutions suggests under conditions like these?
It would take courage among the ranks of the current majority, Republican Congressmen... Thanks is as rare as hen's teeth. Just ask Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Well, yeah, but Kitzinger seems to be doing okay. Cheney is less visible but still kicking. I think the threat of expensive and otherwise draining lawsuits plus the loss of some donors is behind most of the cowardice. We desperately need to repeal Citizen's United in order to better address that last condition.
Courage is not coming. If enough Republican voters dislike trump then GOP MOC will oppose trump. Not happening so far.
A Gallup poll from August 2025 found that 93% of Republicans approved of his overall job performance.
A Pew Research Center poll from August 2025 found that 85% of his 2024 voters continue to approve of his job performance, though this marks a decline from 95% at the start of his term.
Well, among Senators up for re-election, anyway (Ted Cruz et. al.) there seems to be some notice being taken that they have to convince at least some Democrats and a larger share of Independents to win in any but the reddest of states. And even then, without Independents, Senators can't win in many of those states. And the stats that include them are much less rosy for Trump&Co. So maybe it's a war of attrition?
When I was in Silicon Valley in the 1990’s I did witness the abuse of the H-1B visa program: large companies paying foreign workers less than what they would have otherwise. Many were engineers, but some were simply accountants - most were at the initial stages of their careers. They made a substandard wage in a high cost area. It also helped to surpress the wages of US workers.
The abusive part was if they lost their job for whatever reason they had to leave the country in a fairly short amount of time if they could not secure another job with a company that would sponsor them. They were essentially handcuffed. I’m hoping that, due to scarcity, this scenario is no longer applicable.
No, it's entirely applicable; just the other day I saw a job posting for an engineer in North Carolina offering $30-35k annually.
Even in an ultra low cost of living space the bare minimum should be at /least/ 50k.
The reason to offer a wage that low is so they can turn around and go 'We cant find an American to do this job', and then they apply for an H1-B visa instead. And of course you can't find an American! You're intentionally offering a wage so trashy no American with a lick of self respect will apply.
I would support the H1-B far more if it had a requirement to pay 50% over prevailing local market or average national wage, whichever is higher. If an immigrant is highly skilled, they should be worth a premium.
$30,000 per year is ~$15 per hour!! You can make more at a McJob that doesn’t require an engineering degree. Looks like they’re still abusing the system?
Completely. I'm in IT, and it's /well known/ there are many IT contracting firms whose primary purpose is to bring in endless H1-B holders. Every so often one of their recruiters reaches out to me and I apply in good faith and then hear nothing.
And increasingly I'm understanding that they often aren't /really/ reaching out to try to get me hired.
It's instead so I can get rejected and they can use that as evidence there's no American able to do the job so of course they gotta bring in an H1-B at half the salary they just 'offered' me for the same position.
What disasters! Even if sanity returned soon, how long would it take for anyone to again trust the US? Perhaps only when all current Republican legislators and voters have naturally died.
Everyone I know who works in tech has either lost their job to an H1-B visa holder or knows someone who has. That said, the $100K fee will slow, but not end the practice of replacing qualified Americans with cheap contractors from Asia. For those companies who do not bribe their way out of paying the fee, even tacking $100K on top of the paltry salary they pay these contractors will be cheaper than paying an American. Especially if this fee is, as stated in some reports, only a one time thing.
I am sitting in one of the major German university cities (Berlin, also a state in it's own right) and our government has just cut funding for universities, despite the fact that parts of the Technical University are in so bad repair that they had to be abandoned. Not sure how the rest of Europe looks, but I don't think German Universities can afford to hire a lot of academic refugees (also the economic plan of the federal government is to hope for the global revival of the internal combustion engine, so coming here might be a mistake in the first place).
