The Conversation We Need To Have About American Workers

Don’t believe the hype being offered up by left-wing media this week. Americans are being told that the Trump victory will be all for naught because the Republican coalition is now breaking up in a “MAGA civil war” over foreign workers. What is instead happening is that, as the Trump Administration is about to take over, policy disagreements within the broad coalition he assembled are—hold onto your hats, snowflakes!—being publicly, loudly, and vehemently debated. And the debate over immigration policy is one of the most important right now. Getting to a real, sensible, America First policy and legacy is essential for the Trump Administration.

            Ben Berkowitz at Axios offered up red-meat hype to win-starved Democrats on December 27 in a column entitled “MAGA civil war breaks out over American ‘mediocrity’ culture.” What he’s referring to as a “civil war” is really what he admits is just a large, often unruly conversation, much of it on X/Twitter, about how best to handle legal immigration and visas for foreign nationals working in the U.S.

Berkowitz argues that the brouhaha began with Donald Trump’s naming of Sriram Krishnan as his advisor on AI policy. Krishnan has previously voiced support for having no caps on the number of green card recipients. The conversation went viral when DOGE nominee Vivek Ramaswamy made a very long post on Thursday defending big tech’s large-scale hiring of non-Americans due to a present American culture that favors “the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian,” which will not “produce the best engineers.”

While in certain ways, the post was unexceptional in its criticism of American culture, as a defense of large-scale foreign hiring, it seemed to be somewhat tone deaf. Most people agree that American educational culture and institutions are not what they should be. But the question at hand was largely about hiring people using H-1B visas. The H-1B visa is designated as for “people who wish to perform services in a specialty occupation, services of exceptional merit and ability relating to a Department of Defense (DOD) cooperative research and development project, or services as a fashion model of distinguished merit or ability.” But a great many people contest the idea that use of H-1B temporary visas by companies is really about getting people “of exceptional merit and ability” who can do particular jobs with extraordinary and needed skills rather than just another way of outsourcing American work to those who will do it for lower wages.

The other DOGE nominee, Elon Musk, jumped in to defend Ramaswamy. Musk has been solidly against illegal immigration while often sounding rather liberal about legal immigration. Even in this conversation, however, he has been somewhat inconsistent, at one point offering that he was only talking about the top 0.1% of engineering talent but then saying that H-1B visa recipients had to score in the top 50% of the Graduate Record Exam. Though the first group is likely a subset of the second, these groups certainly aren’t equivalent. Scoring in the top 50% for GRE does not guarantee that someone is among the genius-level workers Musk was talking about earlier.

Donald Trump was eventually asked about the controversy and quoted as telling New York Post: “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them.” He added that he has employed H-1B visa holders on his properties, though Trump seems to be referring to H-2 visa holders, temporary unskilled workers.

The question being debated is whether Trump should lean toward Musk, Ramaswamy, Bill Ackman, and other big tech latecomers to the Trump team (who seem still to think that Americans want large-scale immigration that is legal) or the MAGA movement and the many Americans who want a smaller number of immigrants for a while as we address the pressing problems of the Biden Administration’s immigration mess.

As social commentator Aaron Renn, who has a great deal of experience in corporate America, tweeted, “I have direct, personal experience with how H-1Bs work in the real world. I was ‘in the room where it happened.’ We were told we could not hire American unless we showed that we could not use an H-1B. Much of [what] people tell you about H-1Bs is a lie.” Whatever the H-1B program was designed to do, it has been the subject of rampant abuse for a long time.

Trump himself took this position in 2016, telling Megyn Kelly that “The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay.” He pledged to end the misuse of this program when in office.

