To be fair, there is schadenfreude aplenty to be enjoyed from the sidelines of the battle brewing between The DOGE twins, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and the Trump-loving MAGA America First base. After all, the latter has no need for H-1B visas for “skilled immigrants,” because they’re not immigrants. But are they skilled?
This conflict is now roiling the Republican Party. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are dynamists. They want to welcome talented immigrants to the American economy for the same reason the New York Mets are spending over $700 million to sign Juan Soto. You could field a team with all native-born players, but you couldn’t hope to compete with the best in the world.
To say it’s roiling the Republican Party is to raise hoary questions about whether a Republican Party still exists. This ain’t Ronny Reagan’s Republicans.
This has elicited howls of outrage from those who want to restrict immigration, including supporters of canceling the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants. We should be employing Americans in these jobs, those on MAGA’s rightward edge respond. The vaunted technological progress the dynamists worship has ripped American communities to shreds.
The beef lays out pretty clearly. In order to compete in world markets against China, we need to skim the best minds of other nations and bring them into our fold, where they can be party to American technological progress and prowess. The problem at home is that we’re neither producing enough top quality engineers, and that Americans are lazy, demanding and lack the cultural incentive to do better.
We have it too good here, so Americans can’t be bothered to try very hard. Foreign talent, on the other hand, come from countries that don’t enjoy our First World lifestyle, so they work harder to come here and succeed. Americans take success as a given, a birthright, and don’t see it as something we have to earn. We just get it because we’re Americans!
There’s also an element of woke culture undermining the quality of American college graduates. We let in unqualified, poorly educated students, and we hand them sheepskins on the way out even though they don’t deserve them. In the name of a diverse and equitable outcome, we’re watering down the value of our graduates. Other countries don’t have that problem, so their graduates suffer a far more rigorous education and greater competition for seats and grades, resulting in a more qualified graduate than we generally produce.
Some strong points here, even if they put America in a mediocre light. After all, it’s not as if the consequences of DEI were unforeseeable, and American complacency and great expectations are hardly novel concerns. Whether it’s an A for effort or a red balloon for participation, hard work hasn’t been in fashion for quite a while now.
But there are arguments on the flip side worth considering as well. For one thing, skilled workers entering on H-1B visas are pretty much “owned” by whatever company pays their airfare. They are indentured servants, in a very real way, obliged to serve their masters or get on the next flight back to Bangalore. They do not want to go back to Bangalore. It’s not as if they can quit their job if it’s unpleasant and look for another. It’s work or leave, with no option in the middle.
And when the job comes with a paycheck a fraction of what an American would demand, it’s good for the business which save a boatload on salaries, but not so much for the foreign talent. Of course, it’s likely to be far better pay than they would get at home, or even if it’s the same or similar pay, they get to live in America, which was the point of the exercise in the first place. But the Americans who would otherwise be hired for the work see their well-paying jobs being given away on the cheap.
That means they not only don’t get the job, but don’t get the sweet paycheck that goes along with the job. This is not what MAGA America Firsters had in mind when they thought they were voting for their future only to learn that their future was being outsourced by Elon and Vivek.
Will the cause MAGA to implode, or will this be the kiss of death for the love affair between Trump and his work-wife, Musk? Either way, this hardly seems like the outcome Trump supporters expected, unless by supporters you mean tech moguls who will enjoy the fruits of well-educated, hard-working, highly-motivated and low-paid foreign workers who have no other options if they want to live in a shining city on the hill.
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I worked with some H-1B programmers. On average they were about as good as graduates from UConn’s very good Computer Science program. I suppose if you hire 1000, you might capture a genius or two.
It’s probably easier to hire the guy who has declared his willingness to travel halfway ’round the world than the guy who doesn’t want to move to Palo Alto from Iowa.
I wish you new more about the “MAGA America First base” than is apparently available in NYC. I’m as MAGA as it gets, but fall on the DOGE side of the argument about H1-B visas based largely on a lifetime of experience with immigrants of Basque origin who came to the states around the turn of the twentieth century on short term agricultural visas and went back to the Pyrenees relatively rich men.
But some saw more opportunity here, came back through legal immigration and built lives, ranches, businesses and families that produced doctors, lawyers, educators and at least one state governor.
It is possible to be MAGA, to differentiate between legal and illegal entry to the United States, and to not be a racist buffoon stereotype.
From everything I see out of MAGA, you, sir, are not nearly as MAGA as you think you are. MAGA folk are outraged that Musk wants to bring in Indians (with their less than white skin) and calls ‘Muricans “mediocre.” If you do not agree, turn in your red cap.
Miles, we are about to find out if MAGA is a rough and tumble populist movement or just another blob that requires complete fealty no matter how nonsensical. I’m encouraged over the internal debate about H-1B visas. The concept of working out compromises in the public view is startlingly new to some but it gives me hope.