But there really is something wrong. I live amid the largest concentration of data centers on the planet. Interestingly, Indians from the subcontinent are also a major demographic amid these data centers. Do I know for a fact that these are H1-B visa holders? No, I do not. But the coincidence is striking. It is fair to wonder why we have to import this talent when we apparently have a large cohort of young males highly dissatisfied with their lot in life, as Dr. K made clear in his post yesterday. This is a disconnect and deficit that needs to be addressed through competent public policy at the federal, state, and local levels. It doesn't help that demagogues on social media (otherwise known as influencers) preach hate without offering solutions.
Most of those dissatisfied young males aren't interested in doing the kind of work those Indians are doing. It's not bad work, but it doesn't suit everybody.
There are a vast number of unemployed American tech workers and underemployed American tech workers. LOTS of those young men would be well employed in tech if there were jobs.
You can't just become a coder overnight. People need to be trained. 100 years ago, it was common to hire people with the assumption the business would be training them into their role.
Now, we assume that people should be fully trained and competent prior to hiring. Except we also see how many people do that training and still can't find jobs.
Ask yourself - Why would you want to roll the dice when you see there's a really high chance of failure? To grind for years, only for all that time and effort and money to amount to nothing?
You call it laziness. I call it hopelessness. When they are given a true reason to hope, so many of them flourish.
Most of them absolutely /would/ enjoy IT careers if they could get someone to give them an apprenticeship and the 1-2 years of learning how to work in the field via hands-on. I would know, I used to be one of them 15 years ago.
And then I got lucky with an opportunity in IT, turned it into a career, and used the first actual income in my life to transition.
Blaming the young men collectively is holding kids responsible for a problem they didn't create. They're a symptom of being failed utterly by society. Do they need to learn and mature? Yes!
But they aren't in the life circumstances by choice, they're a product of a system that has utterly failed to prepare them to succeed in life.
Get them into a decent job with interesting problems to solve, let them feel the pride that comes from actually succeeding at a basic thing in life - starting a career - and a lot of that pent up misanthropy will begin to evaporate.
I know, because I lived it myself, ages before we recognized the problem.
The current unemployment rate among Computer Science and Computer Engineering graduates is 6.1% and 7.5%. Why isn't Google and Microsoft hiring those. 672,000 tech people have been laid off since 2022, while 400,000 H1-B visas are issued every year. Why are companies like Google and Microsoft laying off thousands while hiring thousands of H1-B's every year? I am a techie looking for a job, and I keep getting undercut by H1-B's willing to take jobs for less.
Lower and mid-level ANYONE willing to work for 1/3 to 1/2 the prevailing wage for a comparable American.
It's been being done for decades. And it kills Americans. I'm not exaggerating. In earlier days, my brother gradually started to see his work replaced by far lower paid H1B workers. Eventually, unemployed and uninsured, he died at the age of 44. That was almost 15 years ago.
The abuse of H1B visas by tech companies is longstanding as has been eroding the wages and stability of American tech workers for even longer.
Most companies I've worked with do not do this, and some of the best engineers I've worked with are on H1B.
But there are some consultancies that just seem to exist only to exploit visa holders. Giving them out by lottery is dumb. Not getting them in a pipeline for green cards is also dumb.
I taught Computer Science at an R1 university for 42 years. I do not support H1B visas. If the tech bros actually supported American education instead of buying $500M yachts, there would be no need to import well-educated foreign workers.
I cannot imagine what a $500M donation to my former engineering school scholarship fund would have produced for the American tech industry. Certainly, we could have produced an absolutely outstanding class of graduates.
The H1B visa program allows the US tech industry off the hook. No need to spend money on US engineering and computing programs, we'll just hire great people from somewhere else. Quite good for our bottom line and we get great talent at the same time. Win-win for us!
Usually I agree with your pov, but today I must dispute your remarks "For tech is an industry characterized by strong “positive externalities”: Every successful company helps create an environment favorable to other companies."
What about the "negative externalities" of devices and apps deployed before testing for impact on mental health of young people, for loss of attention span and deep reading on developing minds, for disinformation and siloing of extremist politics, etc, etc? What economic value is there for dumbing down successive age cohorts so the tech companies can create more augmentations for what the cognitive capacities they cause our species to lose in the first place?
