What Elon and Vivek Get Wrong About The H-1B Visa Debate

DEI and affirmative action, not a cultural predisposition to mediocrity, is what prevents the otherwise high-skilled American worker from pursuing his dreams in tech, finance, and law.

Over the Christmas holiday, a firestorm erupted on X surrounding the H-1B visa debate. The debate has centered on two factions within the MAGA movement – on the one side are so-called “Tech Bros,” represented by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-chairs of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.” This group has endorsed policies like continuing the H-1B visa program, which enables companies to hire foreign workers with “specialized knowledge.” Advocates of H-1B visas justify their position on the purported lack of high-skilled American laborers available today. Within the tech industry, where the program is especially popular, advocates maintain that there is a shortage of high-skilled computer programmers and engineers, and so H-1B visas are an indispensable part to the long term continued growth of their industry. Elon Musk personally got involved and added a geopolitical layer to the debate: arguing that without these workers, America would be at risk of falling behind foreign competitors in the race for artificial intelligence, thus opening itself to a parade of national security horribles over the long run if countries like China and India presumably get these workers instead.

Those on the other side of the debate, people like Laura Loomer, Jack Posobiec, Gavin Wax, Josiah Lippincott, and many others aligned with the MAGA movement, stress that H-1B visas preferentially select for foreign workers over native-born Americans. As a result, Indian and Chinese laborers are getting jobs that otherwise qualified legacy American workers should have. The economic consequences of this policy are twofold: Americans are denied opportunities to work in high-wage jobs, like Tech and Engineering – and even industries like law, which increasingly rely on foreign applicants. The companies who hire these workers can then artificially depress wages industry-wide, which affects both foreigner and American worker alike. In an era of still rampant inflation, the depressive effects of these policies spread across American society are monumental. Culturally, many of the foreigners who receive these jobs generate a sense of entitlement over their American peers. The crude truth of the matter is that this entitlement in some cases breeds contempt for native American citizens, a contempt – both overt and implicit – that permeates the words and actions of those who have benefitted from the H-1B program, either directly or indirectly.

Evidence for this contempt was observed in a particularly controversial recent X post made by Vivek Ramaswamy, who insisted that there are simply not enough high-quality American laborers to fill the jobs needed in tech and other industries. “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” Ramaswamy’s post read. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Ramaswamy argued that American culture suffers from deep-rooted problems that prioritize mediocrity, beginning with grade school education and the glorification of athletics over intellectual achievements, over exceptional talent. Due to these cultural problems, so Ramaswamy’s argument goes, companies must increasingly rely on foreign laborers because American markets are simply not producing enough high skilled professionals to satisfy the number of total job openings. There are several glaring issues with this argument.

First, the incentives. Our society, particularly higher education – and the elite universities like MIT and Harvard – allocate significant resources to foreign students. In many cases, owing to a combination of affirmative action, DEI, white resentment, and federal grants, many seats that otherwise should be allocated to gifted, native-born American students are given to Chinese or Indian foreign exchange students instead. These universities receive mass funding from both our government to take in foreigners – in addition to foreign governments and foreign alumni who graduated from them. For example, China has contributed billions of dollars to the Ivy League schools in recent decades. In many cases, American universities obtain foreign gifts and contracts from adversarial governments. Take a stroll today through Harvard Yard or MIT’s sprawling campus, and you’ll notice a significant percentage of foreign students, a symptom of a long broken system. From tech to engineering to law, in both undergraduate and graduate programs, sometimes the percentage of foreigners comprise a staggering 25% or more of the entire class. This is not because foreigners do better than Americans on the SAT: it’s because massive financial incentives are baked into a rigged university system that actively selects against American students.

Without the requisite training, even if the American has the skillset or natural talent to become a prolific, “high-skilled” worker in his or her own right, the American is not given the opportunity to acquire the education to go onto work in these competitive fields. In many cases, they are actively prevented from doing so: a form of invidious discrimination that is simply accepted in American society because it has been going on for so long. So, the cultural issue is not so much the incentivization of “mediocrity,” as Ramaswamy opined, but a system geared towards the promotion of “equity” and “foreigners” over and above the American citizen. Part of this is economic, another part is ideological. But the bottom line is that no sincere critiques of American culture should be made without first addressing, directly, the endemic obstacles that make the promotion and cultivation of home-grown natural genius anathema in our current society. Indeed, it is a “cultural” issue of sorts, but not of the nature that Ramaswamy asserts (at least not completely): the problem arises in the institutions themselves, and not the debased ways of American “jock” culture or the like.

There are, however, additional problems with the tech bros who promote H-1B visas. First, their general position is naturally tainted by a pro-technology bias, reflecting their backgrounds and worldviews. Technology, while important to GDP, particularly in the state of California, is not the be and end all of American society. If anything, tech is given far too great a perch in America’s present-day cultural and economic affairs than is warranted. iPhones and software applications are useful, to a certain degree, but roads and bridges (and southern border walls) are by several orders of magnitude more so. The entrepreneur who succeeds in “the real world” – the world of atoms, not the world of bits, to borrow a wonky Silicon Valley catchphrase — will always eclipse the techie, in terms of true value added to society, every single time.

