Motus Mentis

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 in 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.