And what about the "negative externalities" of dissolution of energy resources and planetary climate disasters, of AI displaced workers and the invisible low wage labor used to label the datasets that enable the myth that AI is some how not dependent on human minds?
Virtuous circle? I think not, albeit the proposed fees for H-B1 visas are a disaster and not just for the tech industry, but for research and development in other fields as well.
“What about the "negative externalities" of devices and apps deployed before testing for impact on mental health of young people, for loss of attention span and deep reading on developing minds, for disinformation and siloing of extremist politics, etc, etc? What economic value is there for dumbing down successive age cohorts so the tech companies can create more augmentations for what the cognitive capacities they cause our species to lose in the first place?”
For this particular section, I think the view on social media needs to change. I think it should be viewed as a vice, like overindulging in drinking or drugs, it is dangerous. The adults outside of the tech industry must step into the void, but they are not.
1) The government is not putting regulations in place (eg warnings on cigarette packs, minimum drinking age, etc). This needs to happen at the federal level. Ha! Fat chance.
2) Schools and organizations are just now beginning to tackle this problem from one side through phone bans. However, those bans need to be nationwide bell-to-bell. Those bans need to include the laptops and tablets issued by schools. Go back to real books, pencils, and paper. Schools and orgs also need to find other ways to disseminate information besides posting to Insta and TikTok.
3) Parents need to actually parent, even when it’s hard or not fun. Too many either show little interest, care about the wrong things and/or model the bad behavior themselves.
Adults have failed kids in this arena for at least ten years. As research grows, it’s looking more and more like they lapped up what the tech companies touted as innovation and progression without asking any questions, tracking outcomes, or having the guts to acknowledge that maybe things are not what they’ve been sold. FOMO started it, and then shame and embarrassment kept them from fixing things. Adults not adulting and the kids suffer.
It’s all about the fee waivers. Buy a Trump coin or two and I will waive the fees for your workers. The old “double the retail price then put on a 50% off sale” trick.
Absolutely the president and his team are destroying America's leadership. That explains it all, if you see he is in thrall to Russia. It is not misguided; it is not a mistake. At least Nixon, though corrupt, did not hate the US. The current president does.
I don’t think he hates the USA any more than he hates other things. His set of emotions and behaviour is almost completely binary, and predictably capricious: If it feeds his ego, helps or enriches him in anyway he loves it. If it does the opposite he hates it. There is little subtlety between the two polar opposites. The middle ground is simply the staging area - things that he is ignorant of that have yet to be sorted into hate or love categories.
Well put. It’s tempting to overanalyze Trumps behavior - I do it myself. There may be nefarious underpinnings to some of his decisions but in the end it usually comes down to what’s best for either his pocketbook or his ego, or both.
You are correct
absolutely
Yes! One can predict Trump’s destructive policy decisions, with a high degree of certainty, by merely asking the question: WWPD - What Would Putin Do?
Or he can just ask Putin what to do during one of their frequent phone conversations.
Exactly. He is Putin’s puppet.
I don't think he is Putin's puppet.
Rather, Putin is his role model. Which means that he could, under certain conditions, go against Putin.
In fact, by selling US arms that are going to Ukraine, it is helping Ukraine against Russia.
But not enough, of course.
It is very much in the US interest to contribute its' own resources to help Ukraine
I have always thought that it was "did Obama or Biden do it? If so it is bad, so do the opposite or destroy the industry".
Trump doesn’t hate America; he is afraid of what Putin has on him plus he believes in his right to extort everyone for his and his family’s benefit. He is a godfather wimp is owned by another godfather in the country that wants to own us.
I think it is more indifference. Maybe his handler's hate the US.
Trump's motivation seems to be awkwardly proclaiming that he is important, despite his own (& almost everyone else's) doubts.
If the US goes down with his actions, so what. He was (in his mind) showing that he mattered.
