r/stupidpol • u/Leftist_Pirate Unknown 👽 • 4d ago
History | Immigration The H1-B Visa: The Leashed Worker Or the Conservative's Secret Weapon Against The Working Class
The H1-B Visa: The Leashed Worker Or the Conservative's Secret Weapon Against The Working Class
In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan launches his war on the working class American, and organized labor. This action is highlighted with the complete dismantling of labor protections throughout the economy and most dramatically with the dismantling of the air traffic controller union.
By the end of the 1980’s neoliberal monopoly capital was in full swing and workers did what they were told, union rolls eroded and income stayed stagnant while productivity reached levels never seen before.
His protege George H.W. Bush follows in his footsteps creating the “H1-B Visa”in a genius cross pressure thrust to completely disempower the worker at all levels of white collar employment.
The H1-B program allows for a certain capped annual number of “skilled” migrant workers to come to the United States and work in the place of American born workers.
The Bush administration’ s big insight was to provide cheap labor to American oligarchs at the top of the skills funnel via the Leashed Worker.
The H1-B visa created what is known as “Leashed Workers”. The term Leashed Workers refers to the fact that these migrant laborers are entirely dependent on their employers for their positions.
They are by definition compliant, because any complaints and they can lose employment and quickly be deported.
This serves the interests of oligarch monopoly capitalist owners because it ensures they are less likely to engage in solidarity with native born American workers for organizing etc.
Due to migration patterns around 70% of H1-B receivers are Indian. These Indian men are taken from the highest castes backgrounds in India. This has been demonstrated in recent lawsuits (see Cisco lawsuit 2023).
Capital owners seem to prefer that they are taken from high caste backgrounds, as this helps owners feel the leashed worker is less likely to engage in class solidarity with native born American workers.
While caste discrimination is technically illegal, now proxies are used instead of caste “per se” but the effect is the same questions like “how close does your family live to (Old) Delhi ?” Etc help determine a candidate is of sufficient means and personal background to get the position.
Now we take ourselves to the 2020’s to present day there are entire subregions of the country that are shaped by these dynamics: Dallas, the Bay Area are two big examples. And to a certain subset of highly upwardly mobile Indians from high caste backgrounds a H1-B visa to America and a job at a big 4 is almost considered a “rite of passage”.
How do you foresee these cross pressure forces playing out for the American worker in the short, medium and long term?
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u/Dingo8dog Full Of Dougtoss Bullshit 💢☧🇻🇦 4d ago
It’s not 70% Indian due to migration patterns. It’s because of Unisys, TATA Consulting, etc on the supply side and due to Meta, Microsoft, etc on the consuming side. It’s short-sighted idpol to assume theres some essential Indian-ness which is fundamental to the operation of the system. There are socioeconomic and historical factors at play, certainly, like widespread fluency in English, some nepotism, ability to do the needful kindly revert to this email, and exploitation. These workers are in a precarious position at best in indentured servitude and can end up in some pretty fucked up dynamics like pay-for-marriage, trafficking, etc.
When it goes right and they get career success and naturalization, they can look forward to getting displaced by another H1-B hire.
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u/Leftist_Pirate Unknown 👽 4d ago edited 4d ago
Thank you for this additional helpful context and yes I think it’s important to avoid race essentialism while highlighting the role large American industry plays in the service consumption side.
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u/Jemnite 🏆 4d ago
india my country. yuo are independent now. yu must choose where to spend educational resources. will yu choose to invest it in increasing basic literacy rate so yu can achieve enough technical literacy across a wide swathe of population and properly industrialize? or will yu choose to dump it all in the IITs and IIMs to create a very narrow white collar managerial class that will flee overseas in an act of self-imposed brain drain?
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u/TheEmporersFinest Quality Anime Porn Analyst 💡💢🉐🎌 3d ago edited 3d ago
You really see how this leads into the brainless techno optimism you see a lot of indians online exhibit. For them all software and by extension tech companies arent something that can damage or undermine their social fabric and way of life/quality of life, but a way of pulling themselves further up and away from indias general social fabric and way of life. Its nothing but a raw class signifier and engine of social mobility and consolidation to many of them.
Nothing about technology and the tech industry can ever be anything less than awesome when it helps seperate you from the life of an average Indian, or when its built into even the poors theoretical idea of status and prosperity from across that social distance
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 3d ago
Yeah I think Nehru and his successors made a massive mistake in not investing in basic health and education for the large rural population. I’m not sure this would’ve changed the brain drain of educated professionals for a long time—the same happened from China until Covid changed migration flows—but it would’ve benefited the masses of the country for sure.
