The social-media site formerly known as Twitter was aflame, over the past couple of days, with a squabble among various factions of the new Right about the importation, by H-1B visas, of tech workers from other countries. One one side were Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who argue that in order for the U.S. to “win”, we need to grab everybody we can get our hands on. On the other were more-traditional American conservatives, who argue that we don’t need to doing this at all, that large-scale immigration has unwelcome consequences, and that we’ve done far too much of it already in recent years.
First and foremost, I’ll say that bickering like this in public is the last thing our political faction should be doing; we should be airing these disagreements amongst ourselves. If there’s one thing we never seem to learn from the persistent success of the American Left, it is to present, in public, a unified front.
I’ll say also that I admire Elon Musk, and that I think Vivek Ramaswamy is also a smart and energetic fellow. I’m glad to have both of them on our side, and I think they will be powerful assets in the new Trump administration — as long as their individual egos and ambitions don’t get in the way (which is, I realize, a big ask).
I also think that this is the wrong thing to be focusing on right now. H-1B visas are an important issue, but there are others far more clamant: securing the border, removing criminal aliens, cleaning house at DOJ and DOD, flushing the poison of DEI and gender insanity from our institutions, doing whatever is humanly possible to flense the blubber from our managerial bureaucracies, getting spending under control, freeing ourselves from disastrous foreign entanglements, re-establishing our energy independence, bringing back domestic production of essential goods, redressing the grievous injustices of recent years (with special attention to political lawfare, and to the monstrous career of a certain medical administrator and his cat’s-paws and cronies), ending birthright citizenship — and much, much, more.
Having said all that, I’ll say that I think Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy have this one wrong, for at least four reasons.
First, they share the distorted worldview that so often afflicts wealthy and powerful people: they live so far removed from ordinary life that they see things in far more abstract terms than the great mass of citizens far below, and easily lose sight of things — social unity and cohesion, temporal stability and predictability, etc. — that matter little atop Olympus, but mean a very great deal to everyone else.
Mr. Ramaswamy used sports as a metaphor, telling us that, just as a team will take the best players from anywhere they can in order to put a winning team on the field, so should the U.S. focus solely on competitive victory, whatever it takes. But a nation is not a sports team, nor merely an economic zone; it is, rather, a living being, an organic expression of the shared, essential qualities of a particular people. (Who would die for an industrial park?)
Too-rapid immigration, or immigration not based on a desire to become of the nation, to become one of its people, dilutes, and ultimately disintegrates and destroys, the horizontal ligatures of commonality that unite a nation, that distinguish it from a mere congeries of occupants in a vast and characterless dormitory. As I wrote more than a decade ago, we ignore this truth at our peril — and we have already been so careless of it in the past half-century that we ought, having suddenly been given what might be our last chance to preserve what national unity we have left, to keep it foremost in our minds.
Second, the population of the United States is roughly a third of a billion people. With numbers far lower than that, we subdued a vast continent, we settled it and criss-crossed it with railroads and highways, we built mighty industries that changed human history, we led the world in the development of revolutionary technologies and medical techniques, we rose to peerless military superiority, and we put men on the Moon. Have we really fallen so far that we have to go begging for help?
Third, how ethical is it for us to strip-mine the rest of the world for its brightest and most talented workers? And leaving aside the ethical question, is it wise? When we do this, we leave behind an increasingly concentrated residue of dysfunction in the places these people come from. Is it really in our interest to help other nations fail? When they do, how much of the resulting chaos and misery is going to become our problem?
Finally, importing all this low-cost labor depresses wages. (Duh.)
Perhaps the right compromise is to allow a small number of visas for truly exceptional candidates, and to concentrate otherwise on fostering talent here at home; given our numbers, the pool should easily be sufficient. But for God’s sake, can we stop airing our internal disagreements in public?
P.S. Just saw Elon Musk’s unsettlingly intemperate tweet from the evening of the 27th. Not a good look, nor a wise one — nor, at this critical moment of transition, a helpful one.
22 Comments
David Goldman (aka “Spengler”) suggested an interesting idea that may cut the Gordian Knot: just mandate that the salaries of foreign workers be equivalent to native employees, thus undercutting the rational for importing cheap labor through visas.