The corruption, of course, is a big motivation. He has to be important if others give him (or his associates & family) large amounts of money.
Germany’s 150 year global lead in the sciences and mathematics up until about 1933 was shredded by the Nazis and it has never recovered its past status. America has a date with destiny next November. It will suffer the same fate if Trumpian forces prevail either through the ballot box, or because the midterms have been cancelled through some Presidential sleight of hand. After that, the torch is probably returned to Europe and we also see China’s continued rise as a science and technology powerhouse.
The torch will not return to Europe but I am sure that China will create favorable conditions for international scientists.
There's a lot of good science being conducted in Europe - it just isn't as well-funded as it has been in the US in the past. What Europe does have on its side are its historical and cultural ties to the US, making the move for US-based scientists much easier. But Europe is not without its problems, as the right-wing anti-science crowd is here as well - they as yet don't wield the kind of power MAGA does in the US. Hopefully it will stay that way. Hopefully, America comes to its senses.
All Europe needs to do is make it easier for folks to move there.
There may not be too many who wish to expose themselves to China's tender mercies
Is China really interested in non-Chinese immigrants? Evidence?
China already has programs to incentivize overseas Chinese scientists to return. They also have successful programs to attract non-Chinese scientists.
Here is a headline from May 2025: Charles Lieber, ex-Harvard chemist convicted of lying about ties to China, joins faculty of Chinese university.
The US political climate is so bad that I doubt that foreign scientists will be overly concerned about Chinese political restrictions as long as they can pursue their projects.
Overseas Chinese, OK. But there’s no interest in non-Chinese foreigners.
The guy you mention might have been a spy. They might take care of such.
Europe has a great deal of regulation that makes it difficult for foreigners to migrate there. The Chinese already have programs to recruit foreign scientists, and they have no shortage of money, especially in fields like AI or biotech.
You are perhaps unaware that according to Nature magazine, not exactly a hotbed of commies, rates 9 of the top 10 research universities as being in China. Harvard's the other.
While Trump's doing his best to fix that statistic by destroying Harvard's research capabilities, this precedes his current regime. There's been a bipartisan trend for decades across administrations of trashing education in this country.
Don't wait until November. EVERY election is important. So many local elections where the Republican incumbent is running unopposed are happening all the time.
Over 100,000 elections in 2025 with turnouts under 25% in almost all of them. It is vitally important to recruit young Democrats to serve in ALL of these positions.
Correct. Many States elect their governors in off years. New Jersey is one.
Much as I admire the Prof’s writing (and his eclectic musical taste), stating “America took the lead in world scientific research during and after World War II with critical help from refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, who helped build everything from the atom bomb to the space program” probably glosses over the fact that many of those “refugees”were actually escaping from Nuremberg…
There were many scientific refugees who came to the US before the war. Would the US have been better off imprisoning Werner von Braun or taking advantage of his scientific expertise?
“Sure, some of them were bad people, but hey they were our bad people…”
About half of those Nuremberg escapees wound up building the space program of the Soviet Union. They got a satellite up before we did.
Thx. I’m well aware that both the US and Soviet Union divvy’d up the best of the Third Reich’s scientists and engineers after the end of the war.
Andrew , yes, trump has given China all the tools and paths to China’s continued rise, and China’s leaders are loving every minute of it.
"I feel like Germany has the capacity to regain ground"
I'm curious what makes you feel that way.
If I was going to destroy the United States without firing a shot, I'd being doing just what Trump and his followers are doing. None of them individually or collectively are smart enough to do all this intentionally, but they're still capable of destroying the country without meaning to. And in the end, intent doesn't matter.
Do not underestimate the intelligence of the Project 2025 crew - or their malignity, or their ambition. Just because Trump is a very street-smart moron ("he's an idiot, but he's very good at it", as someone said during his first term) does not mean that evil plans are not afoot and being achieved, sometimes several times a day.
I'm not sure their actions are so innocent.
Freeing up jobs for highly educated Americans is an oxymoron.
