Posted on 12/28/2024 6:39:57 PM PST by conservative98
There’s a raging debate on X right now about H1B visas and Vivek Ramaswamy is getting slammed for suggesting American culture is bad and thus can’t product high level talent that top tech companies want.
Let’s start back from the beginning:
THE HILL – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairs of President-elect Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are defending the tech industry’s reliance on foreign-born engineers as the incoming Trump administration prepares to crack down on immigration.
Musk and Ramaswamy both pointed to a lack of engineers stateside.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote in a Wednesday post on his social platform X.
When another user suggested the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was denying opportunities to Americans, Musk argued that the poster’s understanding of the situation was “upside-down and backwards.”
“OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process,” the tech billionaire said. “HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
This is where Ramaswamy steps into it, blaming tv shows that promote ‘mediocrity’ on a culture that can’t product top talent:
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 & 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.
This didn’t go over well with everyone…
Even Nikki Haley chimed in, saying there is nothing wrong with American culture…
The press secretary for DeSantis also suggested the problem isn’t American culture, but mass immigration and quoted Governor DeSantis:
Vivek isn’t wrong that we have a problem with American culture but it’s not what he suggests. It isn’t TV shows and movies that produce mediocrity. No, this has a lot to do with the breakdown of the family, with the inability or unwillingness of parents to push their children to excel academically instead of endlessly playing video games or sitting in front of a TV. Also many of our schools have big problems producing excellence as well. But I think it all starts with the breakdown of the family, ie. fatherless children and single mothers working multiple jobs to make ends meet while their children are at home doing whatever they want. And this is a product of the Godless left.
But that being said, I don’t know how much that really plays into this problem of top-level talent. It may have some effect, but I also agree with fact that mass immigration is a big culprit, in that it provides the cheap labor that companies want. This is a battle we’ve been fighting for decades, not just against the left, but against the Chamber of Commerce types in the Republican party for decades who want the left’s version of immigration so they can reap the benefits of cheap labor.
Look, I have never disagreed with merit-based immigration, especially when it comes to top level talent. We want the best and the brightest no matter where they are from as long as they are willing to assimilate. But we want it on our terms.
Let me quote the Great Mark Levin from over a decade ago:
"And what do we the people want? We want our border secured. And let me go even further. Let me make it absolutely clear to every foreigner outside this country.
This country belongs to us; it doesn’t belong to you. It doesn’t belong to the 7 billion other people all over the world.
You see the way it’s supposed to work is we decide who gets to come here. We decide the standards. We decide the requirements. We want to know who you are. We want to know what you’re going to – (ready for this one?) – contribute to this society, not take from this society.
You see because I want to make it very very clear to the left, to the media and even some ‘Repubicans’ and even some TV and radio hosts.
There’s nothing compassionate about the downfall of America! There’s nothing compassionate about the hollowing out of our society! There’s nothing compassionate about bankrupting our children and grandchildren, destroying our school system, destroying local law enforcement and hospitals, what’s been built up over 200 years.
It’s one thing to export our viewpoints, our economic ideas, our governing ideas. But it’s quite another to import the views, the culture and the destitution of the third world. Because that is national suicide. And any thinking person who is not playing politics, who’s not a demagogue, who’s not a propagandist, any thinking person regardless of party, ethnicity, or anything else knows I’m right!
This isn’t about voting as far as I’m concerned. This isn’t about pandering to this group or that group as far as I’m concerned. This is about preserving what’s left of this Republic."
That is a good point because 95% of Indian CS “engineering” majors are unemployable in the West due to poor technical education or language skills. The top 5% are outstanding but why let Silicon Valley morons hold them as slaves via H1B visas and under cut US wages for the same degrees?!? It is utter insanity.
I can see his point looking at CURRENT American culture.
Problem is, it’s not universal. There’s lots of good people and smarts out there who are being short changed by cheap skates.
You could do that but they wouldn't be remotely comparable in terms of ability. It's not because of comparative IQ but colleges like the Indian Institutes of Technology are extraordinarily difficult to get into.In fact they are the hardest colleges in the world to get admission into. That's simply because the number of students trying to get admission is humongous. Top American colleges may be better in the quality of education they offer but the IIT's would simply have the more brainy, hard-working students because of the rigorous entrance exams and the numbers that they have to beat out. American students have many options and many top students exercise them in terms of the field they pursue. In a country like India, where the concentration is almost directed wholly towards Engineering & Medicine, you are more likely to find the cream of the students pursuing these fields. Whether the cream are the ones choosing to come into the United States is a completely different matter. While that was the case in the past, the majority of graduates from the IIT's choose to stay back in India now. Also true of doctors.
Central govt picking winners and losers, whether industries or individuals, is wrong.
If there were an H1B program to import politicians who are top engineers in the field of securing the blessings of a Free Republic, highly motivated to the American ideal - then they could tell us why such programs are wrong.
Unquestioned faith in populist politicians and iconic folks is a symptom of the disease our culture suffers and is a recipe for (more) disappointments big and small.
Some glorified leaders are deservedly bigger than life. None are better than you. Hold them to principle.
Staying past 9 PM is a clear sign that the company won't hire a sufficient number of engineers. Keep it up and in six months you'll be working past 10 PM.
The Chinese in particular know this death spiral goes nowhere and the young are embracing Tang ping or "lying flat"; a personal rejection of the rat race with ever diminishing returns. Tang ping means choosing to "lie down flat and get over the beatings" via a low-desire, more indifferent attitude towards life.
