The reality of the Danish fairytale

The point is that the Danes understand that they can’t both have a safe, open society where young children can be out alone at night, take the metro by themselves, and enjoy the play parks by themselves, if they also allow druggies, vagrants, beggars, and the mentally ill to roam the streets on their own accord. A strong civil society relies invariably on strong norms that are judiciously enforced by both customs and cops.

Source: The reality of the Danish fairytale

This article provides a counterpoint to the supposed utopia that American liberals like to reference in Denmark, and the compromises to liberty and income it incurs.

H-1B Visas, Facebook, and Cummins

I ran across an article about Facebook’s use of H-1B visas in my news crawl. This part really caught my eye:

Since 2017, as part of his promise to “hire American,” the Trump administration has been denying record numbers of H-1B visas—those offered to high skilled workers with bachelor’s and advanced degrees, including many engineers at Facebook, Amazon, and Google. In the three years that Trump has been in office, the denial rate for H-1B visas has risen from 10 to 24 percent. The United States issues roughly 85,000 new H-1B visas each year. In 2018, 651 of those visas were granted to Facebook employees, the seventeenth most of any employer in the country.

Source: ‘Do Not Discuss the Incident,’ Facebook Told Employee Fired After Speaking About Worker Suicide – VICE

That got me curious. Around these parts, it’s obvious that Cummins is a big fan of the system, but I had no idea how much. If you click through that link from the article, you can see Cummins sits at 29th out of 30 largest users of the H-1B visa program! That was surprising to me!

From state-level data, we can see that, in Indiana, Cummins is #1, obviously.

I think both sets of numbers rather dramatically understate Cummins’ use of the H-1B visa program. Cummins employs lots of people through Tata, Infosys, KPIT, and, of course, my own employer, LHP. It seems like the counts in their totals that represent people working for Cummins ought be applied to Cummins’ count, and I’m assuming that this is same for the rest of the counts. I’m sure Tata and Infosys have people embedded in many of the other companies as well. I guess it doesn’t matter much in the end, but it would still be nice to remove the “consultancy indirection,” and just get final numbers for all of these companies. It would show who’s taking most advantage of the indirection.

Do other countries, like India and China, run programs like this, to get professionals from the US into their countries? I honestly don’t know, and any searches I do online seem to get redirected back to the H-1B program, because that’s all anyone seems to talk about, so it’s hard to tell.

Almost all visa holders I meet are be from India. Second place seems to go to people from various countries in Africa. China has about the same amount of people as India, and about as many as all of Africa combined, but I haven’t met any Chinese visa holders at Cummins. Mexico and Canada are right here on our borders. I’ve never even heard of someone from those countries working here under an H-1B visa. Why does it seem that the program is almost exclusively Indian? Again, I don’t know.

This is all very complex and fascinating to me. Maybe I should read a book and educate myself about the underlying dynamics. It’s just that I have so many books I’m already not reading…

Scripture, as it Relates to Government Policy

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on various social media sites, wherein liberals support taking a lax view on illegal immigration by using scriptural anecdotes, and paraphrasing things Jesus is quoted as saying. I have to say that I find it pretty hypocritical.

After many decades of trying to remove all traces of God and the Bible from any public or legal space — and telling “bitter clingers” that any reference to scripture as it relates to sin was antiquated and offensive — people on the political left are now trying to invoke the teachings of the Bible and the words of Jesus to influence government policy, presumably to shame people on the political right into compliance.

“All scripture is inspired by God,” and I totally agree that we SHOULD be taking a “kinder, gentler,” more-compassionate approach to immigration. However, if we’re going to justify that approach based on the Bible, then, while we’re at it, I welcome the opportunity to go back and talk about some other things that we, as a nation, have been ignoring in the scriptures, particularly for the past 30 or 40 years or so. Everyone who’s posting memes that we should base our feelings about immigration on Biblical passages is going to be cool with reviewing, say, abortion rights with respect to scripture, too, right?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.