Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamey Roil MAGA with Calls for Increased H-1B Visas for Skilled Tech Workers

Trouble in paradise, unfortunately.

I'm antagonistic to the idea of driving down American wages further by importing more indentured servitude workers. Note that H-1B workers can only work for the company that recruited and sponsored them, and if they lose that job, they have to leave the country. So the H-1B laws give employers leverage over foreign workers they don't have over American ones.

On the other hand, the American education system has been so thoroughly debased that we simply do not have an educated class any longer. Oh, we have a credential class -- but not an educated one.

Part of this is due to reducing standards and cutting work so that all the unqualified DEI students can achieve passing grades (or even B's and A's) to keep the numbers "looking good," from a racial Marxist POV.

But we can't ignore the fact that universities have long been placating students by handing out A's for what is at best C minus or even D-level work. Students complained about having to work hard at college, and complained about not getting A's, so universities -- supposedly charged with the goals of educating students and increasing the sum of human knowledge -- catered to their customers and cut coursework and gave everyone A's.

The result is that we just don't have enough actually educated workers. And it's getting worse.

I know the MAGA answer would be, "Well, just reform the universities!" But honestly, in reality, is that even possible? And if it were possible, wouldn't it take 10-20 years? And so wouldn't it take 25+ years before we even saw the impact of these unlikely reforms in the form of new graduates actually knowing their fields?

I don't really know what the answer is here. I don't think there are any good ones. The obvious solution -- fix the system that is turning out uneducated but highly-entitled dummies -- seems impossible, because the Education Deep State absolutely rejects all calls for reform or change.

Immigration restrictionist Mark Krikorian suggests some things that the Tech Bros and MAGA could actually agree upon.

As he has made clear repeatedly, Trump is not a restrictionist when it comes to legal immigration--but his voters certainly are. This sets up a potential conflict between the incoming president's new tech industry friends and his base. Politico framed it this way in a recent headline: "Elon Musk vs. Stephen Miller: Washington preps for battle on high-tech immigration."

It will come as no surprise that I'm on the Stephen Miller side of this dispute. But I don't want to litigate here the pros and cons of "skilled" immigration. Instead, I want to make the case that this tension need not be fatal--there are ways to address some of the concerns of the tech titans without increasing, or even while decreasing, overall legal immigration.

Let me outline two win-win changes, one administrative, one legislative.

The first involves a change in how we award H-1B visas. These are ostensibly temporary visas for foreign workers in "specialty occupations," mainly tech. There's a statutory cap of 85,000 issued per year, set by Congress, and there's always more demand than supply. Tech industry lobbyists have been relentless in pushing for higher numbers, a change consistently blocked by restrictionists arguing on a variety of grounds--it's an indentured, cheap-labor program, it undermines the job opportunities of Americans, it creates a dangerous dependence on foreign sources of talent for vital national industries. Most important, the lack of wage growth in science, technology, engineering, and math occupations is a strong indication there is no STEM labor shortage.

Enough lawmakers have been persuaded by these arguments (or fear those who make them) that Congress has not increased the numbers. The way DHS has handled the high demand is to run a lottery, with many employers submitting applications for far more workers than they need, in the hopes of winning a sufficient number in the lottery.

But if we actually want to facilitate the entry of what Elon Musk calls "super talented people," it's crazy to choose them by lottery from a pool that also includes many whose skills are middling at best. That's why the Department of Homeland Security during Donald Trump's first term issued a regulation to select H-1B applications based on the highest salaries offered. The rationale is that if these are truly high-value workers then employers will value them highly, as reflected in the pay that's being offered.

Now that is a neat solution that is hard to argue with. If these H-1B's are really "super-talented" and "indispensable," then surely you're offering them $150,000+ salaries.

If you're only offering $70,000, then you're not recruiting "super-talented," "indispensable" workers. You're merely hiring middling workers at a discount.

Krikorian's other idea: Sure, increase the number of H-1B's issued to "super-talented" workers.

But only when simultaneously cutting the number of Green Cards issued to non-super-talented workers.

One approach would be to increase the number of skill-based visas, added on top of the current system. This would raise the share issued based on skill, but would also increase total immigration. Given that the foreign-born share of our population has exceeded anything ever recorded--it's higher now than it was during the Ellis Island era, with no natural end in sight--increasing the overall level of immigration is a non-starter, however much Trump's new tech friends may want that.

Or, you could abolish the chain-migration family categories for any but the husbands, wives, and little children of US citizens and eliminate the Diversity Visa Lottery and reassign all those 450,000-500,000 green cards to skills-based admissions, leaving the overall annual level of immigration the same.

Recall, though, that the large majority of Trump supporters don't just want the level of legal immigration to stay the same--they want it reduced. The obvious win-win, then, is to eliminate the chain-migration categories and the visa lottery and reallocate, say, half of those visas to the current skilled categories. This would result in both an increase in the number and share of new immigrants chosen for their skills and a reduction in the overall level of immigration.

This is a great idea, but it requires Congressional action, so....

It's as impossible as reforming the education system.

Speaking of education and immigration:

Uneducated thugs and anti-American foreigners living in our country are claiming that it's imperialist and "American-centric" to even know what The Odyssey is.

We're not talking about reading it or studying it, mind you. They're claiming that expecting people to simply know that The Odyssey is an epic Greek poem about Odysseus's travels is western chauvanism.

We must all become stupid to make the ignorant feel better about their ignorance, and we must remake America into a non-Western nation so that anti-Western immigrants may feel at home here.

posted by Ace at 03:00 PM

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