I think you are mainly right. The average software programmer or IT network technician is certainly nothing to place on a pedestal. Like with all technical disciplines, the top end is what I respect.
So why don’t we have an Indian H1B immigration policy for podiatrists or chemical engineers? Because big tech is based on hype.
Have spent much of my career swimming against the tide to keep high tech manufacturing at the forefront and in this country and have been dealing with the H-1B program for decades.
H-1B was originally intended to retain foreign top rank talent in our universities and to bring in talented, highly educated individuals with special skills not available in the US. In order to implement the Trump MAGA agenda we need to develop a much larger pool of very experienced, talented, industrious and well educated/well trained workers. Very few people truly realize just how much of America's once huge industrial base has been gutted over the last few decades of off shoring .
Entire industries that were pioneered and developed by America have been transplanted to foreign counties and have been largely wiped out domestically and have been gone for over 25 years.
Heck, many American industries have been gone so long most of the Americans who have any knowledge or experience in them are long retired and many are long dead.
America no longer has the institutional experience and tribal knowledge to compete in many industries that we created and once dominated. It's a sad fact of life that America is no longer the dominant technological leader at the forefront of many industries.
This is a serious problem for the MAGA agenda.
Trump has 2 years to get the ball rolling on MAGA to change the current culture and build broad based public support for MAGA or we will fail.
The primary reason we have a lack of technical talent is not because Americans are lazy or stupid.
It is more because we have off shored so much of our industrial base that there are is no domestic jobs market to generate demand for large numbers of highly educated, highly trained top tier talent.
It takes 15 years to educate and train a really qualified professional and after 40 years off shoring our manufacturing, our domestic labor pool has been beaten down to very low levels simply because our industries have been beaten down to similarly low levels .
In many cases, the levels are below critical mass to support a thriving industrial base in many areas. The reality is, we simply don't have the necessary bench depth in our talent pool to support a broad based renaissance in American manufacturing.
We barely have enough to keep what we have going.
Furthermore, bringing American manufacturing back to the United States will literally require bring manufacturing back to the US which will mean bringing at least the nucleus of the critical foreign talent that runs the operations to the US to train and re establish the operations
This has been a huge problem for the Taiwanese chip manufacturing companies and they have had to bring in far more of their foreign talent to the US to get things going than they anticipated. American manufacturing has been beaten down to dangerously low levels over the last 40 years and it is going to take a generation to rebuild our talent pool.
Until that happens , we are going to need to get the talent where ever we can and our only mechanism to do so is by expanding the H-1B visa program and running it with the appropriate oversight so it stays true to it's original intent and does get abused like it has been in the past.
These foreign H-1B holders are not going to take jobs from Americans, they are going generate jobs.
They will be key players short term in the establishment of our re shored manufacturing base and they will generate vastly more domestic jobs that the even a very expanded H-1B program would allow.
We are talking about the future of the country and if Team Trump fails the America Last crowd will win.
We need to have a highly motivated, highly skilled and hard working talent pool to ramp up America's industrial base at a huge, near WWII level of scale in a short term and at a very broad base of industries and technologies.
The only practical way to do this is to find the necessary skilled and talented individuals wherever we can.
To do this we need to acknowledge that America no longer has a monopoly on the very best world class talent and our talent pool has dried up due to decades of broad based technical and industrial decline.
We need recruit the best talent in the world from around the world make up for the short fall to come and contribute to America's revival.
We need to do everything we can to retain the top foreign talent in our universities, especially at the graduate and PhD level.
We also need to provide a mechanism to bring in foreign workers with the necessary talent and experience to provide the nucleus to build American organizations.
This is especially true for the foreign worker of foreign companies that wish to invest in United States operations.
While this is going on, we need to develop a space race style fast track program to educate and train Americans to re build what has been destroyed by the manged decline of our country. by our political class. .