Jason Calacanis: America was built by the best and most driven immigrants, and should continue to be for such people
Angel investor and All-In podcast host Jason Calacanis responded to Paul Graham's statement that "the most qualified should get the jobs" by stating that America was built by the best and most driven immigrants and should continue to be built for such individuals; the borders must be closed, illegal immigration should be zero, and after closing, top talent should be recruited from rival countries like China, Russia, and Iran.
He demands that selected individuals fully integrate into the American way of life and enter the melting pot. He also noted that we are currently at "the lowest unemployment rate in a lifetime" and that H-1B should not be used to replace Americans with cheap labor, a call he has been making for over a decade. He welcomed President Donald Trump's suggestion to impose heavy taxes on H-1B visas: an additional $20,000, not to mention $100,000, would make it difficult to replace a $75,000 American job with someone from India for $50,000.
Calacanis stated that he witnessed in the 1990s at Sony's IT department how this visa was used to create "contract labor": overtime could not be refused, as being fired and not finding a new employer within about 30 days could lead to being required to leave the country. In September 2025, the government imposed a one-time fee of $100,000 on new H-1B applications, whereas the usual government fee was about $2,000 to $5,000. In June 2026, a federal judge in Boston ruled that this fee was an unauthorized tax by Congress and overturned it; the Department of Homeland Security recently proposed a new fee of about $103,265 and changed the lottery to a wage-weighted selection.
Public data and litigation materials show that applications significantly cooled during the period when the new fee was implemented: records indicate that by mid-February 2026, only 85 applications with the $100,000 fee had been received. Amazon, as the largest employer for many years, received about 4,831 approvals in fiscal year 2026, down from 13,265 the previous year. Vice President JD Vance emphasized that companies should first train Americans. After changing the lottery to wage weighting, high-paying positions are prioritized.
In market mechanisms, the buyers are consulting and IT contractors seeking high skills but wanting to suppress wages, while the sellers are intermediaries and employers treating visa quotas as labor arbitrage tools. This situation was triggered by Graham's hiring principle post. Funding will shift from low-wage bulk applications to positions that can afford the six-figure additional fees, or to local hiring and outsourcing abroad. The beneficiaries are high-paying professional positions with more certainty in applications, while the H-1B intermediary chain that relies on wage differentials is under pressure.
Source: Public information
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Calacanis divides immigration into two accounts: one for the melting pot and poaching elites from rival countries, and another for the H-1B bottom being used to drive down wages. The All-In circle has long been caught in the squeeze of "wanting geniuses, not cheap replacements"; figures like Musk and Sachs, also immigrants, oppose turning visas into a cost item for IT outsourcing. His experiences in Sony's IT department in the 1990s have been used for a decade, and he had already discussed it on television in 2015; after Trump made the one-time $100,000 a policy, he claimed it as "adopting my suggestion." The judge's reason for overturning was not moral, but that the president cannot impose taxes unilaterally, so the department is using rule-making procedures to send it again.
The capital path is to impose tariffs on labor. The one-time $100,000 fee is not decisive against the salaries of large firms but will eliminate the business of price differentials between $50,000 and $75,000. The Department of Homeland Security's own analysis indicated that the first round of fees resulted in a net decrease of about $28 million in fee revenue for the government within months due to the low number of payments. The motivation is to change the lottery luck into wage selection, allowing quotas to be tied to high-paying positions. The strategy is to use the border narrative and talent competition with the same phrase "closure is for selection."
Similar structures are seen in Australia's points system, Canada's high-salary pathway, and the historical use of quotas in the U.S. to filter by nationality before switching to skills. The tech industry is at a stage of expanding computing power while facing domestic political constraints: leading labs still need global PhDs, while the logic of replacing consulting and maintenance positions is being framed as abuse. The profits of intermediaries in the lottery era are being rewritten by wage weighting and additional fees.
The essence is the transfer of pricing power. Whoever can determine the standard for "qualified" decides the price of cross-border labor. The mechanism is: additional fees push low-price applications out of the queue, and wage weighting assigns remaining quotas to high salaries; the melting pot narrative covers the political costs of elite pathways, while heavy taxes cut off bottom arbitrage. When both sides are established, visas shift from being a human resource tool to an industrial policy tool.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
- The border can keep people out, but not the competition for top minds.
- Adding taxes to visas is equivalent to capping low-price arbitrage.
- Workers who cannot change jobs already have fear discounts written into their wages.