Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…… there’s another nuance. So there’s another nuance, there’s another nuance, which is mostly in the valley we don’t use H-1Bs anymore, mostly we use O1s. So, there’s a separate class of these, and the O1 is like this… It turns out the O1 is the super genius visa. So, the O1 is basically our founder… When we have somebody from anywhere in the world, and they’ve invented a breakthrough new technology, and they want to come to the US to start a company, they come in through an O1 Visa. And that actually, it’s a fairly high bar, it’s a high acceptance rate, but it’s a pretty high bar, and they do a lot of work, and you have to put real work into it, really prove your case. Mostly what’s happened with the H-1B Visa program is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers. One is basically a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think, and then the other is it goes to these, what they call the mills, the consulting mills. And so, there’s these set of companies with names, I don’t want to pick on companies, but names like Cognizant, that hire, basically have their business model is bringing in primarily Indians in large numbers, and they often have offices next to company-owned housing, and they’ll have organizations that are literally thousands of Indians living and working in the US, and they do basically call it mid-tier IT consulting. So, these folks, they’re making good wages, but they’re making 60 or 80 a or 100,000 a year, not the 300,000 that you’d make in the Valley. he US, and they do basically call it mid-tier IT consulting. So, these folks, they’re making good wages, but they’re making 60 or 80 a or 100,000 a year, not the 300,000 that you’d make in the Valley. And so, in practice, the startups, basically little tech as we call it, or the startup world, mainly doesn’t use H-1Bs at this point, and mainly can’t, because the system is kind of rigged in a way that we really can’t. And then, again, you get to the underlying morality here, which is, it’s like, well, Amazon, Amazon’s… I love Amazon. But they’re a big powerful company, they’ve got more money than God, they’ve got resources, they’ve got long-term planning horizon, they do big profound things over decades at a time, they could, or any of these other companies, could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the country. And you’ll notice they don’t do that, they bring in 10,000, 20,000 H1Bs a year. And so, you’ve got a question there, and then these mills, there’s lots of questions around them, and whether that’s even an ethical way… I don’t want to say they’re unethical, but there’s questions around exactly what the trade-offs are there. And this like is a Pandora’s box that really nobody really wanted to be opened. To play devil’s advocate in all this, in terms of national immigration issues, none of this is a top end issue, just because the numbers are small, and so I don’t think, the administration has said this is not a priority of theirs for right now. But I guess what I would say is, there is actually a lot of complexity and nuance here. Like I said, I have a lot of friends and colleagues who came over on H-1Bs or O-1s, green cards, many are now citizens, and every single one of them was… Not every single one. A lot of them were enthusiastic to defend the honor of immigrants throughout this whole period. And they said to me, it’s like, well, Marc, how can we more clearly express the importance of high school immigration to the US? And I was like, I think you can do it by advocating for also developing our native-born talent. Do you want to inflame the issue or do you want to diffuse the issue? I think the answer is to diffuse the issue. Let me give you one more positive scenario, and then I’ll also beat up on the university some more. Do you know about the National Merit Scholarship System, have you heard about this? Not really, can you explain?…

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