YES! No jobs but a $50k signing bonus to join ICE.
Exactly. Keeping your citizens stupid only works up to a point.
While the concept of H-1B visas is great - there was also a lot of abuse of them - with tech companies coming up with bogus "requirements" so that they could bring in cheaper labor that was essentially indentured to the company that brought them over. Used as designed - great. Used as a tool to get cheaper labor - just more enshitification of our system.
I would love to see the data and analysis of the impact of h1b visa's on workforce training of BS level scientists. The public is constantly reminded that STEM careers are the future... blah blah blah.. NSF reports that half the STEM BS graduates are out of the field within 8 years. This is a long standing reality. Skills get dated so rapidly in tech and science that it must be cheaper and efficient to hire H1 staff and turn them out when they get stale then constantly train your BS grad level staff. "Training should mean part of your 40 hour work week... and not ... we will pay for a course at the local college so that you can be credentialed!"
Being married to a woman who started out with learning COBOL on punch cards in the 70s, and finished her career writing code to make mammoth "off the shelf" apps do things they were never built to do (Don't ask me how, I was just a lowly doctor/administrator that was happy every day the systems worked and didn't blow up), I think there are two true parts to what you said. The first relates to people getting out of the field within eight years. That is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the things my wife saw over and over was that there were people in IT that really had no business being in IT - they didn't like it and/or they weren't good at it, and it was good for them to leave the field and find something they enjoyed and were better at. The second point about skills getting rapidly dated actually relates back to my first point. For my wife, her underlying "skill" was the ability to think incredibly logically, in really small steps, and then de-bug her work. That remained the case whether she was programming in COBOL, derivatives of COBOL, or whatever the languages she had to learn in order to work with and reconfigure "off the shelf" applications. Where she worked was wise enough to make sure she was given the time and opportunity to learn about the new apps and the languages they were written in so that she could continue to exercise her real skills. Tying this all back to the H-1B visa issue - I doubt that there was much that you couldn't rapidly train up a good US IT person to do. It just cost the company more and the company wouldn't have an indentured servant working for it, but rather a highly skilled and highly mobile professional that you'd better pay well and treat right.
If you can program in one language you can easily learn another. Retired programmer here. Never needed extra training.
You sound like my wife. When confronted with "this is written in 'X'," she'd just say - "give me the manuals for the weekend and I'll be ready on Monday." Obviously not totally fluent, but as she also said "I was raised a good Catholic, I know how to follow the rules and also know when you can get away with not following the rules, and programming languages are just different ways of telling you how to follow the rules."
I disagree. Telcordia paid for my wife's Masters degree and it is a widely recognized asset for her in later job searches, as well as earning her a better salary during the remainder of her time at Telcordia. The equivalent "in-house" training would've left her hunting for low paying jobs with a BS and probably would not have earned her much more money at Telcordia.
My father had a Master's Degree in CompSci...didn't save him when H-1B forced an entire generation of programmers into retirement.
yeah, I would like to hear Paul's thoughts on this. I don't believe the criticism of H1B1 bringing in a tonne of foreign IT workers for cheap was made up ...
I’d like an analysis that, even if it critiques the idea or its conclusion, at least recognizes that the original motivation or concern behind the idea (as it emerged on the right) might be valid.
Yea, as someone in IT...I'm sorry to say the H1B is heavily abused. A good IT worker is expensive, but worth the quality; however, with the modern business idiots running companies, what they optimize for isn't a balance between quality and cost.
They just assume people are fungible and optimize for cost only. And IT is notorious for having certain abusive consultancies that serve as H1-B mills. They aren't bringing over top of the line workers, they're bringing over people who will work for peanuts, which drives down wages, makes it harder to find jobs as an American, and also gets you an indentured servant since if the H1B quits they get deported.
My friends in the coding end report seeing this in engineering spaces as well.
I normally agree with Professor Krugman on most things, but he's overlooking a massive amount of fraud and abuse in the system here.
Most people would never conceive the sh*t that emmenates from this regime.
