We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Among the many signal accomplishments of President-elect Trump’s 2024 campaign was welding the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement to the money and know-how of technology entrepreneurs who had historically voted for Democrats. There are signs that the pro-American populism of the movement that brought Trump to the White House in 2016 and again in 2024 may have a very uneasy alliance with the people Trump is entrusting to retool the American government.

Advertisement

Over the past few days, X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been the scene of a fairly intense discussion between guys like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others who are in favor of “high skill” immigration in the form of a massive increase in H1B visas that allow the hiring of foreign workers and a large number of devoted Trump fans who see H1B visas as a way corporate America has of replacing American workers with what amounts to chattel labor.

This was the setup for the discussion.

The conversation got spicy, with Musk getting inundated with anecdotes of American workers being forced out of employment in the tech sector by H1B visa holders.

Advertisement

Regardless of my view on the subject (and I do see H1B visas as a way for businesses to depress wages and create a captive and compliant workforce), I admire Musk’s willingness to duke it out with all comers. That is something that would have been impossible with Jack Dorsey’s Twitter.

Vivek Ramaswamy, though, is a nerve. He believes that Americans are not culturally adapted to working in the tech field.

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: 

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. 

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

…

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.

Advertisement

This drew some good counterpoints.

This is an argument, not a new one — see Remember Back When Donald Trump Thought Moving Your Job To India Was A Great Idea?, SNEAK PEAK. Four Leaked Draft Executive Orders Target DREAMers, Illegal Immigration, H1Bs, and Trump to Sign Buy American/Hire American Executive Order — and it is not going away.

On the one hand, Musk and Ramaswamy are right. The US must make it easier for top-shelf talent to come to America. That isn’t a problem for major tech players like Google, Meta, etc., because their brand draws the best, and the work environment doesn’t tolerate mediocrity. On the other hand, there is no doubt that run-of-the-mill H1Bs are not superior to American workers. Their competitive advantage is that they are cheap and don’t cause labor problems.

As much as we don’t like to hear it, Ramaswamy has a point about the culture we’re developing. One of the responses to his critique was this.

Advertisement

You see, the reviewers couldn’t actually quantify the reason why the Florida-based energy company was so successful.  In response the FPL field leadership laughed, took out magic markers and wrote on the back of their hard hats: “WE’RE NOT GOOD, WE’RE RUCKY.” 

A few years later, every single Kuwaiti oil field was blown up by Saddam Hussein. Global analysts and think-tanks proclaimed it would take 5 years to cap them all off and restart the Kuwait oil pumping industry. Well, the Kuwaiti’s and Saudi’s called Texans, who had them all capped and back in working order in 6 months. 

We are a nation that knows how to get shit done. 

A few more years pass, and the Northern Chile mine workers were trapped two miles underground. The eyes of the world began to tear as the word spread. Most began to whisper no one could save them. Who did they call for help? A bunch of hick miners from USA coal country who went down there, worked on the fly, engineered the rescue equipment on site, and saved every one of them. 

Yup, that’s our America. Ingenuity born from freedom.

The problem is we are no longer the America that produced the guys who put out the Kuwaiti oil field fires and rescued Chilean miners. We are a nation that has permitted its primary and secondary education system to be dumbed down to the lowest conceivable denominator and made a high school diploma a participation trophy…and we’re trying to do that to our university systems. We don’t care about performance or standards, and our traditional work ethic is probably an artifact of white supremacy.

Advertisement

But if we are all going to remain in the same big political tent, we have to come to some agreement on how we can attract the stream of talent that we need while ensuring that every American tech worker who wants a job has one before allowing the first H1B visa to be granted. Otherwise, we are not going to have a coalition that makes America great again; we will be a loose confederation of warring interests that will blow up in very short order.