Summary
Steve Bannon intensified divisions within the MAGA movement by calling for “reparations” for American workers allegedly displaced by H-1B visa holders, whom he also advocated deporting.
On his show, War Room, Bannon criticized Elon Musk and others for supporting the visa program, claiming it undercuts U.S. workers.
The H-1B program, which allows companies to hire skilled foreign workers, has divided MAGA, with anti-immigration factions opposing it.
Musk’s support of the visas and clashes with conservatives, including Laura Loomer, have escalated tensions, raising questions about his alignment with MAGA priorities.
Steve Bannon is obviously a giant racist douchebag, but I do have to say H-1B isn’t great. It basically lets companies rent foreign workers for cheap. What I would like to see instead is a program to grant citizenship to skilled workers and fast track their immigration status. Companies would hate that of course because then skilled people would be less willing to accept low-ball offers.
What I’d like to see is the idea of regional pay based on local cost of living being tossed out the fucking window worldwide and start trying to equalize pay worldwide.
People aren’t and shouldn’t be worth less based on geographic location or the language they speak or any other bullshit factor like that. It’s always just been a worthless excuse for exploitation of whoever is available to exploit. It’s why the US CIA has participated in economic terrorism to help prop up the US empire. If the US had always had to pay US equivalent wages to foreign workers, the great outsourcing would have never worked. It would protect US workers and pay foreign workers or immigrant workers what they’re worth. Immigrants and foreign workers are fine, but they aren’t worth less because of who they are.
I know people’s fears about a world currency and shit, but for fucks sake, its just one of so many ways to have poor people worldwide at each others throats.
Hear hear. There’s plenty of work to do, and it’s only gotten easier to collaborate remotely as time goes by.
I say this as a hardware engineer, remote collaboration can and does work.
And the tools for communications between people who don’t speak the same language have never been better.
What would pay look like for the median American in that scenario?
I can’t imagine I’d still own nice electronics or live where I do, though it would be pretty darn cool to rescue the indentured servants and the slaves, to cure the most curable diseases, to know our brothers across the world no longer worry about going to bed on an empty stomach…
Boy I’m selfish. I want to raise these people up:
but I still wanna hang out on Lemmy and go to restaurants and stuff and if I’m sharing with the $700/yr salary crowd I can forget about everything I’ve ever known pretty much. (IDK, it’s wildly complex right to think about perfect redistribution of liquid and illiquid assets, then the days and years that follow)
Oh absolutely. I don’t mean to infer that I don’t understand that for people of the first world this actually means some sacrifices will have to be made. Maybe I’m optimistic, I think we could get away with each household having like a raspberry pi type computer and maybe focus on voip phones and rolling out enough rural internet so cell phones in general (not just smartphone) go back inside the pandoras asshole they crawled out of. Let’s go back to beepers/pagers and home phones and not everyone being connected all the time, too.
Anyway, yeah, a lot of focus in the first world will have to be done on renewable energy and trying to transform current housing to be more energy efficient especially in terms of heating/cooling.
Certainly assumed you knew that plan demanded sacrifice. Hey, I like the Raspberry Pi idea.
I’m curious if you, like me, own something better than a Pi right now. In which case, we could sell it and buy a Pi for ourselves PLUS some mini PCs for those who could really use them.
If so, we could do that right now but we haven’t. For me, that challenges my stated intentions, because I’m not willing to put my money where my mouth is.
Hmm, I couldn’t do my work with such a low powered machine but what kind of work would I even have to do in a completely equitable world…
Well we don’t currently have a good path to equitable distribution, but ever since I was a teenager, I have always held on to still working PC parts instead of immediately selling them when I upgrade. Beyond using the old ones as various servers, I’ve most often restored them and given them away to folks who were too poor to afford a PC but needed one. I’ve also fixed countless laptops only asking for the people I help to pay for their own parts, my labor was free to them (I have always felt the cost of PC repair is prohibitively expensive to the elderly who live on a fixed income). So I certainly feel like I’ve done my bit in that regard.
But as for computer stuff, I actually have quite a bit of equipment at the moment, but that has a purpose and plan. One, the aforementioned “lab” of old equipment that can be hacked together into stuff that is needed, and two considering the realities of a future where we really need Mutual Aid networks and figuring out how I can contribute by having the tools, parts, and knowledge necessary for things like a community mesh & ethernet LAN network. We need to restore citizen communications networks like the barbed wire telephone networks of yesteryear.
Bannon seems like he’s identified all the pain points Americans are feeling, but has the exact wrong ideas on how to solve all of them.
Yep, exactly this. I’ve been saying this kind of thing for decades when discussing H-1B with others in my field. If there is really a “shortage”, we can fix it in short order by: training programs put on by companies (I know, imagine that), scouting for talent both in the country and across the globe, enticing them to migrate here with permanent status, and then PAYING people accordingly.
…but that’s not the problem they are trying to fix.
The problem that needs fixing is Elon Musk, and people like him. We need to fix them