The Trump-Tech Immigration Rift

The topic of immigration and Indians has blown up over the past few days. I dunno who got the ball rolling on this, but I suspect it started with Trump’s inside team, e.g. David Sachs, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy pushing this narrative of a ‘talent/worker shortage’. This has led to various heated exchanges between Musk and Trump supporters, who have accused the former of selling out.

We’re already seeing the division between ‘the base’ and the establishment. Trump now finds himself in the middle of this rift. Does he disavow and find replacements for Musk and Vivek? Does he abandon his whole pro-tech pivot? History has shown Trump cares more about power than he does pleasing his base or ideological conformity or consistency. Things will play out the same as they did in 2017-2018: his advisors and DOGE will be relegated to the backseat or ignored, compelling them to quit.

This is how Trump has typically dealt with these situations. Instead of having to take a side, he pleases no one. The same fate awaits the pro-crypto people too who are expecting a ‘bitcoin reserve’–ha good luck with that. By the time they quit, they lose the cachet of the title of ‘Trump advisor’ and are back to square one. Putting all of one’s eggs in the Trump basket means a good likelihood of quitting mid-term emptyhanded.

This tweet is not going well, and he’s being attacked for being out of touch and wrong:

Yet again this blog keeps being right. I was right about DOGE being a joke, likening it to something from Idiocracy. The only ‘cutting’ will be American jobs:

There will be no reductions of government waste or downsizing of bloated agencies. No rollback of post-9/11 security such as TSA or financial screening. Just a big dog and pony show.

I was also right about Vivek Ramaswamy being an overpaid midwit who is not nearly as smart as assumed earlier. Many of the same people who were praising him for his alleged brilliance during the primaries (as if spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money for a bottom-ranked finish is somehow illustrative of unrecognized genius) are now coming to the same realization I had.

Regarding the talent or worker shortage, there are two ways of looking at this: a shortage in terms of employees who are up to par, or a shortage in terms of supply not keeping up with demand?

I also disagree with his claim that America doesn’t value genius or merit. The guy who wins the math Olympiad and gets a STEM job is sure going to be making way more money than the guy who auditions for a TV show or who ‘ keeps up with the Kardashians’. This is the marketplace rewarding STEM people with more income for their contributions to the economy. There are far more people getting rich with STEM/tech compared to in Hollywood or sports even if they are not household names. Why else is there so much demand for admissions to elite universities or coaching in the context of standardized tests or math competitions if society does not value genius and merit? Revealed preferences clearly shows it does, as much as people on Twitter insist otherwise. Also, I disagree about America losing its competitiveness; all the data shows otherwise as the US economy has pulled away ahead of the rest of the world post-Covid.

As others such as Cernovich noted, during the ’60 and ’70s there was plenty of decadence in America, like Woodstock and drugs, yet America was still innovative. Moreover America’s high-achieving Indian immigrants are a tiny self-selected population that are not representative of India as a whole.

I disagree with Elon about school in regard to fostering talent:

Even though I was able to self-learn math, I don’t think self-study is a viable alternative to classroom learning and supervised or formal instruction. In my case, there were still gaps in my knowledge that would have been detected had someone been supervising me. These things tend to be subtle, like knowing the precise domain of a function and so on. Advanced concepts in math and engineering can be subtle and it’s easy to make a mistake or miss some key detail. I can recall in high school the smartest kids still needed help with calculus despite taking community college courses. It’s not like they were able to pick it up on their own despite being smart in other ways. The conceptual leap of going from algebra to calculus is considerable, that it necessitates extra help to get over the roadblocks. Sure, school can be mind-numbing, but for technical concepts in which gaps of knowledge are unacceptable and precision matters, like engineering, in which lives are at stake and things must work, I don’t see any alternative.