Five Quick Things: The EOY 5QT

Technically, I’m on vacation.

But I can’t let 2024 end without just one more installment of the Five Quick Things.

So with as little folderol and ado as possible, let’s begin, shall we?

1. The H-1B Thing

After last week’s kerfuffle over Vivek Ramaswamy making a pointed, obnoxious, and mostly true critique of the celebration of mediocrity that is American culture while defending the use of H-1B visas, by now you’ve probably seen and heard all you want to on this subject.

But I’ll just throw out a few quick points hopefully we can all agree on.

• The median IQ in the U.S. is considerably higher than that of India. India is not some shining repository of intellectual brilliance. It has a staggeringly large population, and out of that mass of people there will indeed be some brilliant engineers. That those people want to come and ply their trade here is, on balance, a good thing. But this is not an indication that Indian culture drives excellence while American culture does not. That’s not true, and Ramaswamy is wrong to the extent he’s asserting it is.
• I don’t think that’s what he was asserting, though. I think the deficiencies he sees in American culture are substandard not in comparison to India but in the American culture we should have. He should (and may have; I’m on vacation, as I said, and as such I’m not reading every last little thing on X) make this clear.
• The H-1B program is absolutely being abused and should be ratcheted down in size. That American corporations have forced American workers to train their foreign-born replacements on their way to the unemployment line is a horror that deserves punishment. Rather than stupid tax increases and other socialist solutions, I’d rather start making use of antitrust legislation to break up the largest and worst offenders since our economy needs to be re-democratized and reoriented toward small and midsized businesses anyway.
• But H-1B is by no means the biggest problem we have where immigration is concerned. The top priority absolutely must be getting rid of the 12-15 million illegal immigrants clogging our cities and towns without our permission. Start with the criminals, move quickly to the illegals who have been given deportation orders, then to the illegals on governmental assistance (cut that off and offer a free plane or boat trip home and a great number of those will self-deport). And when all of that is done we can talk about what the next steps might be. My guess is there is a cash amount that can be arrived at which will pay illegals to leave — perhaps a distasteful policy, but at the right number it would nonetheless be cheaper than attempting to forcibly remove them. There is also perhaps a number that can be arrived at by which illegals can outright buy a green card given successful vetting. It had better be larger than, say, $60,000; perhaps the leftist NGOs bringing so many of them here might make loans to them for that amount.
• Speaking of those NGOs, any of them who have participated in facilitating this invasion across our southern border must be banned forever from receiving federal funding. At minimum. I’d say there should be an investigation and any violations of U.S. law by these people must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Of course, this is almost certainly going to include government officials before it’s all said and done; so be it.
• But back to Ramaswamy — the easiest way to square his statements with those of his critics is to recognize that there is a demand for H-1B recipients because our educational system utterly sucks and it produces young workers who not only lack the hard skills needed to fill the jobs of today but the soft skills that allow for them to be trained. What we desperately need to do is to blow up that system and start to embrace a panoply of educational models within a robust marketplace. Rather than diagnose boys with ADHD and medicate them so they’ll sit in classrooms like zombies, put those kids into apprenticeships and teach them trades and industrial skills first, and then move them into academic subjects later. Or whatever. Our one-size-fits-all system doesn’t work, its results are garbage and it’s destroying generations of Americans who might otherwise move from school to fulfilling work and successful lives.
• One last point: our national birthrate, which was 1.6 children per adult female the last I checked, is far below the replacement rate of 2.1. This has to recover if we’re going to do what we need to do, which is to enter a period of very low immigration that lasts for 20-30 years. Historically, waves of immigration have been followed by such breaks, and in those lull periods, we’ve assimilated immigrants and grown stronger and more unified as a country. But we’ve had the longest period of sustained mass immigration in our history, and it has taken a major toll on our culture and societal cohesion. We need to absorb and assimilate what we have; the problem is, without immigrants, we’re going to grow very old as a country very fast. So as important as curtailing immigration is accumulating and nurturing successful families.