Why?
Because it takes diabolical minds to formulate that sh*t.
PS: why ANYONE still maintains a presence on X is extremely perplexing and disturbing given its fascist ownership.
yes, get off X.
LOL, I got off X with a post that suggested that the US would benefit if the current FOTUS had "something" happen to him. It wants me to delete that post but hell no!
I got off X as soon as Musk took it over, started firing the staff, got rid of content moderators. The misinformation and spreading of conspiracy theories increased exponentially. Anyone on Truth Social also need to get off of it.
It seems almost redundant to repeat the opinion of many in the intelligence sector (or formerly in its employ) that Mr. Trump is a wholly-owned asset of Vladimir Putin, which would be one explanation of all this. Another might be his profound ignorance, stupidity, and history of enriching himself via flouting the law, over and over and over again, without paying much of a price for it. (Hence the name Teflon Don.) Or maybe he's the tool of a shadow cabal of autocrats around the globe who'd be rubbing their hands in glee to see the US crumble. That he should be impeached for these and innumerable other acts is beyond doubt. Will it happen? No. And there is where we need to steer our attention. Why is no one in the Federal government, the military, and other formerly trusted institutions willing or able to act as the Constitutions suggests under conditions like these?
It would take courage among the ranks of the current majority, Republican Congressmen... Thanks is as rare as hen's teeth. Just ask Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Well, yeah, but Kitzinger seems to be doing okay. Cheney is less visible but still kicking. I think the threat of expensive and otherwise draining lawsuits plus the loss of some donors is behind most of the cowardice. We desperately need to repeal Citizen's United in order to better address that last condition.
At least one Republican congresscritter has stated that they are afraid of violent attacks on their families from the MAGA crowd.
And that might even be true, even if it most likely isn't the most important reason for that critter's cowering.
Courage is not coming. If enough Republican voters dislike trump then GOP MOC will oppose trump. Not happening so far.
A Gallup poll from August 2025 found that 93% of Republicans approved of his overall job performance.
A Pew Research Center poll from August 2025 found that 85% of his 2024 voters continue to approve of his job performance, though this marks a decline from 95% at the start of his term.
Well, among Senators up for re-election, anyway (Ted Cruz et. al.) there seems to be some notice being taken that they have to convince at least some Democrats and a larger share of Independents to win in any but the reddest of states. And even then, without Independents, Senators can't win in many of those states. And the stats that include them are much less rosy for Trump&Co. So maybe it's a war of attrition?
Posting government policy through social media should be illegal.
Why would Trump care?
When I was in Silicon Valley in the 1990’s I did witness the abuse of the H-1B visa program: large companies paying foreign workers less than what they would have otherwise. Many were engineers, but some were simply accountants - most were at the initial stages of their careers. They made a substandard wage in a high cost area. It also helped to surpress the wages of US workers.
The abusive part was if they lost their job for whatever reason they had to leave the country in a fairly short amount of time if they could not secure another job with a company that would sponsor them. They were essentially handcuffed. I’m hoping that, due to scarcity, this scenario is no longer applicable.
No, it's entirely applicable; just the other day I saw a job posting for an engineer in North Carolina offering $30-35k annually.
Even in an ultra low cost of living space the bare minimum should be at /least/ 50k.
The reason to offer a wage that low is so they can turn around and go 'We cant find an American to do this job', and then they apply for an H1-B visa instead. And of course you can't find an American! You're intentionally offering a wage so trashy no American with a lick of self respect will apply.
I would support the H1-B far more if it had a requirement to pay 50% over prevailing local market or average national wage, whichever is higher. If an immigrant is highly skilled, they should be worth a premium.
$30,000 per year is ~$15 per hour!! You can make more at a McJob that doesn’t require an engineering degree. Looks like they’re still abusing the system?
Completely. I'm in IT, and it's /well known/ there are many IT contracting firms whose primary purpose is to bring in endless H1-B holders. Every so often one of their recruiters reaches out to me and I apply in good faith and then hear nothing.