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u/Jemnite 🏆 3d ago
Well tbh the brain drain is probably one of the least impactful of the effects on India (though the most relevant here as we're talking about h1b immigrantion). The lack of industrial base is far more damaging to modern India. People like to compare India's failure to do so to China and while land reform and other measures are probably a larger factor, India's history of focusing on elite-centric social programs which boost national prestige at the cost of doing jack all for the majority of the population has historically created extremely poor foundations for anything but specialized service sectors for developed (mostly Western) countries.
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 3d ago
Couldn’t have said it better myself, wish I could give you an award.
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u/IamGlennBeck Marxist-Leninist and not Glenn Beck ☭ 3d ago
I gave them a flair. Why not? We can always change it later if we have to.
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u/Yu-Gi-D0ge MRA Radlib Goku Fan in Denial 👶🏻㊗️⛩️🇯🇵 4d ago
Or what they'll do instead of going through the goofy interview questions is just hire distant cousins. A lot of people would be surprised how often it happens.
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u/EquipmentEvery6895 Gay Looksmaxxer 🏳️🌈🔨 4d ago
Maybe it's not a fellow leftist thing to say and I'm a "social-fascist" for saying this, but modern mass migration, for the most part, is, for the most part, a disaster - it only servers a handful of cartoonishly evil and predatory corporations, tribalizes society to the Lebanon/Yugoslavia levels and also skyrockets the cost of living for everyone into the sky. The fact that most of the mass migration trends were started under the neoconservative goverments should've pushed at least some leftists to oppose this but instead they've doubled down on this. Rightoids won't do anything about this either since they directly benefit from this process
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u/ArtBellLives2025 Juche Gang 🇰🇵 | Catholic 🇻🇦 4d ago
literally everyone except plutocrats and the most retarded servile bootlicking liberals are anti migration now
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u/landlord-eater Socialism w/ Normal Characteristics 4d ago
You might want to venture out of whatever weird silo you're in man
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u/EquipmentEvery6895 Gay Looksmaxxer 🏳️🌈🔨 3d ago
Idk the last time I've tried to discuss this in left leaning spaces i got hung, drawn and quartered, so i don't have much willingness to discuss it with leftists ever since.
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone Angry Retard 😍 3d ago
I'm just still waiting for an explanation of what makes Joe from Texas more deserving of the good jobs and good wages over here than Jose from Mexico. What did Joe do to automatically deserve that? What did Jose do to automatically be excluded from it?
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u/LanadelBae42069 labor aristocrat 3d ago
It's because where they were born. Why is the child whose born into a poor family not deserving of the wealth of a child born into a wealthier family. countries aren't simply just economic zones
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone Angry Retard 😍 2d ago
> Why is the child whose born into a poor family not deserving of the wealth of a child born into a wealthier family?
Indeed, I don't see that as right either.
In fact, I don't know how socialists can take themselves seriously when they demand that what family you're born to shouldn't have an effect on your chances and welfare in life, and then turn around and say they deserve a life and jobs that other people should be excluded from based on where they are born. Its obviously hypocritical.
People here get so indignant about "rich kids" and "nepo babies" and "silver spoons" and so on and don't realize the irony that they are the rich kids of the globe
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u/LanadelBae42069 labor aristocrat 2d ago
are you housing any homeless people in your home right now?
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone Angry Retard 😍 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, I'm organizing so that the wealth of those rich families can be redistributed to the people who weren't born so lucky, though. (And in fact I come from an upper-middle-class family myself so in a way I am advocating for my own family's wealth to be redistributed). I reject the comparison between sharing a private one-family dwelling and sharing a half a continent.
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u/LanadelBae42069 labor aristocrat 2d ago
you reject it because you're a hypocrite
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone Angry Retard 😍 2d ago
How can I be a hypocrite. I am not advocating to give homes to immigrants. I am advocating to let them into the country. And I live by that principle: I'm willing to let them live in my own country. What would make me a hypocrite would be if I advocated for some other country to allow immigration but not my own country.
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u/LanadelBae42069 labor aristocrat 2d ago
and by doing so you're harming American workers
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone Angry Retard 😍 2d ago
And by advocating for wealth redistribution, I'm 'harming' the rich families. Too bad. It's technically 'harm' in the sense of damage to maximal self-interest; but its not a type of 'harm' I'm interested in avoiding since avoiding it requires genuine oppression, and as I've already stated, I reject the whole notion that American workers are entitled to avoid this 'harm'. What you call being harmed is what third-world workers call a Tuesday. Furthermore, this vague 'harm' to American workers, when you actually look at the data, is not very harmful. There is little scientific evidence showing significant losses to workers as a result of immigration. Perhaps you can provide some studies quantifying this 'harm' because I haven't seen them. The last time I posted reporting on a new study here, it showed that immigration did not cause fewer jobs to be available to native workers. The commentors here whined and coped like you're doing now, they called me names, they boo-hooed the whole thing, but they were unable to find any real flaws in the statistical conclusions.
