Janet Levy: This speaks to the critical role of advisors. The people a president surrounds himself with, make decisions that affect everyone.
William Upton | National Pulse | Dec 26, 2024
A fierce debate has broken out between President-elect Donald J. Trump’s very recent tech industry supporters and his long-standing America First base. At the core of the disagreement is the subject of legal immigration—specifically, how Trump should handle so-called “high-skilled” foreign worker programs like the H1B visa.
One of the staunchest proponents of expanding the labor pool in this way is billionaire Elon Musk. In a Christmas Day post on X, Musk exclaimed America needs more than double the 160,000 semiconductor industry engineers said to be required by 2032.
“No, we need more like double that number yesterday! The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote, adding: “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to wn.”
Additionally, Musk-allies and newly-named artificial intelligence (AI) advisors to President-elect Trump, David Sacks, and Sriram Krishnan, have both emerged as loud advocates for more legal immigration, expanding the high-skilled labor supply through changes to the H1B visa lottery.
A FLAWED MORALITY.
While bringing allegedly top talent from around the world to the United States sounds good on its face, this isn’t actually what H1B visas do.
The O-1 visa is actually the program used to grant legal work status to a foreign nation in the United States that is considered a ‘once-in-a-generation’ intellectual talent in a critical industrial sector.
H1B visas apply more to workers with skills that native-born Americans can easily learn through technical training programs or even collegiate classes. Think more programmer or mid-level software engineer than someone trained in semiconductor fabrication.
Even more concerning is that the big tech companies routinely abuse H1B visas as part of a scheme to suppress the wages of both American and foreign workers while maximizing shareholder profits.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice ramped up enforcement of visa rules after a pattern emerged in which tech companies artificially create the appearance of a domestic work shortage to increase their H1B allotments. This ultimately resulted in native-born workers being laid off and replaced two or threefold by cheaper foreign H1B workers.
H1Bs benefit tech companies on two key fronts:
- First, on average, H1B workers are paid significantly less than their American-born counterparts. This effectively puts downward pressure on wages across the industry, meaning American workers also get paid less;
- Secondly, because the visa is attached to the sponsor company, the foreign worker lacks the leverage afforded to American-born workers who can demand higher salaries by simply looking to take a job with a different firm.
MAGA is a team effort, and Donald Trump is the head coach. This is the most important thing to remember in the H1B situation.
This stuff with visas started, as far as I know, in the early 90s when the U$$R was destroyed from within and the US no longer needed to show how life is so much better here than there.
The US manufacturing was largely moved to China and computer programmers, as an example, started to come in on those visas from India.
At first, there were special firms that obtained the visas for them and brought them in.
The Indians’ salaries were 1/3 of those of the American programmers, and they successfully competed with their American coworkers (in spite of the fact that many of the Indians doctored up their resumes) because Americans compete with each other as individuals but Indians cooperate and share knowledge within their group, and permit each other to learn new things by working on a project together even if the project was assigned to only one of them.
Several years later, someone realized that there was now no need to bring them in – they could work online from India and be paid their local salaries in rupees, or the natives of other countries could work online and be paid in their local currencies – this is still true, as far as I know, so why Ramaswamy has to start hauling them in again?
This is what the American business wants – CHEAP LABOR, no matter where it comes from or who it hurts in the US or anywhere else.
After the US manufacturing was moved to China, we were told that the US is now at a higher stage of economic development – it is called “service economy”.
But a few years later, if you called a company’s customer service number, instead of hearing an American-born representative, you heard someone with a heavy foreign accent.
Now, you would be glad to hear any accent, as long as someone live picked up the phone instead of some sadistic automatic system.
So, what stage of economic development are we at now?
There is nothing here to debate, business wants CHEAP labor.
These people are not patriots, all they want is to increase their profit margins in any way possible, all the rest is lies and marketing to get their way.
“Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to wn.”
… while building from your own base (the American people).
@Adam
Actually, Trump opposed H-1b program during his first term, which is quite different category than just legal immigration which, as you noted, he has never opposed.
Rightly or wrongly, Trump has always said that he favored granting legal immigration permits to skilled workers whom American industry can use to increase production, provided needed services to Americans,etc. That has beenhis position for many years, and it is not realistic to expect him to change his mind now. Trump has always opposed illegal immigration, and permitting illegal immigrants to obtain employment in the U.S. But he has always claimed that he supports legal immigration by individuals who apply for immigration permits by the procedures specifyed by law (which menas a lot of paperwork), submit their applications in the proper locations (usually American consulates outside the United States) and who meet the legal requirements for temporary or permanent resident status. I don’t thinkhe will abandon his support for legal immigration by legal means.