And increasingly I'm understanding that they often aren't /really/ reaching out to try to get me hired.
It's instead so I can get rejected and they can use that as evidence there's no American able to do the job so of course they gotta bring in an H1-B at half the salary they just 'offered' me for the same position.
What disasters! Even if sanity returned soon, how long would it take for anyone to again trust the US? Perhaps only when all current Republican legislators and voters have naturally died.
Or have been voted out of office...
Everyone I know who works in tech has either lost their job to an H1-B visa holder or knows someone who has. That said, the $100K fee will slow, but not end the practice of replacing qualified Americans with cheap contractors from Asia. For those companies who do not bribe their way out of paying the fee, even tacking $100K on top of the paltry salary they pay these contractors will be cheaper than paying an American. Especially if this fee is, as stated in some reports, only a one time thing.
As someone in tech - so much this.
I hope the EU has the wit to take advantage of Trump’s lunacies
I am sitting in one of the major German university cities (Berlin, also a state in it's own right) and our government has just cut funding for universities, despite the fact that parts of the Technical University are in so bad repair that they had to be abandoned. Not sure how the rest of Europe looks, but I don't think German Universities can afford to hire a lot of academic refugees (also the economic plan of the federal government is to hope for the global revival of the internal combustion engine, so coming here might be a mistake in the first place).
But there really is something wrong. I live amid the largest concentration of data centers on the planet. Interestingly, Indians from the subcontinent are also a major demographic amid these data centers. Do I know for a fact that these are H1-B visa holders? No, I do not. But the coincidence is striking. It is fair to wonder why we have to import this talent when we apparently have a large cohort of young males highly dissatisfied with their lot in life, as Dr. K made clear in his post yesterday. This is a disconnect and deficit that needs to be addressed through competent public policy at the federal, state, and local levels. It doesn't help that demagogues on social media (otherwise known as influencers) preach hate without offering solutions.
Most of those dissatisfied young males aren't interested in doing the kind of work those Indians are doing. It's not bad work, but it doesn't suit everybody.
Most young males aren’t interested in an education. They don’t see the point of enduring all that hard work.
Nonsense.
There are a vast number of unemployed American tech workers and underemployed American tech workers. LOTS of those young men would be well employed in tech if there were jobs.
The tech job market is in VERY big trouble.
Then where were they 3 years ago when the tech industry was begging for people? Six figure jobs were there for the taking.
The tech job market is not good right now, though. I don't know if it will improve.
You can't just become a coder overnight. People need to be trained. 100 years ago, it was common to hire people with the assumption the business would be training them into their role.
Now, we assume that people should be fully trained and competent prior to hiring. Except we also see how many people do that training and still can't find jobs.
Ask yourself - Why would you want to roll the dice when you see there's a really high chance of failure? To grind for years, only for all that time and effort and money to amount to nothing?
You call it laziness. I call it hopelessness. When they are given a true reason to hope, so many of them flourish.
Most of them absolutely /would/ enjoy IT careers if they could get someone to give them an apprenticeship and the 1-2 years of learning how to work in the field via hands-on. I would know, I used to be one of them 15 years ago.
And then I got lucky with an opportunity in IT, turned it into a career, and used the first actual income in my life to transition.
Blaming the young men collectively is holding kids responsible for a problem they didn't create. They're a symptom of being failed utterly by society. Do they need to learn and mature? Yes!
But they aren't in the life circumstances by choice, they're a product of a system that has utterly failed to prepare them to succeed in life.
Get them into a decent job with interesting problems to solve, let them feel the pride that comes from actually succeeding at a basic thing in life - starting a career - and a lot of that pent up misanthropy will begin to evaporate.
I know, because I lived it myself, ages before we recognized the problem.
