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."
I’ll be the first to admit that my experience is not necessarily representative of the nation as a whole, but I’ve been working in a STEM field for 30 years and I don’t know a single unemployed engineer.
“It goes back many decades. Example: our Space Program was not advanced by any American. It was advanced by a German after WWII. “
That is fiction. American engineers did the huge majority of the work. Von Braun was a program leader. The MAIN goal of bringing nazi rocket scientists was to keep them from the Soviets. American scientists of that era are slandered far too much.
BTW, Von Braun got his 10 year head start in liquid fuel rocketry by reading the research of Robert Goddard.
“Why can’t y’all be more like the Asians?”
This is the practical, empirical, sane approach that moves things forward. If someone else has a competitive advantage, copy whatever it is they are better at. Its what sports teams do all the time.
Screeching and falling into a snit helps nobody and advances nothing.
If they stay, they are immigrants. If they don’t, they are not germaine to this discussion.
In 2024 America's financialized, debt-bloated, fiat money economy - nearly all those top engineering students will probably go to work on Wall Street. That's what the USA is all about now - creating debt, moving money around, and political activism.
The argument of "Who needs to make stuff any longer?" is already rejected. We've already learned the problems of sending our factories and jobs offshore to China to save a few more pennies on debt service.
But we are only now starting to discuss that H1B is really the same thing - just bringing the off-shore here to take jobs, also for a few more pennies saved on debt service.
If they are on visas they are not U.S. citizens.
As an aside, does your native language include definite articles?
Excellent point. As a foreigner with an American spouse I can relate!
You apparently like trafficking in hoary old stereotypes, don’t you?
A guy’s whose family comes from India should NOT be insulting anyone else’s culture.
I think it’s terrible. What many of these billionaires don’t understand, and perhaps not care because they only want their billion dollars, is that these Indians come to the West to soak up knowledge on the job and then they go home and start competing against the American companies.
They are only slightly better than the Chinese in terms of how much they legally steal from the West.
Well, there is that.
“If the women don’t find you handsome...”
exactly, he is 100% correct. American schools are broken and have been for decades.
If we want America to succeed in the 21st century we need to start by fixing out schools. But in the meantime we need to encourage the best and brightest in the world to come to America.
No, that is South Asian and is attributed to pediatric diarrhea because of low caste families having no good water.
There are 1.4 billion. It is the cream of the crop that go to their engineering schools. So they are selecting the best of their IQ 130 types.
BTW Chinese are 105. Highest average IQ among ethnicities is Hasidic Jews.
Bottom line: There is nearly no engineering unemployment in the US. The top US engineering graduates are Asian. So Asian H1Bs are entry level competing with Asian high tech student visas.
Here ya go, scroll through the MIT Elec. Engineering faculty:
https://www.eecs.mit.edu/role/faculty-ee/
I’ve met people who have had a hard time finding jobs commensurate with their skills after a merger.
We have been dumbing down education for years. Schools offer limited technical classes. Many students graduate with limited basic education. These poor kids are taught corporations are evil. Look at the Luigi/United Health fiasco. We raised generations with poor work ethic. Feeling like their employer owes them. Too much rot in public education.
Not a fan of importing workers. But I get it.
Irrelevant.
Part of white replacement.
Troll.
just because you have a STEM degree doesn’t mean you are employable. Many Americans demand to work from home etc
The problem is bigger than just a decent education, it is also about work ethic, ect
Vox Day neatly disassembled the Hasidic Jew high IQ myth.
“So we won’t have a space program today if it wasn’t for those two foreigners.”
Bullcrap. Total bullcrap. You clearly are very uninformed about the US space program, it’s origins, and the aerospace industry of the post war era.
And our space industry did well up through the modern feminist and woke era. It’s wrong to say that without Musk and Von Braun are the only reason we have a space program.
Cool.
They can stay in Asia with all the smart people
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