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President-elect Donald Trump realized early in his campaign that U.S. IT workers were angry over training foreign visa-holding replacements. He knew this anger was volcanic.
Trump is the first major U.S. presidential candidate in this race -- or any previous presidential race -- to focus on the use of the H-1B visa to displace IT workers. He asked former Disney IT employees, upset over having to train foreign replacements, to speak at his rallies.
"The fact is that Americans are losing their jobs to foreigners," said Dena Moore, a former Disney IT worker at a Trump rally in Alabama in February. "I believe Mr. Trump is for Americans first."
Yes, US nerds were angry about training H-1B replacements, but how much could they have helped put him over the top?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday November 10 2016, @10:31PM
So what is the $major_factor?
Is there one, single reason America couldn't manage a competition between decent presidential candidates?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 10 2016, @10:41PM
The two party system.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday November 10 2016, @11:08PM
No. The illusion of a two party system. Trump proved there was in reality only one Party with two public faces.
Now we get something new. The Republican Party died the night Trump was nominated. The Democrats died with Clinton's loss, they just don't know yet.
The H1B thing probably moved the needle in the tech community, although few could afford to risk the career limiting consequences of saying so in public. Which was of course another major theme of Trump which also moved the needle, his promise to end the reign of fear. In the end it was many things, but all variations on a couple of themes. One side was globalist, giddy with barely concealed delight at the ongoing ruin of what most would call "Americans" but they deemed "irredeemable deplorables" and on the other were those who now wear "Deplorable" as a badge of honor and suddenly have realized that a) they aren't dead yet, b) they are still a majority and c) they still have the option of fighting.
So a big thank you needs to go out to President Obama, Hillary Clinton and the legacy media for crushing the crap outta us, rubbing our noses in how hated we are and being too stupid to realize they were in fact still outnumbered, that demographic replacement hasn't happened yet.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 10 2016, @11:34PM
I'd mod you Insightful or Informative but I already used up my points. Instead I'll just say that's some rare brain-usage.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fritsd on Thursday November 10 2016, @11:12PM
The facts as I understand them as an outsider, are:
(1) The "Red States" people are hurting badly: this I learned from this very informative article: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/ [cracked.com] that somebody linked in the earlier discussions a few days ago.
(2) A large majority of the "Red States" people voted for the Republican party.
I think we all agree on these 2?
Now, as an outsider, I say: I don't understand why they voted for the pro-corporate, pro-big-business, anti-taxes-for-the-rich, Republican party.
I really, really, cannot comprehend why they thought that the Republican party would do anything important for them, to help them in their plight.
And in such numbers that the Republican party has more power now than ever for the past 100 years or so.
The right-wing Democrat party, and the far right-wing Republican party, is who got them into this mess in the first place.
I believe that decades of right-wing politics has FAILED the people in the Red States, badly.
Imagine that you live in a small village in the middle of State Red, and your tooth floss factory just went bust because of outsourcing, or it's turned into a robot factory with 1 director and 2 maintenance engineers.
What are the possible Republican policies to help your community???
(1) lower taxes for the rich?
no
(2) lower taxes for corporations?
no, and besides: what corporations? The only new corporations that need fresh workers are at the big cities on the coast (according to the cracked.com article, page 2).
(3) retrain them all to become NSA employees or Homeland Security?
that would work locally, but is not good for the country's GDP, because defense spending doesn't bring in foreign valuta.
I can't remember any actual policies that the next government said it is going to do. We'll see in January, I presume.
If all the "Red State" villagers had voted Green Party, then with any luck they could have had free courses on Permaculture Subsistence Farming, or similar non-sexy technology.
Good for your dignity, for the feeling that you're still working towards something, even if it's only small potatoes. City people will continue to laugh at the "grimy-nailed hillbillies", regardless.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hartree on Friday November 11 2016, @02:50AM
"Is there one, single reason "
No. It's a combination of things of course. But in this case, there aren't enough disaffected tech workers to have changed the vote directly in many of the close states that went for Trump. And I doubt that testimonials about Indian workers supplanting white collar types don't really have the gut impact on blue collar types without college degrees that seem to be a major part of the Trump voters.
I have some ideas about what were major factors, but I'm a bit wary of trotting them out. Emotions are still too high. People are looking for easy emotionally satisfying answers that preserve their viewpoints. (Regardless that they might not make a whole lot of sense when examined more closely. Think of parallels to walls along the Mexican border. Easy to state in a sound bite. Emotionally satisfying to some. Unworkable in reality. It's not just Trump voters that gravitate to oversimplifications when emotions are high.)
But, there are some rather general things.
We've seen a rise of nationalism and populism in a number of countries, not just the US. Now, things that appeal in Russia, Turkey or Britain don't always transfer directly to the US. But, a feeling of being put down by others is being felt a lot of places. Russians feel pressed as they see the lands they had control over at one time moving to join NATO. Putin tells them he'll push back and it's popular. More conservative Turks worry that the military is pushing too hard in a secular direction and the benefits of being closer to Europe really aren't materializing, let alone any real chance of joining the EU. Add in an arbortive coup with secret societies and shadowy links to foreign governments and Erdogan gets a free hand to deal with opponents.
And then Brexit of course. Not just immigration and the refugees from Syria and elsewhere, but a resentment toward a lot of regulation from Brussels and voila, we have a surprising vote.
Now in the US. We have a group that's feeling they're on a downswing of their influence and economic status. There's a suspicion that some of it is due to outsiders coming in to take jobs or that the jobs are being moved out of the country. There's a feeling that the elites are sandbagging the middle and lower class (Why? Well, because at least to some extent they are. Look at the Occupy Movement, Bernie Sander's appeal etc, let alone the Tea Party. All of them had strong themes of the elites profiting unfairly at the expense of others). Add to that a feeling that the country is suffering military and diplomatic setbacks in the world.
And here you have someone that comes along who's willing to tell people it's not what they did and they aren't at fault. It's a set of reasons crafted to match those existing fears. Further, we'll fix it and get the good times back for you.
Doesn't seem surprising that it sold well. But when you look a little closer the solutions aren't really very workable even if they didn't have other downsides.
Why didn't others (the press and political types outside of the Trump campaign) pick up on it? Well, those simplistic solutions weren't ones that played to THEIR fears. It's the old SEP field from the Hitchhikers Guide. The hardest thing to notice is something that isn't really a problem that you have to deal with. The arguments seemed silly, so it was easy to discount the impact they might have had on people who did have those fears and problems.
Trump apparently tapped into something that was real in terms of the feelings and fears of a large number of people regardless of whether those feelings and fears were well founded or silly. And not realizing that was a major failure of the rest of the political experts..