MAGA and the Great H-1B Civil War
Perhaps you’ve read about the famous Christmas truce of 1914.[1] As WWI was getting underway, Allied and German soldiers, much to the horror of their commanders, decided during Christmas that they preferred celebrating peace on earth to killing one another.
Christmas 2024, on the other hand, saw a war break out. Not a shooting war of the sort raging in Europe in 1914, but a war of ideas. This time, the battlefield wasn’t France. It was X. The opposing forces weren’t the British and German armies. Instead, it was a civil war, pitting Trump supporters against other Trump supporters on immigration.
Immigration is a big topic. The Christmas immigration war of 2024 was focused on one aspect of the subject: the H-1B visa. More to the point, the focus was on the incoming Trump administration’s desire to remove the country cap that currently limits the number of H-1B visas issued to a particular country. India was the focus of this battle, as the bulk of H-1B visas are issued to Indian tech workers. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others argued that more H-1B visas would help America “win.” Others were upset, seeing the proposed increase in H-1B visas as opposed to Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda.
Musk said, “I will go to war on this issue [the expansion of the H-1B visa program] the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”[2] Vivek Ramaswamy added, “A culture [America] that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.[3]
But what Musk and Ramaswamy don’t tell you is that there’s no shortage of American engineers, just a shortage of engineers at the price they and other Silicon Valley tech moguls want to pay.
For a long time now, it has been evident that the H-1B visa program, far from being an example of capitalism and free markets in action, is, in reality, a corporate subsidy, allowing wealthy and powerful tech companies to import an entire class of indentured servants, whose job and presence in the United States is dependent on their H-1B visa, This allows tech companies to pay the H-1B visa holders sub-market wages compared to what they’d have to hire Americans.
To come to work in the United States, an H-1B visa holder has to be sponsored by an employer. Suppose the corporate sponsor is Musk's SpaceX, and the H-1B holder is an Indian software engineer. When that engineer comes to America, he has to work for SpaceX and only SpaceX. If he doesn't like his job at SpaceX, He can’t quit and take a better-paying position at Googe or Amazon the way his American counterpart can. He’s stuck at SpaceX. He gets the bum's rush back to India if he doesn't remain at SpaceX. Now, this may be a great deal for Elon Musk, as he gets engineering talent for below-market prices. But don't confuse this with free market economics; as has been noted by many, it is more a case of indentured servitude.
The H-1B visa forces ordinary Americans who aren’t billionaire tech entrepreneurs into direct competition with foreign indentured servants for jobs and wages. It should surprise no one that Americans are losing this fight. But when they complain about this, they are then lectured that they’re lazy, racist, and deserve to be replaced by foreigners.
Yes, having an endless supply of cheap labor lacking the leverage to push back against sub-standard wages and working conditions is a dream of many big shots in Silicon Valley C-suites, but let’s not confuse this with the free market.
In a recent article on the MAGA H-1B visa war, the Washington Post – surprise! surprise! – took the establishment line, writing, “Right-wing figures are fighting over H-1B visas that allow highly qualified workers to join the American workforce.”[4] This supports Musk's Ramaswamy's argument that there’s a shortage of American tech workers when the truth is that there’s no actual shortage of American tech workers, just a shortage at the price Musk wants to pay. The proper response to this situation is "too bad."
Another deleterious effect of the H-1B visa program is that it tends to drive American college students out of studying for these fields. If SpaceX, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. can bring in a software engineer from India for a third less than an American engineer, that is a disincentive for Americans even to try to enter the field. In this way, the H-1B visa can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, driving Americans out of the field, thus creating a bigger “shortage” of qualified American engineers, which then is used as evidence that more H-1B visas are needed to supply the shortfall. It’s a form of corporate-sponsored replacement migration.
And don’t forget, America’s insane policy of rewarding birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil extends to the children of H-1B visa holders.
Unlike the replacement migration championed by the Antichrist Roman Church-State, fundamentally, support among men such as Musk and Ramaswamy for the H-1B visa program is economical. As former Wall Street fund manager Ed Dowd said in a recent post on X, “If HB1 (sic) visas raised unit labor costs for a company would we be having this discussion? No we would not. That is your answer.”[5]
[1] Christmas truce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
[2] “MAGA is fighting a ‘civil war’ over H-1B visas. Here’s what they are.” By Jonathan Edwards, The Washington Post, 12/30/2024, https://wapo.st/403EBtN, accessed 01/05/2024.
[3] https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507
[4] “MAGA is fighting a ‘civil war’ over H-1B visas. Here’s what they are.” By Jonathan Edwards, The Washington Post, 12/30/2024, https://wapo.st/403EBtN, accessed 01/05/2024.
[5] https://x.com/DowdEdward/status/1873267092713005200