The Elitist Case for Cutting H-1Bs

Elite Human Capital should actually be elite

This will be a short article, as the fantastic Bingo Bobbins already articulated most of my thoughts on the matter in his recent essay H-1B: A Tech Bro Perspective. Everyone seriously invested in the topic at hand should begin by giving that a read.

The primary reason I’m weighing in today is to dispute the basic rhetorical framing of this issue as a debate between vitalist übermenschen on the “Tech Right” who support H-1Bs and knuckle-dragging chud “National Populists” who oppose them. To me it seems straightforwardly obvious that this is a monstrously disingenuous way to slice the cake, and I’m genuinely quite surprised it hasn’t received more pushback.

Because most tech workers—and particularly right wing tech workers—most definitely DO NOT want the country flooded with cheap labor who’ll undercut their salaries at a time when the job market is already strained. One reason I know this is I literally run a professional fraternity of right wing knowledge workers.

“But Walter!” I hear some of you shriek through globs of Elon’s mucilaginous cum, “the term ‘Tech Right’ doesn’t refer to computer programmers, you stupid dummy! That’s really embarrassing for you that you don’t know that, Walt! LOL! You should know the ‘Tech Right’ ackchully just refers to a small cadre of CEOs and VC bros.”

Okay, well—says who? Why shouldn’t my men be part of the “Tech Right?”

Why do the parochial interests of King Musk get to define the entire thing?

Obviously Elon had a sizeable impact on the last election, but his fans should keep in mind that tech workers have been turning against the Left more generally for a hell of a lot longer than Musk has been the GOP’s chief power broker. Nor did Elon himself precipitate that shift—if anything he was a straggler. In truth its causes were mostly systemic: demonization of tech from legacy media, hostility to crypto, undermining of meritocracy in education, overreach on free speech issues, and so on.

Any reasonable definition of the ‘Tech Right’ needs to extend well beyond Elon et al. It should cover the data architect who relocated his family from San Fran to Austin because he was tired of stepping in the shit of homeless black people. It should cover the financebro who left his stuffy gig at Goldman when NYC was closed for Covid to participate in Miami’s burgeoning crypto scene. It should cover the job stacking software engineer in North Carolina who’s actively pillaging woke megacorporations to finance his personal piece of heaven.

Kindly observe that none of those guys are low status chuds. They certainly aren’t poor—most of them will likely hit millionaire status in their 30s. Nor are they uneducated; plenty of them have advanced degrees or professional certifications.

In truth my men comprise the modern-day gentry class. They are themselves elites, roughly comparable to the equestrian order in Classical Rome. Naturally they will object to Elon swaggering in like some solipsistic hyper-Optimate trying to consolidate even more power among the highest echelons of the Senate.

Because this debate isn’t Court against Country—it’s King John against his Barons.

Genuine plebeian chuds don’t give a rat’s ass about H-1Bs. I’d be extraordinarily surprised if any of them even knew what that is. Most of them remain preoccupied with Mexican immigration, and still think of Indians as operating convenience stores.

The reality is this has always been an intra-elite debate between a mass affluent gentry that boasts moderate numbers and a lot of money but extremely little cultural capital (hence their inability to meaningfully dispute this grotesquely dishonest framing) and a clique of oligarchs backed by intellectuals who profess libertarian beliefs in theory but in practice tend to look down on the gentry class as vulgar vaishyas whose commercial orientation precludes genuine EHC status.

But the simple fact of the matter is that a really fantastic software engineer is about as EHC as you can get in the modern world. Unlike your typical academic or journalist or bureaucrat, he actually has useful skills. These guys are the only ones keeping the West’s Faustian Spirit alive as useful labor grows ever more Pareto-distributed and Corporate America is increasingly consumed by redundancy and redistributive grift.

Their primary limitation consists in being spergy shape rotators with low verbal IQs, which results in them getting Wozniak’d by verbally talented predators in their own ranks, the most successful of whom easily accrue cheerleaders in the intelligentsia and popular culture who resent the techie’s modestly higher salary and will therefore agitate on behalf of his dispossession by spicy supplicants eager to Do The Needful.

But speaking as one of those verbally adroit predators in STEM, I saw a unique arbitrage opportunity: to instead take Woz’s side and act as his Harold Daggett.

And that’s what The Tortuga Society is ultimately about: we’re agitating for the material interests of our own special interest group (rightist white guys in tech and their allies) and are providing our men with the resources they need to pursue that fight on their own accord in an ecology where the deck is brutally stacked against them.

Because—as anyone who’s worked in tech or adjacent to it will tell you—Indian tech leads often display truly horrifying levels of ethnic nepotism, and it’s incumbent upon us to fight fire with fire. There’s nothing noble or admirable about fighting under Queensberry rules when the enemy is using Krav Maga. It’s just retarded.

And don’t get it twisted—this attitude does not mean being crudely racist against Indians. I’ve always been militantly opposed to Retard Racism when transacting with civilized races, and contend it’s vitally important to approach Asiatic peoples in a particularly equitable and evenhanded manner to avoid terrorizing their risk-averse agricultural temperaments with our brutish Occidental swagger.

But there’s also just some sense in which different groups are always going to have distinct material interests, and anyone in the tech world who isn’t blind as a bat can see the massive ethnic tension brewing between Indians and other groups. Speaking as a former WN who remains plugged into that world, I can tell you Jews are actually quite old hat now; Indians are what the wine track racists care about these days.

And call me a faggot cuck if you want, but that really bothers me, because ever since I came back as a public figure I’ve made loads of Indian friends here on Substack who very genuinely don’t deserve to be lumped in with ungrateful malnourished H-1Bs who clog up dev teams with their 96 IQ cousins and smell like cumin / poop.

Rajeev Ram is one of the most patriotic and genuinely American people I know, and from the very beginning he played an enormous role in operationalizing Tortuga as a scalable entity. He’s also been very consistent in opposing further immigration from India, arguing the U.S. needs to focus on assimilating its current population.

But despite Rajeev’s entirely genuine feelings of camaraderie with white boys and indefatigable efforts on our behalf, there will *still* be some low status wignat chuds who get racially activated even against guys like him in the coming years. That’s what happens with ethnic conflict; it’s why I saw Ezra Klein’s name as (((EZRA KLEIN))) and thought he was a nefarious race communist until just a few years ago.

If you don’t pop the zit in its infancy it inevitably starts to fester. Soon it becomes one of those giant fetid cysts you see redneck bitches slashing open with a box cutter on YouTube. And once the pressure grows that intense it’s basically impossible to avoid getting pus everywhere—including on innocent bystanders. And that’s not fair.

Because a few months ago I hung out with Rajeev, and he smelled pretty great.

(no homo)