The High Cost of Cheap Foreign Labor
Currently, an immigrant and the recent descendant of immigrants (Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy) are about to take a major role in America’s government. At the same time, they are advocating for a more open immigration system with regard to the skilled labor that is imported via the H1-B visa program. As an immigrant, I try to avoid issuing commentary on the immigration policies of the country that has welcomed me (unless directly asked), but this seems to be cause for an exception.
The controversy was started with an X post by Vivek, which Elon seconded. The original post reads:
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.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
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.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before [sic] & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
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.
His arguments are not entirely false, and yet we still should not yield to these desires. It is true that some foreigners have a much better work ethic than the people that American universities are churning out. It is even true that some of them are highly skilled in what they do. However, even this best case scenario misses the point. Those who voted for President Trump, and to whom Vivek/Elon are appealing, are not seeking to turn America into a Big Tech oligarchy. They are seeking that the nation be great—in ways that matter most.
We are seeking a harmonized Christian culture, a re-emergence of American manufacturing and energy independence, the avoidance of unnecessary wars, the shrinking of an unaccountable bureaucracy, and the just union of our legal system with natural law. Fundamentally, it’s not about AI or even technology more broadly, it’s about the nation’s soul, which ought not be for sale.
A native to the Christian West often feels an innate desire to protect or at least respect that which they associate with the history of the West. It’s a natural and healthy reverence for those who built the civilization that we inherited. People who are foreign to that ethos are less likely to feel the same sense of loyalty, which will have manifest results in their decisions. What they see in timeless Western architecture, music, art, and even historic institutions, is not the product of their ancestry.
In the technology field, foreign workers have influenced our companies already, which is partly why there is such little regard for American values like freedom of expression therewithin. Sure, America’s college kids aren’t associated with patriotism either, but such ‘wokism’ is strongest in liberal arts fields, not computer science and STEM areas. In the tech world, foreigners with no loyalty to American principles are already having an impact on our lives. It is why honest search results are easier to come by on a Russian search engine like Yandex than an “American” company that is better known (except if the results sought are about Russian foreign policy). At a time when American (and Western) culture struggles to assert its identity, multiculturalism is a death knell. This is especially true in a country like America, which gets so much of its sense of unity from a shared culture rather than a single ethnicity (like the countries of Europe).
Someone like Elon is likely to over-identify with the immigrants that he favors because he once relied on a work visa himself. However, he is not a representative sample of H1-B visa applicants. In fact, Elon is unlikely to be a representative sample of anything. He’s a wildly unique individual.
Further, the labor being imported under H1-B visas often does not even meet the claim of highly-skilled, necessary laborers—which is why some companies want to increase the limits. The system is being grossly abused. The recent controversy has brought this into the public eye, showing H1-B visas being offered for cashiers at 7-Eleven. This was not the promise of highly skilled labor for which we do not have enough Americans. It is merely cheap labor that is beholden to their employers like a modern indentured servitude, and who hold no loyalty to America, nor an understanding of her values.
Most of Europe stands in testament to the result of an uncapped immigration system. Such migration policies culminate in over-burdened social services, disconnected communities, and widespread social upheaval. Countries like Poland and Hungary are among the few nations without the normalization of “barriers of peace” to stop Islamic terrorists from plowing down citizens, because their nationalistic policies have manifested in limited immigration.
Throughout western Europe, we can see how no-go zones begin to form as immigrants do not assimilate into countries, but rather, form pockets of people that they better identify with, ethnically and culturally. At a time when America and the West are struggling from an identity crisis, we need to strengthen our culture, not weaken it with foreign workers who hold a vastly different religious and moral worldview.
Very well put Sarah. We seem to be losing track of what we are. We are a nation, not a corporation.
Having worked in the tech industry I can attest firsthand that corporations value cheap labor far and above skilled Americans and loyal workers. What they've done over the past 30 years is they've made workers easily replaceable.
They want foreign workers because they will work for far less money and they are even easier to replace than American workers. Foreigners do not have high middle class standards. Or they tend not to.
They have virtually wiped out the upwardly mobile middle class. In it's place we find middle class citizens who are literally surviving paycheck to paycheck and just getting by. Gen X and Gen Y are taking the worst of it.
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So what's going on? First off, ever since NAFTA, we have moved nearly all manufacturing to foreign nations. The USA no longer produces actual physical product like we used to. Corporations are taking advantage of foreign cheap labor and lax regulatory laws.
Next, corporations have been pumping in hundreds of thousands of foreigners to replace what remains of American jobs.
It's a class war. It's the ultra super rich vs everyone else. Have you noticed how the pay gaps between those at the top and the actual workers has gotten much, much bigger.