In short, there’s a lot to do and probably not so much time for fighting. But it isn’t a bad thing that we’re having open, frank debates on these subjects within the MAGA movement while nobody really gives a damn what the Left, who broke this thing on purpose, has to say about them.

2. Bye, Jimmy

There are lots of people saying nice things about Jimmy Carter, who lingered for months waiting to die before finally passing away over the weekend.

I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything nice to say about Jimmy Carter.

The narrative we’re supposed to accept right now is that Carter wasn’t successful while in office (you don’t say?), he emerged as a great humanitarian upon leaving office. And that narrative, in my estimation, is as worthy as his presidency was.

The best example of what a paper-tiger humanitarian Jimmy Carter was, comes from when he went down to Venezuela and gave his imprimatur to Hugo Chavez’s stolen election in 2003 (if I remember the year correctly). That country went straight down the toilet from there. Everybody knew the election was stolen but Carter — committed leftist fellow traveler that he was, happily played the useful idiot.

And then there was Carter’s anti-Israel advocacy, which I could bore the reader for hours with examples of.

Jimmy Carter spread misery everywhere he went. Pay respects to him if you want, but let’s not sanitize the legacy of one of the worst politicians America ever saw. I’ll let that be all the ill I speak of the dead, but suffice it to say we most certainly don’t need any more praise for Jimmy Carter. (RELATED: Carter Was to Reagan What Buchanan Was to Lincoln)

3. He’s Not Wrong and This Should Be Investigated

Our own Nate Hochman had perhaps the most interesting tweet on X Monday…

Tons of people have this experience: You’re talking about something with a friend, you open your phone, and all your browser ads are suddenly promoting it. It’s bizarre we haven’t had more public debate about this. Everyone’s just accepted their phones are eavesdropping on them?

— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) December 30, 2024

I can contribute to this myself, because a couple of months back I was on the phone while driving, and I was cut off and nearly run off the wrote by a cretin in a Cadillac Escalade, and I mentioned this — along with a few choice invectives — to the person I was talking to.

And for four days afterward, I saw Cadillac ads all over my Facebook feed and elsewhere on the internet.

It’s one thing when they capture your browser history to show you ads. Nearly buy a flannel shirt at L.L. Bean’s website and you can expect to see that shirt all over the internet as L.L. Bean tries to make the sale. But listening to your calls in order to sell you things?

How much of a shred of privacy can we still claim?

Doing something about this is a proper function of government and it’s worth a legislative debate — at the state level if not in Congress.

4. Donald Trump and Old Southern Democrat Politics Writ Large

I didn’t get to this earlier in the month, but Walter Russell Mead wrote an interesting two-part essay at Tablet Magazine in early December worth a look.

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

Mead’s thesis is that Southern politics in the post-Civil War era has always broken down into a struggle between two groups: the Redeemers, who sought to bring about a resurgence of Dixie through economic development (attracting capital investment from the North) and social progress, and the populists, who were more interested in reclaiming political power for the farmers and the poor.

And that what used to be true of Southern politics is now a model for American politics in this new post-Great Society age which has just begun.

I’m not going to characterize too much of Mead’s essay: You should read the whole thing and decide for yourself. A quick taste from the introduction:

Until recently, when people thought about the political divisions inside the Republican Party, they saw two camps. There was the predominately liberal Republican Party rooted in the Northeast and represented by figures like Nelson Rockefeller and Mitt Romney, and there was the Sunbelt Republican movement led by Ronald Reagan. Sunbelt Republicans were seen as further to the right than their Rockefeller Republican rivals on both economic and social issues. The shift of white Southerners in the 1970s and 1980s to the Republicans from their traditional post-Reconstruction Democratic affiliation decisively tipped the balance between Sunbelt and Rockefeller Republicans, driving the whole party into the more conservative form it assumed under both Reagan and Bush.

The post Five Quick Things: The EOY 5QT appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.