Young Chinese also embrace Bai lan or "Let it Rot", an attitude of letting a bad situation stay so without trying to improve it. "Going Galt" would be a similar Western approach.
There is a video online, not an isolated one, of Chinese authorities threatening families during the COVID-1984 lockdowns, where the government employee is yelling and threatening the family for not locking down, saying their family would be impacted negatively for three generations for such disobedience. The mother yells at the bureaucrat that there is no next generation, that they are the last. They're not going to force their next generation into slavery.
Anecdotal, but the IIT engineers I worked with we not as good as US engineers I worked with. Even some of the Purdue co-ops were better that IIT grads.
I work with too many who are the exact opposite.
An inordinate number of them have OCD which overrides thinking.
They became engineers to follow someone else's standards instead of thinking things through.
They're steadfastly determined to hide from the world in the decimal points.
They'll design a complicated solution that does everything except solve the problem.
If you want to learn to think, study philosophy. and get your hands dirty doing anything and everything your grandfathers did.
You do know that Trump himself works remotely.
Sod off, troll.
You have to go back.
“These guys are scary, and very nice. But scary. It is competition you can’t blow off.”
I don’t know anything about engineers, but the people from India I’ve met are brilliant.
Troll.This is exactly on point. I will amplify with my own experience.
Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won't tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive. I've seen jaws drop when I show… https://t.co/rLsf2nU9BQ— John Carter (@martianwyrdlord) December 28, 2024
The reason I often stayed past 9 PM is due to the need for conference calls with Japanese or Indian engineers in their respective countries. In fact, I would often get up at 6 AM to have a call with German engineers, and then work all day, and then call Asia for a couple of hours in the evening, four days a week. Hiring more engineers for that situation wouldn’t help, because you need one person who knows all the details to keep the teams in Germany and East or South Asia on track. I would often fly to Germany on a Sunday, stay a day, fly back to San Francisco, stay a day, fly to Tokyo or Nagoya, stay a day, and fly back. Some of my friends would fly to Seoul on Monday, and return to San Francisco on Friday, every week for years. Not an exaggeration. Hiring more engineers doesn’t help the transfer of knowledge that such travel and endless conference calls lead to. BTW, the pay for such crazy schedules is substantial. This work schedule is common in Silicon Valley hardware design companies, and I know as many Americans who do it as foreigners. You just need to have the right wife. My first one wasn’t, but second one is. I am blessed.
Amen!
Why is the right concerned about H1B visas instead of student visas? We issue half a million student visas per year, they provide a firehose of money to woke universities, many of which would shut down if they couldn’t sell visas to foreigners, and the students are mediocre.— Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) December 28, 2024
= = = = = = = = = =
TrollData shows US college seniors studying computer science outperform their foreign counterparts by almost a standard deviation.
Indian college seniors rank as the weakest performers.
Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/q2h0sYul0C— AF Post (@AFpost) December 28, 2024
He’s right about that part of the culture, but wrong about immigration being anything of a solution for it.
India is a nasty place
Indians who came here didn’t build what they came here to enjoy and exploit often with family cash from back home
My ancestors did over 500 years now
Any questions Vivek?
Not all Asians
And it depends on how measured
And who’s measured
The Asian nations at top have no minorities driving it down
Our IQ SCORES have plummeted same as our average height via non white and non high Asian immigration
But nice try equivocating
Truth. In my case Germany (Siemens, etc) and the UK, and then India.
yahoo.com
snip
Trump’s election was powered in large part by anti-immigrant sentiment, and advocates of more foreign-born experts acknowledge they must pull off a tough balancing act.
Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), a member of the Senate’s four-person AI working group and a longtime proponent of high-skilled immigrants, said Congress can do two things at once: crack down on illegal immigration while also clearing new pathways for foreign STEM professionals.
Young waved off questions about the powerful anti-immigrant current in his party, instead noting that Musk himself is an immigrant.
“America has benefited from Elon Musk and his amazing contributions to our economy,” Young told POLITICO. “He’s the object lesson on how high-skilled immigration can benefit our country, if done right.”
Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a longtime proponent of increases to high-skilled immigration, said he’s been “waiting for the stars to align” — and that Silicon Valley’s rising influence on the GOP may be what’s needed to break the logjam and defeat the restrictionists.
“The money is on the side of the big tech firms and the tech entrepreneurs,” Foster told POLITICO. “To the extent that the [Trump] administration dances to that tune, the answer is clear.”
Durbin shared some of that optimism but also sounded a note of doubt, saying in an interview that “there are some political forces in the MAGA world who don’t want a single new immigrant doing anything, period.”
It’s not clear which side will prevail. Many of Trump’s most ardent backers claim high-skilled immigrants depress wages and take jobs from native-born Americans. And while Trump recently expressed support for letting STEM students stay stateside, he said similar things in his first term even as his administration made things harder for skilled foreign workers.
The tension is likely to at least slow any high-tech immigration fixes on Capitol Hill. While Republican lawmakers on key committees now express some openness to reform, they’re wary of moving too fast and getting crosswise with a GOP base eager for a border crackdown.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration policy, said winning the AI race “includes Americans who went to school and got the same degree” as STEM immigrants. But Jordan, a longtime admirer of Musk, said he’s happy to work with the tech billionaire on the issue — after the border is locked down.
“President Trump and Mr. Musk, if they’re open to other things, we’ll look at those,” Jordan told reporters. “But we got to secure the border first. That’s where the country’s at. The sequence matters a lot.”
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