I fully agree with your position on this matter of skilled foreign labor, but I would like to make one additional point. Those who support MAGA in one way or another are drawn from a variety of social classes, with the base of the movement, from what I can see, coming from the working and “middle” classes and much of the leadership from the professional or capitalist classes, the latter including the president-elect. With such a board coalition of social forces, it is natural that in matters directly affecting the material interests of particular sectors of a class conflicts will arise with other sectors of the same class or other classes. Thus, the wage labor needs and, hence, capital accumulation of tech entrepreneurs, such as Musk and Ramaswamy, results in their support for the continued granting of numerous H-1B, since they more directly benefit from a ready, affordable supply of educated foreign labor than do traditional capitalists, a supply that adversely affects the immediate and long-term interest of American workers, depressing employment and wages and making national technical training reform less likely. This little scuffle, which I agree should have been raised in private, simply shows that the recent displays of MAGA enthusiasm and good feeling, which while real and welcomed, must not prevent us from being aware the real economic and social tensions within the movement. As you argue, Malcolm, Musk and Ramaswamy, “share the distorted worldview that so often afflicts wealthy and powerful people: they live so far removed from ordinary life that they see things in far more abstract terms than the great mass of citizens far below.” Hopefully, the president-elect, although rather enamored with Musk, will grasp the larger national interest in this and other issues and side with the working people who brought him to power
Immigration has always been a divisive issue in the Republican party and now is no different. Trump had better be quick about too much talking in public by Vivek and Elon and truth be told by Trump too. No need for so much talking. Counting on populist movements to hold together is always problematic as the populist make up contains so many people who want and expect outsized results and revolt when only minimal results happen. Our coalition could blow apart before inauguration giving the Democratsmedia exactly what they need to put an end to the Trump agenda.
Our team needed hired ringers to win, and now the ringers are demanding their pay. When Abraham Lincoln tried to hold the Union together with an appeal to the “mystic chords of memory,” those “mystic chords” proved unequal to the task. There are no “mystic chords of memory” between the MAGA elite and the MAGA rank and file, although the snobs will put on a show for the slobs when they must. I think there are two different definitions of America at play here, and that this contretemps has brought that difference to the fore. There is America as the Land of Opportunity and America as the Land of Memory (“land where our fathers’ died,” and all that). Trump is about to start sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom because the Democrats are hostile to Opportunity and Memory, but the coalition this created is rickety at best.
One element of this fine essay is the equally fine vocabulary displayed. I draw attention to the following:
clamant
flense
cat’s-paws
ligatures
congeries
Thank you all for your comments (and thank you, Dave, for your praise of my diction).
Steve Sailer found the perfect framing for this debate: “Americans First” vs. “America First”.
JMS,
Yes. There is a problem with immigration and education and most everyone knows it across the MAGA-verse. However in Washington there is only one problem-the arrival of DJT. Therefore Washington wants a solution and ‘want’ means all the Democrats, the deep state and truth be told, half the Republicans. Solution-exploit the coming MAGA divisions until they are a spent force. Results, status quo ante. DJT is not a politician, he is a Capitalist and a Patriot. DC has little patience for that especially with an R brand on it. It may take Divine Intervention for us to win.
Whitewall @ You are certainly correct that the Tools of Satan will work at widening this fissure, but we must also make it clear to the tech-bros that our votes came at a price. The tech-bros’ vision of America as the Land of Opportunity must be to some degree constrained by our vision of America as the Homeland of Americans. I want to live in a country and not an “enterprise zone.”
By the way, I neglected to link to Elon’s alarmingly pugnacious post in the PS above. It’s here.
Frankly, I find this awfully disappointing. We have a real opportunity here, and it’s vital that we not squander it.
I also think — and this should really be a post of its own — that we fail to understand how rare the American (or more broadly, Western) ethos of honesty and merit really is in the world; it is certainly not a characteristic feature of the cultures we tend to import on these H-1B visas. (See, for example, this thread on X.)
As I wrote nearly ten years ago, cultures do not fall from the sky; they are better understood as the “extended phenotypes” of the particular populations that give rise to them. We would be vastly better off if this simple truth, which until recently was wholly uncontroversial and universally understood, had not become a radioactive heresy here in the West.
“Pugnacious” is not the word I would use. Psychopathic menace seems closer to the mark. Musk could have called us “filthy peasant scum,” but that was insufficiently vulgar for him. Democrats just call us fascists. The leaders of our own party tell us too . . . well, you know what.
Yes, JMS, it seems genuinely psychotic. That’s worrisome.
Kind of a telling incident today Malcolm. At the urgent care because I contracted Covid for the first time, the NP mentioned as she began our session something to the effect of: “Do I have your permission to use AI for assistance during the examination?” I’ll confess it threw me off a little bit.
This afternoon, the New York Post is reporting that Trump in a telephone interview has come out in support of H-1B visas, saying, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them…. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program..” (https://nypost.com/2024/12/28/us-news/donald-trump-backs-h-1b-visa-program-supported-by-elon-musk/). This appears to be a retreat from the policy of his first administration, which sought to suspend and crack down on these visas.
An informative article in yesterday’s Breitbart News reveals the extent to which this type of visa and the massive employment of foreign contract workers is destroying the job opportunities and lowering the wages of American workers. The article begins with a brief factual summary that I think your readers would find of great interest:
“The heated debate over H-1B visa workers obscures the far greater inflows of other foreign workers into the white-collar jobs needed by American college graduates. The federal government issues about 130,000 new H-1B visas each year — plus another 650,000 visas or work permits to other white-collar migrants each year. Many of these non-immigrant workers are allowed to stay for five, six, or seven years. The multi-year visas create a resident population of at least 1.5 million white-collar workers. That growing population is almost twenty times larger than the H-1B program’s inflow of 85,000 new foreign workers every year that the media is focusing on. … The huge giveaway annually delivers roughly two foreign workers for every American who graduates from a four-year college with a skilled degree in science, software, computers, business, healthcare, or engineering. The programs also deliver two foreign workers into the career-starting jobs needed by every young American who graduates with a four-year degree in ‘STEM,’or science, technology, engineering, and math” (https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/12/28/h-1b-uproar-obscures-vast-workforce-other-white-collar-migrants/.
