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.
13 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.