The big issue with the H-1B program is that it let cheap skate companies hire indentured servants for half the salary of a US citizen or green card holder. The “programmer shortage” in the business pages was a dearth of people with CS degrees willing to work for $25,000 a year in Silicon Valley. There were plenty of experienced coders in the US, but they expected to be paid $75,000 and up. Nowadays with remote work a company in Palo Alto can hire a coder in Iowa at a discount. That’s why North Dakota has call centers.
Tl:Dr I think H-1B was a scam to get cheap labor and should be shut down
AC, i work in a rural hospital. Without H-1B staff in my department we’d be paying a helluva lot more for contract workers. We’ve had openings continuously for the last decade – as long as I’ve worked here. Perhaps your experience isn’t the whole story?
“Without H-1B staff in my department we’d be paying a helluva lot more for contract workers.”
I think you just made his point for him.
Our H-1Bs make just slightly less than we citizens do. After 3 years, their agency can find them another placement if they are unhappy; after 6 the agency sponsors their permanent visa and they may work for whomever they like, at whatever the going wage is (mostly a fair wage, for most of the country).
They aren’t, for us, cheap labor. The only way I’m making AC’s point is if you strip all nuance and complexity from the argument. It’s a vision of the medical field as if from someone who goes to a doctor every once in a while. Dumbing it down, in other words.
Do tech companies take advantage as AC describes? I have no idea. Saying the entire program should be scrapped because of that blinkered viewpoint is my main issue, but also $25k/year for a CS Bachelor’s? That’s $12/hour. You’re nuts.
I’m not about to explain ancillary services economics on SHG’s blog.
“Without H-1B staff in my department we’d be paying a helluva lot more for contract workers.”
“Our H-1Bs make just slightly less than we citizens do.”
These two statements are in direct contradiction to each other, which is it – you pay “a helluva lot” less for H1Bs or they “make just slightly less” than similar American employees do? Either of these statements makes it sound like your organization is hiring H1Bs to avoid paying market rates to US employees.
I am reasonably sure the 25K statement in the OP was hyperbole, but the basic point is valid. It’s documented that companies, (mostly) tech and otherwise, used H1B employees when there were significant numbers of qualified Americans applying for the same positions because they could pay less for them. Do a simple Google search on H1B abuse and fraud.
I did not say the program should be scrapped, it has value and helps bring high skill immigrants into the country which is a plus for America as a whole. It is also abused to drive down wages and lock hopeful immigrants into manipulative and abusive work environments, not all or probably even most but enough. It is also used by hostile countries to get agents into the country for espionage, industrial and political which makes the news every so often when one of them gets caught.
What the correct answer is I cannot say, it’s to complicated for a post on someone else’s blog and more knowledgeable people than me have spent years arguing without coming up with the answer.
>They aren’t, for us, cheap labor.
They are cheap labor for employers. Not only do they accept lower salaries, but employers don’t have to pay payroll taxes to the government for H1-B employees, which is a massive savings when compared to US citizens.
At the end of the day there are two sides to this debate. Globalists who think that there is nothing wrong with bringing in cheap foreign labor to undercut US workers (“a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”), and those who believe that the United States is a sovereign country that has a vested interest in protecting the economic and social interests of US citizens over those of multi-national corporations and foreigners. We already have an O-1 immigration program for immigrants who, “have extraordinary ability or achievement”. We don’t need a program that imports foreign workers to work full time in convenience stores for $40,000 a year. This debate isn’t about extraordinary talent and never has been. Those trying to frame it in this manner are either uniformed or being deliberately dishonest in order to push their agenda.
In terms of immigration issues, the visas for skilled immigrants should be way down the list. These people are all coming through the system and are not part of the border chaos.
In rare instances are the workers brought here under H1B are justified. There are more than enough qualified Americans to do the job the tech field. They are a means to reduce labor costs and used to exploit those under the program. When I worked for a major tech company, before breaking out on my own, H1B and off-shoring, was a component to their profit and growth, particularly in the consulting arm of the business. The attitude that Musk and Ramaswamy exhibit is not rare, its commonplace. They don’t value their workers or their labor…just the fruits their workers produce. And their obligation begin and end with the stock price.
It’s interesting to ponder that MAGAphants actually believed that a man, who clearly exhibited tis attitude, would actually care about the H1B visa or the trials of the common man. He has nominated approximately 12 other billionaires to his administration. It would require complete suspension of disbelief to think they would dismantle an economic system that enabled the billionaire class in this country to explode. The MAGAphant should hold on for a wild ride….but perhaps they’ll be satiated if he keeps talking about trans and criminal illegals.