The evidence is that he did. Theo Wold, who served in the first Trump Administration, recounted how the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) fired 200 American workers in 2020 “and had them train their foreign replacements on the way out. They did this despite the fact that TVA is (1) a government agency; (2) founded to improve the material station of poor Americans, and (3) manages critical energy infrastructure for a large swath of the country.” Later that same year, Trump began putting pressure on TVA board members, firing one after another until the TVA reinstated their own American workers. As Wold puts it, this was important for both the 200 workers and their families and for setting “an outer boundary for what short-term labor visas (which is ultimately what the H1B visa is) should NOT be used for: to replace competent American workers in a critical industry with temporary foreign visa workers just to save a buck.”

Is that really what happens? There were a lot of X users telling stories quite similar to the 2020 TVA story. While it’s certainly possible that some were made up or misunderstandings of what happened, there are too many to be simply written off as false.

A great many people started cruising the H1B Data Info for 2024 site and finding that, rather than being for positions that required super-genius computer engineers, many of the jobs offered were for positions that lots of Americans would love to have and could fill. X user Nathaniel Eliason discovered that Wake Forest University, for instance, not only had H-1B positions for instructors in economics, but also assistant track coaches. Another user discovered that Franklin Pierce University was using an H-1B line to hire an assistant football coach.

But even in tech itself, it seems that this program has been rife with abuse—precisely of the kind that Americans have reported. A 2017 commentary in its web magazine, Spectrum, co-written by a past, (then) present, and (then) future president of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), described how the organization had been working for over a decade to fix the problems with these H-1B visas. While the authors admitted that some large tech firms were using these visas to secure the kind of extraordinary talent that Musk was talking about, many firms were indeed abusing them and bringing in foreign workers who would work well below market level: “This is the real story of the H-1B visa. It is a tool used by companies to avoid hiring American workers, and avoid paying American wages. For every visa used by Google to hire a talented non-American for $126,000, ten Americans are replaced by outsourcing companies paying their H-1B workers $65,000.”

Several tech companies have been sued for doing exactly that. In fact, even the biggest dogs of tech appear to have been discriminating against Americans. In 2021, Facebook settled with the DOJ for discriminating against Americans in favor of temporary foreign workers. In 2023, Apple settled a similar suit brought against them for discriminating against American citizens and permanent residents. Journalist Daniel Horowitz posted on X that, “Over the past few decades, 71% of jobs in Silicon Valley have gone to foreign workers, while 74% of American STEM graduates have failed to secure jobs in STEM fields.”

            On one level, this week’s fracas about visas and immigration is not central for the coming administration. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will not, even if they do serve as heads of the new Department of Government Efficiency, be in charge of immigration policy. This writer thinks that’s a good thing. But it’s good that this argument is being had now. It’s good for the country—and for Donald Trump—to hear the different perspectives in his coalition. The president-elect and all of us need to examine how the H-1B visa program actually works in practice. While it might be objected that the program only involves about 85,000 jobs per year, it’s a good starting place for thinking about how much and what kind of legal immigration this country needs and can handle. This writer hopes that Donald Trump (whatever he said to the New York Post reporters) will agree with the Elon Musk who said we only need the top 0.1% of foreign talent—those who can do things that are not do-able by Americans. In that case, it might be advisable to think about dropping the H-1B program altogether.

If we are talking about the top of the top foreign talent, perhaps we can stick to the E-1B immigration visa, which is available if you are “a noncitizen of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.” Or, for other fields, use the O-1 non-immigrant visa, designed for “the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.”

            America needs to harness the internal talent we have right now. In one of Musk’s tweets, he made the analogy to the NBA: getting those top figures from around the world will help with American greatness. No doubt that’s true. But for most jobs, even in tech, there are enough talented Americans who have been, as Horowitz puts it, “boxed out” by foreign workers.

American greatness certainly is about extraordinary accomplishment in our country. But it’s also about allowing Americans with exceptional and even ordinary abilities take part in those great accomplishments when they are capable and willing. Donald Trump was hired by Americans for a number of reasons. The most important is that they perceived that he believes in America as a real country—by the people and for the people—and not a mere economic zone of a world labor market.   

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.