The Work Visa Debate: Not All Immigration Is Bad, But Focus On Americans First

After Donald Trump’s overwhelming election victory in November the nation is adjusting to the reality that the mass immigration policies of the political left are about to be reversed.  Not just ended, but turned back.  This means mass deportations of millions of illegals and far more scrutiny on existing temporary visa programs.  The logistics of such an unprecedented effort require intensive planning and a lot of debate.    

There is a contingent of MAGA that wants a total shutdown of migrant activity and a moratorium on work visas.  For how long?  No one seems to know, exactly, but it’s a scorched earth response to the Biden Administration’s excessive abuses of H-1B programs (and similar labor programs) to sneak millions of third world migrants into the country and label them “legal”.     

Biden’s free pass for Haitians and Venezuelan’s, for example, was introduced at a time when the border crisis was hitting the mainstream media feeds and the public realized how bad the situation actually was.  Biden and the Democrats offered Haitians and others temporary work visas and created a loophole, allowing the visas to be extended for years.  In other words, Biden tried to reduce the number of border encounters by offering millions of illegals a backdoor into the US through work programs.    

The third worlders still get into the country and Biden can claim illegal immigration is going down.  The longer migrants are able to stay in the US on visas, the easier it is for them to get permanent residency.  This is called “Labor Certification” and it’s the first step towards a Green Card.  Because of the many loopholes associated with visa programs, Americans are now highly suspicious of any migration to “fill holes in the labor pool”.     

On the other side, some in MAGA want to end illegal immigration while increasing legal immigration of skilled workers.  In other words, attract the best and brightest from around the globe and bring them here so that our competitors don’t get them first.   

The threat of a complete shut down of all immigration, including skilled workers, has the tech industry concerned.  Elon Musk chimed in on the H-1B issue recently and called for more foreign engineers to be allowed work status in the US.  Some people agree, while many others are in an uproar, calling Musk a “traitor”.   

There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 25, 2024

No, we need more like double that number yesterday!

The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.

Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 25, 2024

To be fair to Musk, he would know better than most what the deficiencies are in the STEM labor market in America given his industry focus.  The fact is, not all immigration is bad immigration and going scorched earth on work visas might be a net negative to the US in the short term (perhaps even the long term).  It should be noted that a lot of skilled immigrants come from Europe, Australia, the UK, Canada and other western nations, not just places like India or China.

Others argue that America is not a sports team or a company, it’s a home.  People believe the system is inviting foreign workers into the US without giving a fair shot to native born Americans.  The question is, do such American STEM workers exist in numbers large enough to fill industry needs?  And, if not, what’s the solution? 

Vivek Ramaswamy has chimed in on the issue via X, suggesting that there isn’t an intelligence deficiency in the US, there’s an educational and institutional deficiency:  

“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.” 

This is essentially the same argument that conservatives have been making for many years; the decline in the American educational system, especially in STEM fields, is legendary at this point, along with the overall decline in culture.   

Vivek might be a little behind the times on the issue – Even athletic excellence in the US is no longer culturally venerated.  The problem is mediocrity in every area of life.  The most popular career choice for Gen Z is to become a “YouTube star”.  No kid wants to be an astronaut anymore.  There are some very smart people out there on YouTube, but no society can survive on a labor force full of wannabe “influencers”.

That said, US trust in the immigration system has been broken and even Vivek is receiving considerable blowback for his defense of H-1B visas.  A common counter to Vivek’s position is the claim that much of the “skilled labor” coming from countries like India is actually mediocre labor that does the job (barely) for cheaper wages while replacing better qualified Americans.  Whether or not this is true on a wider scale needs to be investigated. 

       

As usual, whenever there is a divisive issue causing internal conflict and debate among conservative groups there are doom mongers that dance around the edges and act as if the entire movement is suddenly fracturing.  Conservatives have never agreed on solutions – This is normal.  They are not a hive mind like the political left, which is a good thing.  Such debates are a sign of a healthy political process.     

What we really have here is an artificially created either/or scenario; skilled labor shortages should be treated as a “why not do both” scenario.   

First and foremost, Americans want actual proof of these labor shortages.  They’ve heard stories for years but the proof is less accessible.  What if tech companies and others in need of STEM labor were to engage the public in a large scale national labor fair?  It sounds cheesy, but consider for a moment that the vast majority of companies today handle all their hiring through online cattle markets that often give job seekers the runaround.   

There is almost zero human interaction and no confirmation that a job was ever filled.  There are companies that post fake job listings to make it appear as though they are growing, to make existing employees feel as though they can be replaced and to make existing employees think their extreme work load will soon be alleviated by new talent.  This practice has stunted the stats on the labor market.     

Nationwide job fairs require money to set up and companies have to put people on standby to talk to prospective employees.  There is energy and a sense of urgency involved.  If skilled labor is truly hard to find, then Elon Musk and other industry leaders should have no problem putting come capital into a physical and interactive job fair – A national search for American talent in STEM in which workers talk to employers face-to-face instead of being filtered by websites and algorithms.   

It might even be prudent to make such labor searches a requirement for large companies before they’re allowed to bring over migrant workers through visa programs.

If the shortage is real then it will be obvious from the lack of participation on the side of job seekers or the lack of qualifications in their resumes.  Then, those within MAGA that oppose migrant visas will have to admit that the demand is legitimate and that the only option, in the short term, is to bring in foreign labor.   

In the long term, the national education system needs to be completely overhauled and a focus on practical skills and advanced STEM has to be championed.  Incentives to lure Americans back into science and engineering fields may be necessary.  The US can do both:  Cut immigration down to only the best and brightest, or down to labor pools with proven shortages, while also encouraging native-born American interest in such fields and creating a domestic pool of skilled assets.