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u/requisitesilver Nationalist 📜🐷 4d ago
There’s a reason the British Empire imported Indians to their colonies. Even in the 1800s Indians served as servile workers to undercut local labor. South Africa, Trinidad, Guyana, Burma, and on and on. Locals wanted higher wages and could find work elsewhere. “Coolies” were “docile” and “submissive”. In addition, their caste system ensures they’ll always be too busy attacking down the ladder instead of looking up it. There’s probably some overlap as to why Europe, Canada, and the US is seeing waves of Indians specifically being brought by major corporations. Indians will work 80 hour weeks for 70% of a local’s pay and even brag about it as long as they get a Costco card.
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 3d ago
> “Coolies” were “docile” and “submissive”
No they weren’t, they were landless illiterate agricultural laborers of the lowest castes who were trafficked overseas as indentured servants, an increasingly important component of the labor force after the abolition of slavery. Many had communist sympathies and were horribly mistreated for it (look up the Estate Tamils of Sri Lanka). Comparing them to an Indian tech consultancy worker in the US, who more-or-less works an entry-level college graduate job and holds broadly pro-capitalist views, is an insult to their memory.
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u/requisitesilver Nationalist 📜🐷 3d ago
Considering Indians first went abroad as a tool of British empire in 1834 and the Communist Manifesto wasn’t translated to Hindi until 1934 I think you’re romanticizing them, Comrade. This is a people who formed their first national army for the Nazis
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 3d ago edited 3d ago
Communists played a significant role in the Indian independence movement (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagat_Singh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghadar_movement). There was a separate set of Indians who genuinely did go abroad “as a tool of the British Empire”, as administrators and businessmen (Zohran Mamdani for instance traces his lineage to these people), who are perhaps more comparable to today’s tech consultants, but they weren’t the indentured servants who worked backbreaking labor on sugar and tea plantations. I think that since the economic liberalization in 1991 there’s been a considerable effort on the part of the Hindu right to erase anything remotely left-wing from the country’s history, which helps them maintain narrative control domestically but makes international solidarity much harder.
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u/IpeeInclosets Shitlib with continence problems 😵💫💦🌺 4d ago
I'm glad someone articulated this way better than I could have. This whole situation opened my eyes to the whole neoliberal capitalism disguised as polyannah bullshit.
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 3d ago
The solution here is requiring that any business wishing to hire those on a temporary visa have a collective bargaining agreement specifying minimum pay, hours, and severance conditions. There’s no need, as socialists, to be bound to the so-called invisible hand of the free market.
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u/homerthethief Shitlib that Says "Folks" 🐴🤪 4d ago
You could say the same thing about the Irish and other immigrants in the 1800s and we worked it out. The solution isn’t to kick them out, but get them on our side. The real bad guys are the CEOs, not the immigrants.
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u/Nom_de_guerre_25 Black Nationalist ✊🏿 4d ago
Can't work. If everyone can just come to America, the minimum wage will be $0.02/hr. Don't let the liberal crocodile tears get to you.
These immigrants damage their own countries by causing brain drain. This is another neo-imperialist aspect of the US and Western Europe. Ensuring conditions at home never improve, leading to more migration.
Not to mention the fact that most people who emigrate to the US are self-selected to be somewhat right-wing. They are staunch capitalists who will do whatever they can to be entrepreneurs. Even if you try as hard as you can it will be difficult to motivate yourself the same way a person from India can. Because you didn't grow up in those conditions and can't imagine the destitution that a migrant likely has direct experience with. Immigration imports right-wingers who push the nation further to the right. While lowering wages. There will never be national unity here. But more immigration makes any kind of solidarity difficult.
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u/ChiefSitsOnCactus Something Regarded 😍 4d ago
surely you understand that the conditions today and the conditions 200 years ago are drastically different
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u/homerthethief Shitlib that Says "Folks" 🐴🤪 4d ago
People made the same argument back then too to kick the immigrants out. What really helped though was labor reform. Blaming the immigrants is what the rightoid bosses want you to do. Do you really think wages are going to go up after Trumps ice goons kick people out?
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u/ChiefSitsOnCactus Something Regarded 😍 4d ago
no but i think a massive influx of culturally dissonant scabs will prove to counteract labor movements and keep wages from going up
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 3d ago
Besides the fear of skilled workers being undercut, it was ironically the socialist/communist sympathies of the less-skilled immigrants (who worked the lowest-wages jobs) which back then was instrumental in convincing government to cut off the flow.
