Those of us with friends and people spent the close of 2024 celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, and the Advent of the New Year. The industry’s most terrible misanthropes closed out the holiday time raging against the government’s H-1B immigration program.
They’re jealous about the system, which aims to bring foreign staff to the U. S. for experienced work when Americans can’t complete them, in public. It indirectly contradicts intentions by President-elect Donald Trump to restrict immigration.
They’re also furious especially at a pair of H-1B system soldiers, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are advising Trump on cutting national investing. The couple recently urged his successor leadership to hire more foreign technology employees. They point to companies that rely on the H-1B card software to attract thousands of international engineers and other skilled employees from China, India, and other countries each year.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s sights have sparked an intra-MAGA website spat between groups of Trump’s followers over immigration and the software business, whose firms rely on the H-1B card program. Over the vacations, Musk and Ramaswamy, who will guide Trump’s Department of Government Performance, were branded” sociopathic rulers in Silicon Valley” by MAGA gadfly Steve Bannon for their enthusiastic defence of H-1B permits, linking their aid to outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden, no less.
President Donald Trump ( R ) shakes hands with former candidate Vivek Ramaswamy during a primary night party at the Sheraton on Jan. 23, 2024 in Nashua, New Hampshire. ( Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images )
According to Bannon,” the workers with H-1B visas if been deported at the same time as we’re deporting the 15 million illegal aliens Biden brought across the border to reduce wages for low-income workers,” echoing the often racist language raging at Musk and Ramaswamy. American workers should be immediately hired to fill those gaps, and then we should begin discussions about reparations for what American tech workers were doing in secret.
That is a mistaken and misguided opinion because it is a political expedient to focus solely on a small percentage of legal immigrants while the country’s illegal immigration influx has reached record highs.
After all, it is against the law for the federal government to grant more than 85, 000 new H-1B visas every year. Because H-1B visas only last for three years, with limited options for extensions, only 206, 002 immigrants were working in the country with H-1B visas as of 2022. At least 10 million illegal immigrants have entered the country since the start of Biden’s presidency four years ago, with the total number of illegal immigrants still in the country being over 12 million, according to estimates.
H-1B visas are only a small portion of the noncitizen visas that allow legal entry into the nation. The Biden administration issued a record 11.5 million immigration visas in fiscal 2024, of which only 1.3 million were granted to those who worked there.
In other words, H-1B visas authorized annually don’t just account for a fraction of 1 % of the country’s current illegal population, but also a fraction of 1 % of all the visas issued to migrants each year to come to the country legally.
Elon Musk greets President-elect Donald Trump as he arrives to attend a viewing of the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on Nov. 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. ( Brandon Bell / Getty Images )
Additionally, the consistently tightest labor market in the United States in at least 50 years requires our legal immigration programs to listen to more free market employers than bureaucratic orders from Washington. Consider that of the 1.1 million green cards issued each year, just 1 in 6 are issued based on merit, whereas the majority are based on family or, even less logically, “diversity”. It is in the objective economic interest to increase the share of workers ‘ visas and green cards based on merit, regardless of where you are on the spectrum of whether to increase or decrease legal immigration as a whole.
Consider that nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or immigrants ‘ children. These businesses generated as much money as Germany and Japan combined’s combined annual economic output last year. Between just the most notable companies Musk has personally founded or spearheaded — Neuralink, OpenAI, PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla— he has created almost 183, 000 jobs still employing Americans to this day.
Ramaswamy, who, like Trump, was born in America to an immigrant mother, has created nearly 1, 000 jobs just with his biotech firm Roivant Sciences. In Cincinnati, Georgia’s Geetha Ramaswamy immigrated from southern India to practice geriatric psychiatry.
In addition to their obvious contributions to the American economy and tax revenue, high-skilled immigrants like those championed by Musk and Ramaswamy create new jobs. Additionally, they’re correct in saying that Americans are becoming less and less adept at achieving the top jobs in STEM and AI.
The majority of eighth graders surveyed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2022 failed to meet basic reading standards, with a majority of them deemed functionally illiterate. American 15-year-olds ranked last among those surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international intergovernmental organization, in the last Program for International Student Assessment. And while a humiliating 16 % of American high school graduates said they would study calculus in 2019, high school students are essentially required to take the advanced matter course in the academic fields of Germany, South Korea, and Vietnam.
I can attest from experience that the most privileged Americans are largely denying us tech jobs because we largely cannot or will not accept them. Another lifetime ago, I was an economics-mathematics dual major at the University of Southern California. The math major at USC was a part of the larger humanities college, unlike the majors in engineering and computer science, which required a separate admissions process within the university. So, if you wanted a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, you could earn one simply by taking the classes. We would anticipate seeing lots of native-born Americans in these math classes with virtually no barriers to entry if they were being overtly discriminated against in STEM fields.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER CLICK HERE TO READ MORE.
Well, by sophomore year mathematics, I was one of a handful of women in the class, and by junior year maths, I was often the only American-born woman and one of a few American-born students, period. Fellow American-born students tended to gravitate toward” softer” STEM fields or away from STEM completely, leaving the overwhelming majority of elite math classes populated by students from China, India, and South Korea.
Republicans would be wise to concentrate on the crisis of millions of criminal immigrants among us rather than to direct friendly fire on our most influent operatives, who make up 1 % of all legal immigrants in the country, in order to deliver the MAGA mandate Trump has promised to his voters. In general, should there be more discussion about reforming the education system that begins to fail our children a dozen years before they try to switch to STEM only to discover it is too late.