That is because tech jobs are really not all that useful to the day-to-day affairs of most Americans. That is not to discount or ignore the dramatic ways that technology, particularly in recent decades, has had in shaping communications, politics, and institutions all throughout modern society. But it is to say that most jobs in the industry are not particularly revolutionary: crummy apps relying on coders of doubtful national loyalty who are simply being conscripted over here to make a quick buck (and give the employer some relief in terms of wages) compose, let’s be honest, the lion’s share of today’s tech industry jobs. As much as Silicon Valley would like to cast itself as the public vanguard, the bottom line is that for every innovation they have developed and unleashed upon society has come with significant costs, including endangering the free speech rights of many Americans, up until five minutes ago when Elon bought X and liberated at least one major platform from the dogmatic tyranny that is rampant throughout this society.

Big Tech’s most well-known figure, Elon Musk, is better known – and made most of his fortune in – the world of atoms, not in tech, by becoming the most prolific automobile producer since Henry Ford. That is a lesson unto itself, demonstrating at one and the same time the limits to Silicon Valley’s usefulness to society as well as the frequency with which they often overstate their impact on American culture and economics. The language these types used in this ongoing debate also sharply illuminates the limits to their knowledge outside of technical expertise and skills: on politics, they speak like amateurs, blithely disregarding the concerns of the MAGA base, which so far has been to their detriment. Though smart about technology, they have revealed themselves to be political neophytes. After all, political science is a science with its own set of rules and lessons, one that like any other science takes years to master and involves a totally different set of skills than what is needed to succeed in technology, or even business.Subscribe

Not to mention, many H-1B visa applicants who have waded into this debate have showcased outsized egos and overinflated self-worths. Being a coder for the latest dopamine-fixing smartphone application is not a particularly venerable societal contribution, certainly not one that merits the sense of entitlement with which far too many of these types conduct themselves. For example, one such anonymous X account, a Twitter engineer, that goes under the username “@yacineMTB” boasted that he was “outcompeting [white people] on every axis that actually matters,” and that whites themselves were “dysgenic” who will be “tak[en] care of” by “evolution” “in due time.” Not only is this type of rhetoric obviously deeply inappropriate and disrespectful to the country that took him in and gave him a chance to pursue his dream. But it also betrays the rigor of the H-1B visa process itself: the bottom line is that it doesn’t take Albert Einstein to obtain one of these visas, far from it. These are in the vast majority of cases not world-class geniuses, but laborers who have signed up to perform a job for a cheaper wage than an American applicant. Standards have been reduced so much nowadays that it doesn’t necessarily take a world class genius to qualify for this visa process – so long as a basic level of proficiency is displayed, coupled with a willingness to work, with enough persistence, any diligent applicant can usually qualify.

Also, in many cases, the H-1B visa system is inundated with applicants and the volume is so large that comprehensive vetting becomes impossible. Inevitably, people lie about their applications: they overstate the types of skills they have to meet the needs of the employer or interviewer. Once they are brought into the United States, they might have to adapt their skillsets, or learn new ones altogether, to meet the demands of the job for which they were allegedly hired. It’s far from a perfect system, and the rhetoric by the staunchest proponents of H-1B visas is a world away from the facts on the ground, including how these applicants are processed and the degree to which these applicants make measurable contributions to their jobs – and America’s economy – above being a convenient pretext for employers to simply hire cheaper workers.

American society at this juncture in time has too many immigrants, both illegal and legal. Assimilation takes time, and we have not allowed the new migrants, over the course of many decades, to acculturate themselves sufficiently to our values, customs, and, in many cases, even language. When a society, even one as pluralistic as the United States, takes in too many people over too short a time, cultural fault lines develop and deeper social frictions get exposed, creating rifts among peoples, spikes in nativism, and a lowering of public trust and confidence in institutions. None of these are good things for the long-term health of a country, but they are entirely justifiable – and a natural survival response – for any society that has undergone far too much change, too quickly. The new arrivals, including the many who support H-1B visas, should not be blamed too harshly for their ignorance about American culture: they haven’t had the time to assimilate and hence can’t help themselves. But their words merely serve to reinforce the need to shut down our borders and limit the number of new migrants overall, brought in by H-1B visas, student visas, and other programs, because mass migration is not in the final analysis a zero-sum game, nor is it ever an unfettered good. Those who advocate for the H-1B position would be well-advised to have some humility and take these other factors into serious account before defaulting automatically to their pro-immigration views.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have done a ton of good for the MAGA movement. They have kicked open the doors to free speech, helped finance a campaign juggernaut which led to November’s consequential electoral victory, and are genuinely committed to cutting bureaucratic largesse. But on the question of H-1B visas, they should listen more to the MAGA base, which has been supportive of the President since that fateful escalator ride in 2015 and understand an incontrovertible truth: America has too many immigrants, and we have nearly cracked up as a society because of it. From its start, MAGA was centered on border security and mass deportations, not H-1B visas and eliminating country caps for imported foreign workers. The United States will never be some amorphous idea or economic zone; it is a nation composed of flesh and blood individuals. Therefore, it’s high time we adjust our immigration policies and finally start acting like such a real country!

Paul Ingrassia, a graduate of Fordham University and Cornell Law School, is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the NYYR Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow Paul on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.