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."
“before any grad from the top university in India.”
That would be IIT Madras. I worked with a contract programming group (outsourcing - the alternative to H1b. Think about it.) in Chennai (new name of Madras). These guys were IIT Madras.
These guys are scary, and very nice. But scary. It is competition you can’t blow off.
My son, a talented Silicon Valley Mechanical Engineer, has lost two jobs to “Indian slaves.”
BOTH HE AND I have good reason to EXTREMELY dislike the two companies he worked for!
Vivek needs to go back and do more studying.
What he’ll learn is Americans have had our education stolen, so what he thinks he sees about our abilities is at best a superficial deficit.
It would be stupid, and communistic, to further dilute our culture. The only solution is to make education great again.
Wernher von Braun and Elon Musk.
A German and a South African.
So we won't have a space program today if it wasn't for those two foreigners.
I saw above someone talking about the top 30 or 40 graduates of US engineering universities should get jobs before H1B types.
Well, those graduates are from India and China on student visas. They score better.
Immigrants who still don’t know what it is to be an American.
Andddddd let’s have a look back at The Bell Curve.
Asians have higher average IQ.
The problem with engineering in the US is not the engineers, it’s the management.
There are still excellent engineers graduating from US colleges and universities.
But, yes, they are not valued by management, who would rather pay for cheaper immigrant labor.
Ramaswamy’s parents are plain old immigrants. They lived in the US and apparently still do. His dad worked for GE as an engineer and patent attorney.
If he is an anchor baby, then so was Milton Freidman.
Anchor babies are kids of illegal aliens or tourists, etc.
I’ve met some of them. They aren’t that scary.
Not engineering.
He may be wrong about that. However, I am saying the American education system underestimates most Americans. It takes 12 years to educate children to about a grade 5 education, when you compare what used to be taught in 1900.
This is done to limit the opportunity for Americans, to protect the economic interests of our supposed betters, who privately their children to greater levels. I think what is currently taught in 12 years could be taught in about 4 or 5 years to an average child in a better system.
I don't think those are the ones whose jobs are being replaced by H1Bs. Those grads all get multiple offers before they graduate. The unemployment rate for US-born engineers from the top 20 US universities is close to zero. It is the rest that have to compete with H1Bs.
In fairness to Vivek and Musk, they don’t want to import third-world trash that ends up sucking taxpayer money.
No, they want to import third world trash with a British world view to censor us like Twitter’s Chief Legal Officer and Policy Chief Vijaya Gadde, Sundar Pichai at Google, Spaniard Javier Olivan at Facebook, etc etc.
And then there are the thousands of nameless lower rank types who did the grunt work of censoring and monitoring Americans and throwing elections.
Not all of them. And I would rather have those immigrants that worked hard in US engineering schools than those trained outside the US.
That is debatable.
Tech bros: “There’s a shortage of talent. We need more workers! More H-1Bs!”
Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley: “My perfect GPA students are contacting me worried because they are getting zero job offers.” pic.twitter.com/iF7iKXPppk— U.S. Tech Workers (@USTechWorkers) December 27, 2024
Their average IQ is not so much greater than Europeans. They simply have tigermoms and European Americans don’t. Give somebody of average intelligence, who is of European stock, and his culture of enjoying hard work, just because, will beat anything out of Asia.
Yes, he is. I have taught, worked with, and mentored some of the top computer scientists and engineers in America. They get sold out by the H1B and DEI systems and they melt into other professions.
I wasn't replaced but I saw the writing on the wall and got into a field that paid better and had a high barrier for entry.
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