The current unemployment rate among Computer Science and Computer Engineering graduates is 6.1% and 7.5%. Why isn't Google and Microsoft hiring those. 672,000 tech people have been laid off since 2022, while 400,000 H1-B visas are issued every year. Why are companies like Google and Microsoft laying off thousands while hiring thousands of H1-B's every year? I am a techie looking for a job, and I keep getting undercut by H1-B's willing to take jobs for less.
Absolutely.
Lower and mid-level ANYONE willing to work for 1/3 to 1/2 the prevailing wage for a comparable American.
It's been being done for decades. And it kills Americans. I'm not exaggerating. In earlier days, my brother gradually started to see his work replaced by far lower paid H1B workers. Eventually, unemployed and uninsured, he died at the age of 44. That was almost 15 years ago.
The abuse of H1B visas by tech companies is longstanding as has been eroding the wages and stability of American tech workers for even longer.
Most companies I've worked with do not do this, and some of the best engineers I've worked with are on H1B.
But there are some consultancies that just seem to exist only to exploit visa holders. Giving them out by lottery is dumb. Not getting them in a pipeline for green cards is also dumb.
I taught Computer Science at an R1 university for 42 years. I do not support H1B visas. If the tech bros actually supported American education instead of buying $500M yachts, there would be no need to import well-educated foreign workers.
I cannot imagine what a $500M donation to my former engineering school scholarship fund would have produced for the American tech industry. Certainly, we could have produced an absolutely outstanding class of graduates.
The H1B visa program allows the US tech industry off the hook. No need to spend money on US engineering and computing programs, we'll just hire great people from somewhere else. Quite good for our bottom line and we get great talent at the same time. Win-win for us!
Another win for crony capitalism.
Usually I agree with your pov, but today I must dispute your remarks "For tech is an industry characterized by strong “positive externalities”: Every successful company helps create an environment favorable to other companies."
What about the "negative externalities" of devices and apps deployed before testing for impact on mental health of young people, for loss of attention span and deep reading on developing minds, for disinformation and siloing of extremist politics, etc, etc? What economic value is there for dumbing down successive age cohorts so the tech companies can create more augmentations for what the cognitive capacities they cause our species to lose in the first place?
And what about the "negative externalities" of dissolution of energy resources and planetary climate disasters, of AI displaced workers and the invisible low wage labor used to label the datasets that enable the myth that AI is some how not dependent on human minds?
Virtuous circle? I think not, albeit the proposed fees for H-B1 visas are a disaster and not just for the tech industry, but for research and development in other fields as well.
“What about the "negative externalities" of devices and apps deployed before testing for impact on mental health of young people, for loss of attention span and deep reading on developing minds, for disinformation and siloing of extremist politics, etc, etc? What economic value is there for dumbing down successive age cohorts so the tech companies can create more augmentations for what the cognitive capacities they cause our species to lose in the first place?”
For this particular section, I think the view on social media needs to change. I think it should be viewed as a vice, like overindulging in drinking or drugs, it is dangerous. The adults outside of the tech industry must step into the void, but they are not.
1) The government is not putting regulations in place (eg warnings on cigarette packs, minimum drinking age, etc). This needs to happen at the federal level. Ha! Fat chance.
2) Schools and organizations are just now beginning to tackle this problem from one side through phone bans. However, those bans need to be nationwide bell-to-bell. Those bans need to include the laptops and tablets issued by schools. Go back to real books, pencils, and paper. Schools and orgs also need to find other ways to disseminate information besides posting to Insta and TikTok.
3) Parents need to actually parent, even when it’s hard or not fun. Too many either show little interest, care about the wrong things and/or model the bad behavior themselves.
Adults have failed kids in this arena for at least ten years. As research grows, it’s looking more and more like they lapped up what the tech companies touted as innovation and progression without asking any questions, tracking outcomes, or having the guts to acknowledge that maybe things are not what they’ve been sold. FOMO started it, and then shame and embarrassment kept them from fixing things. Adults not adulting and the kids suffer.
It’s all about the fee waivers. Buy a Trump coin or two and I will waive the fees for your workers. The old “double the retail price then put on a 50% off sale” trick.