All the talk about MAGA, Trump’s included, will be exposed as so much empty rhetoric if this employment regime, one that serves the interests of capitalist enterprises by undermining the economic and social well-being of the American people, is allowed to continue.
Trump reveals his hand before he even takes office.
A very bad sign which should disabuse Americans of the notion that Elon, Vivek, or even Trump, have our best interests at heart.
I don’t doubt that Trump loves the U.S., but he is still a billionaire, and an old one at that, and ultimately, his interests don’t align with the average American, and they never really have.
The idea that the U.S. can’t field qualified engineers and scientists is absolute garbage, and everyone on the pro side of H1B knows it.
Eric Weinstein has challenged Vivek to a public debate on the issue, with crickets from Vivek, because Eric, and a number of other scientists, have shown that the work/visa programs have been a scam from the beginning, based on faulty data and disingenuous ideological posturing.
The billionaire class wants hordes of Indians willing to grind away for 80 hours a week for 50K a year, while qualified Americans demand something called a work/life balance, something Americans used to take for granted for generations, and expect 80K to 100K a year for their services, a not unreasonable expectation.
Trump is making a very, very big mistake with this.
I personally know two engineers that trained their own replacements from Pakistan and India respectively, only to be kicked to the curb shortly after with reduced pensions after decades of service to their companies.
Multiply that anecdote by a million, and understand the rage that tens of millions of legacy Americans feel about this issue, an issue as critical to our overall health as a society as illegal immigration.
Very bad call on Trump’s part.
Jason,
“Do I have your permission to use AI for assistance during the examination?” How did the session with AI go? Are you turning the corner on covid or are you still down?
A first-rate post, Malcolm, and congratulations on having managed to attract some excellent comments, in contrast to the rubbish that filled the combox of the phil of math entry earlier this month.
By the way, A. S. tried to leave comments at my place recently. I simply deleted them unread. Ignore or get more. That is the operative maxim I came up with some 20 years ago.
Happy New Year, and blog on!
Thanks, Bill. Happy New Year to you too!
(And thanks all for the discussion.)
Interesting post and comments!
Allow me to add: this is an interview from **nine years ago** with Michelle Malkin and John Miano on the book they co-wrote, “Sold Out”: https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/sold-out/420786
Worth watching!
Also interesting: this article from 2020 by Neil Munro: “Fortune 500 CEOs Use H-1B Visa Workers to Grow a Bonded-Labor Workforce” https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/05/20/fortune-500-ceos-use-h-1b-visa-workers-to-grow-a-bonded-labor-workforce/
Thanks for your concern, Whitewall. Covid hasn’t been so bad for this fifty-two-year-old GenXer, basically like a fairly tough cold – the worst physical feature has been the pain just below my shoulder blades from difficulty coughing at times. Honestly, the more frustrating aspect is irritation at poor judgment calls on my part, namely not testing myself quickly enough.
Regarding AI, if I understand correctly my NP was utilizing it in this instance to determine my normal drug regime’s interactions with Paxlovid. Needless to say, there are all sorts of other applications, from assistance for patients signing up for appointments to the analysis of all the patient data – not merely of my midwestern medical system but that of the Mayo Clinic system as well (the two are working in conjunction, along with the databases of other nations).
It’s important not to be a Luddite in my mind. Obviously a lot of good will be done with AI in health care and other fields. Yet technology is a good servant but a poor master, and as Malcolm has written regarding the acceleration of AI (especially as it edges into SuperIntelligence), it’s hard to believe we’ll be able to constantly ride this tiger in the future. Hence my trepidation at hearing the term pronounced so conspicuously during that most intimate of professional interactions. It signaled to me how the clock is ticking, how we really are entering a new epoch.
Sorry not to have responded to that comment of yours, Jason, and I hope you are feeling better soon.
AI is going to be involved in intimate interactions of every sort, in no time at all.
Jason, that AI question would have unnerved me too. I did a bit of AI assisted med sign up about an hour ago. How they-it-got my cell # I don’t know but up popped a text wanting me to pre sign/register for my audiologist visit next week. Seems my test shows I need hearing aids of all the nerve! Evidently I didn’t sign up right on the new race, ethnicity, sex I prefer to use or some such trash. I hit ‘finish later’ like when I walk my mid 70 something year old carcass into the office and the receptionist can write down what she sees.
When I had Covid Aug. 2022, I had that deep cough as well and it made my shoulders and abdomin sore. Fortunately my cough though deep was bone dry.
I don’t know how fast AI will encroach medicine vs the time I have left but, there is nothing I can do about it. Feel better soon.