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https://morgthorak.substack.com/p/screw-elon-musk-and-x?publication_id=1155331&r=rne00==================
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H1-Better Be Indian
Geoffrey Ingersoll, Editor at Large
December 27
Good morning, Dear Reader,
Here we are, last weekend in 2024.
What will ‘25 bring? Trump really only has 18 months before midterms gridlock DC. If he’s smart, he’ll thread the needle on immigration, and not just of the illegal variety.
With that …
H1-Better Be Indian
Vivek Ramaswamy really stepped in it.
In a 400+ word tweet, he criticized America’s everyone-gets-a-trophy culture that idolizes the likes of the Kardashians and “jocks” like “Slater” from 90s show “Saved by the Bell,” while ridiculing nerds like “Screech” from the same show.
His conclusion was baffling: America needs more entry-level foreign tech nerds because she’s too busy chucking footballs and Instagram likes to train and educate homegrown competition.
The problem: Vivek’s caricature of America, while containing some elements of truth, is a painfully superficial analysis of a complicated problem. His tweet set off a firestorm of criticism from the right.
Does America really need hundreds of thousands of Indian systems administrators – working slave-hours for fear of getting deported – because it places too much value on 6A High School football in west Texas? Competitive sports don’t teach children the values of merit? Corporations making outstanding employees train cheaper foreign replacements on visas is simply meritocracy at work?
(Also didn’t the guy playing “Screech” turn into a drug-addled criminal, while “Slater,” Mario Lopez, is a successful show host to this day? Anyway, onward.)
Trump originally set off this debate online by appointing Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American immigrant, to be a senior adviser to the White House on artificial intelligence.
Nationalist MAGA went ballistic because he’s been vocal about removing nation of origin caps on “skilled” legal immigration.
Tech MAGA generally, and Musk specifically, like Krishnan in part because he represents everything a good immigrant should be: legal, skilled, aggressive, innovative, entrepreneurial, and finally, a fully naturalized American.
In an attempt to support Trump’s pick, Musk fired off a take on H1-B immigration. At face value, H1-B is a lottery system US Immigration uses to attract technically savvy immigrants, coders, chemists, engineers, etc. Musk’s take was unchanged from what it’s been for years: There are more tech jobs than Americans trained in tech jobs, therefore H1-B good, more H1-B.
Except that’s not quite true. Depending on how you look at Census Bureau data, there could actually be more organic, American tech workers than tech jobs. Of course, this data doesn’t account for self selection, people who simply opted not to work for major tech companies.
At the same time, there’s no doubt the insanely rapid growth in tech puts recruiters in a bind. They’re constantly in a cycle of finding people the company needed a year ago. That urgency begets a system where expediency rules.
Expediency drives big tech toward third-party talent corporations who habitually abuse the H1-B immigration system. It’s easy to conclude they discriminate against Americans, because judges and juries have already done it.
Do the companies themselves take part in this discrimination? There’s at least some evidence they do as well. Facebook, Disney, Google have all waged legal battles over H1-B immigration law.
And the anecdotes in some of these cases are staggering. In one case, Americans were 20 percent more likely to be terminated and Indians represented a full two-thirds of the company’s US-based talent pool.
There’s no doubt America needs to produce more skilled workers, but it also needs to reduce abuse of a system meant to attract truly outstanding minds.
“This is one of my biggest issues in life, dude,” my brother, a former Marine, HS varsity athlete, now computer engineer, told me this morning. “I’m feeling the effects. Computer engineering is extremely niche but dominated by Indian immigrants. So I only make 90k when I should be making 150k.”
There’s something fundamentally wrong with tech companies using this system to hire armies of inexperienced foreign workers at 70% the rates of Americans, driving down wages and disincentivizing homegrown talent. It would be one thing if Big Tech were using H1-Bs to attract this generation’s Albert Einstein or Nikola Tesla. But these visas are, by the numbers, disproportionately entry-level and overwhelmingly going to Indian citizens.
It’s a complicated problem for Trump 2.0, certainly not as easy as deporting brownbaggers at Home Depot who moonlight as petty criminals.
It also puts him at odds with Musk.
I guess we’ll really see who’s the bigger man.
