Natives vs Indians
The Woke Right has grown tired of all the winning.
Over Christmas 2024, the Make America Great Again coalition has erupted in a splendid new Twitter spat nominally about H-1B skilled work visas category. Now an astute reader might find such topics a little too boring for a good flamewar. Indeed it looks more like that after Trump's election victory, some on the right are tired of all the winning. They want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by turning attention away from Venezuelan gangsters and onto Indian tech nerds.
The charitable view (the one I held before I started to think about it) is that the debate about whether American tech workers are being frozen out of the job market by Indian coolies. Deeper yet, we might dimly perceive a principled argument between nativists for whom "America First" means "Americans First" and techeads for whom it means "America in First Place".
There are some on the nativist side who really are driven by these valid considerations. But if that’s all there was to it, because both sides could easily agree on sensible changes to the actual visa. But there are darker motivations driving MAGA to choose infighting instead. More on those motivations later.
The H1-B is for temporary employment of foreign workers in "specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability". This would all be much more entertaining if was about fashion models, but disappointingly, it’s about computer engineers instead. The nativists and tech-heads both hate H-1B for seemingly opposite reasons.
Although the visa is supposed to prevent foreigners from displacing native workers, the nativists see the safeguards as a sham. Is computer engineering really such a specialty Americans can't do it? The rules require workers be paid at least the "prevailing wage" in their occupation - as if that wage were not affected by an influx of foreign competition.
For its part, the tech-head camp sees only a shortage of workers and to them H-1B is a maddeningly unreliable means of mitigating it. Every country has its own visa cap, and when the cap is exceeded, the winning applicants are chosen by a literal lottery.
My own lived-experience from the junior trenches of big tech is closer to the latter camp. No matter how many capable candidates there might be in the world, very few of them ever seem to turn up at the interview table. Hiring is hard. But it is also true that many of the biggest employers of H-1B workers are Indian outsourcing firms who have replaced what used to be in-house tech staff in the US. They can also point to the fact that, despite claims of talent shortage, in the last few years, tech firms have actually been laying workers off.
These arguments have been around a long time, but the sudden Yuletide fight seems to have started with the tweet by right-wing media personality Laura Loomer complaining about the "appointment of Sriram Krishnan @sriramk as Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the Office of Science and Technology Policy". Mr Krishnan's offense was that he had once spoken out in favour of loosening the restrictions on H-1B visas.
Soon enough, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy weighed in to support skilled immigration. Musk liked America to a champion sporting team that needed to bring in "the top ~0.1% of engineering talent ... to keep winning." (The US has a different visa category O-1 for this purpose, but Mr. Musk's experience seems to be that he himself along with many people who built great American companies actually came in under the more permissive H-1B visa.
The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.
Mr Ramaswamy made some wonkish criticisms of the H-1B's quota system. But he also lit a firecracker by criticizing an American culture that has "venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long". Mr Ramaswamy wants to see
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of "Friends." More math tutoring fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less "chillin." More extracurriculars, less "hanging out at the mall."
These are just a few highlights from a vast and sprawling food-fight. At its best, the fight between those Americans who want to lean into skilled immigration in order to keep America in the champion's spot vs. those who want Americans to have first dibs on the opportunities their country provides.
As a matter of abstract principle of course any country should give its own citizens first dibs on its opportunities. But opportunity does not fall as manna from heaven, it is made by the skilled work of human beings. America is the land of opportunity because it has always an open order that attracts contributions from all over the world. A highly skilled immigrant doesn't remove opportunity from natives, she thickens the network of such opportunities.
But that doesn't mean every H-1B visa holder is such a creator; at least the average low-level IT worker employed by an outsourcing firm isn't. Which is why there are actually many opportunities for both sides of this debate to get what they want by reforming the visa.
1. Add a fixed minimum salary restriction. Even if this pure restriction were the only change, it would still help high-level hiring by freeing up quota slots that would otherwise go to lower-paid foreigners.
2. Simplify and debureaucratise the process. Red-tape not only makes honest hiring more difficult, it also creates loopholes for abuses. Indeed replacing the fuzzy "prevailing wage" condition with a flat minimum salary is a good example of this.
3. Unlink the visa holder from particular employers. Nativist opponents of H-1B often say the visa makes Americans compete with "indentured servants". So let visa holders to change jobs as long as they continue to meet the same requirements as the original.
It's also important to remember the bigger picture. America today has an effectively open door for illegal immigrants. And even the vast majority of legal migrants come under asylum or family reunion rules, not skilled-work visas. The coalition to restrict immigration has lots of important work to do before it can afford a fight about skilled migrants.
So why then is there a fight?
The attention economy gives certain people (call them "grifters") a financial incentive to choose division and defeat. But that's perhaps a rationalistic explanation for murkier motivations. What seems to be at work here is the psychology of what is starting to be called the "woke right".
It's helpful to look at Laura Loomer's original post. She was using Twitter to publicly rabble-rouse against an advisor on AI policy on the basis of past wrongthink on a completely different topic. This is an almost perfectly baked example of cancel-culture cake worthy of the woke left. (That she also mischaracterized the wrongthink is just the cherry on top). The only significant difference is that Ms Loomer didn't seem to have any hope of actually cancelling her target. She just wanted to complain about Mr Krishnan.
Which brings us to the towering trumpeting tusker in the room: most of the ire seems directed at people of Indian descent. One wonders if the worry is really about Indian tech workers and not about the number of brown faces and Sanskrit names appearing in the vicinity of Trump's new throne.
I doubt there are enough racists in America to really drive a political movement of any heft. But there might be enough to misdirect the energies of Americans with justified anger at mass immigration. Trump and the whole MAGA coalition would do well to keep their eye on the ball and pay no heed to the mischief-makers hanging to their coattails.