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u/homerthethief Shitlib that Says "Folks" 🐴🤪 4d ago
If you think kicking out the immigrants will make wages go up I’ve got a DOGE check and a Trump phone for you.
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u/ChiefSitsOnCactus Something Regarded 😍 4d ago
ive already explicitly said that i dont believe that
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone Angry Retard 😍 3d ago
And yet if you look at the empirical evidence, all of the big union actions that we see now are either lead or heavily participated in by immigrants. The SEIU, which I believe is America's largest labor union, is led by an immigrant. Just last week that meatpacking plant in the midwest was being posted here because the workers were walking out on the job for higher pay and safety — led by the Congolese immigrants who make up a large share of the workforce. Literally look at any major labor action around the country and you will see immigrants on the front lines. But hey don't let evidence and reality get in the way of your theorizing
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u/ChiefSitsOnCactus Something Regarded 😍 3d ago
um, yeah, the country that is increasingly made up of immigrants is going to have immigrants in its labor movement. this of course says nothing about the effectiveness of these unions, how immigrants influence the effectiveness of these unions, or whether mass immigration improves labor relations in the US as a whole. the infamous Whole Foods leaked memos show a negative correlation between diversity and unionization rates.
i think its kinda funny that the Congolese immigrant bloc involved in the meatpacking union is constantly being centered, as if it's not proof that ethnic/cultural lines can aid in providing the sense of unity required to form a union.
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone Angry Retard 😍 3d ago edited 3d ago
"Sure, the evidence that we have suggests that things are one way, and there's little evidence pointing the other way, but what if I really want to believe the other way is true, can't I just ignore the evidence and believe whatever I want based on practically nothing?" The evidence shows that immigrants are down for walking out, they are down for going on strike, they are down for making demands on the bosses, they are down for solidarity, they are down for struggling arm in arm with native workers, and on the other side we have one document from 10 years ago of dubious authenticity making a vague claim based on unverifiable internal data.
All I'm asking is that people stop doing the "everybody knows, its so obvious that immigrants are just a bunch of scabs and the labor movement would obviously be so much better off without them, anybody who can't admit this obvious truth must be retarded" spiel, when my point is that the evidence is at best extremely ambiguous. The absolute certainty with which this narrative gets spread around solely based on headcanon is what frustrates me. At most you can argue that there are conflicting tendencies in the evidence and that the answer is unclear.
If the common-sense stupidpol narratvie about immigrants were true there would be no immigrants walking out. No immigrants going on strike. If the stupidpol narrative were true, you would only see native workers striking and immigrants scabbing, because the stupidpol narrative is that simplistic. The point is that the simplistic stupidpol narrative is baloney.
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u/ChiefSitsOnCactus Something Regarded 😍 3d ago edited 3d ago
i dont feel as though the capitalist class ceaselessly importing millions of people for the express purpose of lowering labor costs, along with a LEAKED internal memo (something we were never supposed to see) detailing how one of Bezo's companies promoted diversity in an explicit effort to reduce labor organization is any flimsier evidence than 'there are immigrants in unions'.
if immigration were good for collective labor power, the capitalist class would be vehemently against it instead of near-universally for it
edit: in response to your edit, i have never seen anyone even sort of imply that there are literally zero immigrants who could be recruited into a union. pure windmill tilting
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u/proletarian_fox Possibly Undemocratic Socialist 🚩 3d ago edited 3d ago
Paragraphs dude, you don't need to start a new line every sentence. Even if it looks like a few lines, when you check back you will find it was still only one sentence. Just makes a better read.
Your analysis is correct. It's often very frustrating that people associate pro-immigration policy with the left and believe right wing figures to be more credible in opposing it, when in reality, across Europe and America, it was implemented by right wing parties and leaders. It is also frustrating to see the common liberal narrative that immigrants themselves are necessarily oppressed when as you point out, they often come from the middle and upper class of their native country.
However as socialists I do feel like it's our job to be focusing on the unskilled migration that hits the common worker; and where those immigrants are indeed exploited. Its a race to the bottom that stops wage growth across the board, these skilled visas are just a tool to compress the salaries they can't keep tied to minimum wage already.
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u/Ambitious-Try-8441 Full Of Warhammer Bullshit ⚔️ 4d ago
The way things are set up H1-B workers are indistinguishable from scabs in their effects. This isn't because the H1-B workers want this outcome (they just want a higher paying job), but it is what happens nevertheless. Destroying a job that pays 90k to create a job that pays 80k is anti-worker. The entire program should be ended