What if We Restricted Athletes Like We Do Tech Workers?
How much would that suck?
My Christmas gift this year was watching the tech right and the MAGA right get into a good ol’ fashioned Twitter brawl. It started when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan to be a senior advisor on Artificial Intelligence. The pick surprised me because Krishnan is: 1) Qualified, and 2) Not accused of paying teenagers for sex — Trump is really mixing it up with this choice! But MAGA Twitter was surprised because Krishnan has called for removing the country-specific caps on H1b visas, which are often used by tech workers, especially Indian tech workers. This led to anti-Indian invective bubbling up on social media, which has the potential to sully MAGA Twitter’s reputation as an egalitarian safe space for the tolerant and open-minded.
Trump allies Elon Musk and David Sacks stuck up for Krishnan, and for the concept of hiring foreign workers, generally. In response, MAGA heads lost what’s left of their minds. I side with Musk and Sacks — even a clock that fried its brain on acid is right twice a day, right? To my mind, much of MAGA Twitter is making the same mistake that many leftists make when arguing against merit-based hiring: They fail to realize that these are companies, not jobs programs, and the number of jobs grows or shrinks depending on how those companies do. Also like the left, they imagine that that you can restrict the pool of workers without any drop off in quality, and that’s the part of the argument that I want to address.
The left wing version of this argument is: “So you’re saying you can’t find a nonwhite/transgender/disabled/all of the above person to fill this highly specific role?” And the right wing version is: “So you’re saying you can’t find an American to fill this highly specific role?” In each case, the interrogator is daring the person doing the hiring to say: “Yes, the best person available is not in your preferred group.” Of course, the Twitter hordes will try to twist that to mean: “I hate your preferred group — I get up every morning and pray for pestilence and sorrow to befall those subhuman trolls.” Of course, nothing remotely like that was said, but the person being interrogated has to ask themselves if they want to spend a week on social media trying to explain that to the dumbest people alive.
One thing I find absurd about this back-and-forth is that there’s a highly public field in which everyone knows that the MAGA/leftist way thinking doesn’t work: sports. Virtually all Americans agree that pro sports teams — or at least the pro sports team they cheer for — should hire the best player available. American sports fans might be a vast ocean of fuckwits, but even we know that you either hire the best players or you get your ass kicked. And I think that if we imagine what pro sports would look like if it was subject to the same immigration restrictions as the tech sector, it becomes obvious that, yes, restrictions make a big difference.