Posted on 12/27/2024 10:11:47 PM PST by SoConPubbie
A fierce debate has broken out between President-elect Donald J. Trump’s very recent tech industry supporters and his long-standing America First base. At the core of the disagreement is the subject of legal immigration—specifically, how Trump should handle so-called “high-skilled” foreign worker programs like the H1B visa.
One of the staunchest proponents of expanding the labor pool in this way is billionaire Elon Musk. In a Christmas Day post on X, Musk exclaimed America needs more than double the 160,000 semiconductor industry engineers said to be required by 2032.
“No, we need more like double that number yesterday! The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote, adding: “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
No, we need more like double that number yesterday!
The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.
Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 25, 2024
Additionally, Musk-allies and newly-named artificial intelligence (AI) advisors to President-elect Trump, David Sacks, and Sriram Krishnan, have both emerged as loud advocates for more legal immigration, expanding the high-skilled labor supply through changes to the H1B visa lottery.
While bringing allegedly top talent from around the world to the United States sounds good on its face, this isn’t actually what H1B visas do.
The O-1 visa is actually the program used to grant legal work status to a foreign nation in the United States that is considered a ‘once-in-a-generation’ intellectual talent in a critical industrial sector.
H1B visas apply more to workers with skills that native-born Americans can easily learn through technical training programs or even collegiate classes. Think more programmer or mid-level software engineer than someone trained in semiconductor fabrication.
Even more concerning is that the big tech companies routinely abuse H1B visas as part of a scheme to suppress the wages of both American and foreign workers while maximizing shareholder profits.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice ramped up enforcement of visa rules after a pattern emerged in which tech companies artificially create the appearance of a domestic work shortage to increase their H1B allotments. This ultimately resulted in native-born workers being laid off and replaced two or threefold by cheaper foreign H1B workers.
H1Bs benefit tech companies on two key fronts:
Little data actually supports the tech industry’s claims of a worker shortage and a need to end H1B country caps. The data does suggest, however, that big tech is replacing qualified and capable American workers with cheaper foreign labor.
Between 2022 and 2024, Amazon laid off nearly 30,000 high-skilled workers. In the same period—though in compliance with federal law regarding when companies can request H1B visa workers—the online retail giant expanded its workforce by nearly 100,000 foreign workers.
Despite the layoffs, Amazon asked the federal government for a total allotment of 125,000 new H1B visa workers between 2022 and 2024, while they requested to retain around 90,000.
Similar trends are true for Google and Microsoft. Between 2022 and 2024, nearly 60,000 American workers were laid off among the three companies, while the companies increased their H1B employees by over 340 percent.
Ultimately, the entire need for H1B workers is predicated on a supposed domestic worker shortage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current native-born American labor force participation is around 63 percent. Meanwhile the foreign-born labor force participation is a stunning 68 percent.
Importantly, per the Wall Street Journal: “…census data show[s] immigrants who arrived since the start of 2020 are more than twice as likely to lack a high-school diploma as U.S.-born workers.”
In January 2007, the overall American labor force participation rate was around 66 percent, but has declined to 62.5 percent. When you examine the data overall, there is a strong suggestion that the high labor force participation among foreign-born workers is actually the cause of the lower rate of participation among native-born workers, pricing them out of the job market through downward pressure on wages.
Additionally, even the big tech companies’ own annual reports suggest they’re not suffering from any significant shortage in skilled labor. Elon Musk’s own Tesla slashed 14 percent of its workforce in 2024. Generally, a company struggling with fulfilling its labor needs might see a small need to cut workers if it cannot hire to keep up with demand, but far more common is the company hiring instead of laying off workers at all. You certainly wouldn’t see around a fifth of a corporation’s labor force being laid off amid a worker shortage.
In November of 2023, tech-giant Apple was sanctioned $25 million in fines and back pay due to American workers who were discriminated against in hiring—with the company essentially rigging its recruitment process in favor of foreign workers.
Conclusively, there are excellent arguments for a more fierce O1B recruiting policy, but the idea of expanding H1B visas for foreign workers should be a total non-starter for MAGA. Not only are the arguments for it untrue, but creating more competition for American workers is not even close to the ‘America First’ philosophy.
BTTT
The H-1b visa program is a corporate indentured servant program that locks in the visa worker into a seven year contract while the employer sponsors their green card. It undercuts American wages, increases prices, and transfers of wealth through welfare payments.
I know many smart kids from America’s best universities. These kids have studied math, physics, and engineering
to a one - they all have found their way into banking, finance and management consulting, These jobs pay much better, as they serve America’s financialized and debt-bloated economy.
Until this is fixed, we will continue to send our jobs to workers off-shore, and off-shore workers on-shore.
I work with many young guys with IT degrees that can’t get an IT job and they end up in sales or service. Yet i see my company stand up multiple departments with H1B people from India that can barely speak English. Sad fact these companies don’t care to train our youth.
“ I work with many young guys with IT degrees that can’t get an IT job and they end up in sales or service. Yet i see my company stand up multiple departments with H1B people from India that can barely speak English. Sad fact these companies don’t care to train our youth.”
***************************************************
Guess what…. ELIMINATE THE H1B PROGRAM and suddenly those companies WILL CARE TO TRAIN OUR YOUTH.
Good article that tells the real story.
This is true, but that's just the beginning. These "indentured servants" take the jobs of American graduates, blocking their entry into their chosen field. While the H1-b program is technically not an immigration program, they never leave. Having blocked Americans from the entry level jobs, they go on to fill the mid and upper level jobs as well. We have to break this cycle.
The price of an H1-B (to an employer) should be to pay for the education of an AMERICAN, and to hire that graduate, as the H1-B is returned to their home country.
Big Tech are anarcho-communists.
“You like the free market?”
“Fine, we will use free market principles in order to show you why the free market does not benefit you, so you will choose socialism in order to survive.”
Then they proceed to lock American workers out in favour of the third world.
Move ‘em on, head ‘em up, head ‘em up, move ‘em on
Move ‘em on, head ‘em up, rawhide
The whole H1B program is a disgrace.
You get these “Libertarian”. tech bros who think they have the absolute right to replace any American employee if they can find someone anywhere in the world who can more or less do the job and works cheaper.
And the the same Globalist mentality pervades the corporate class especially of the Anglo-Sphere.
The backlash in Canada has been such that Liberal Justin Trudeau has announced big changes to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, with tighter qualifications, higher mandatory wage premiums.
Canada is now positioned to the Right of the USA on foreign workers, and Trump needs to get on this.
The H1B program serves a need in the US.
The problem is not the program.
The problem is that Deep State has abused and is continuing to abuse the program.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Why did we have an H1B for a Chippendales "dancer"?
That's not use. It's abuse.
And the Deep State promoting the abuse is the problem.
Notice one more thing about this latest game of lets-you-and-him-fight tbat Deep State ginned up.
What’s missing, folks?
I’ll tell you since a lot if you clearly haven’t noticed...
Any mention of Big Med.
It’s not just Big Tech hiring H1Bs, is it.
So why no mention of what Big Med is doing?
That omission is telling to my mind.
Stop allowing yourselves to be suckered into an either/or argument meant to divide us.
We hired Trump to do a job.
Give him room to do it.
Viola! That's it. Problem solved.
You wanna know why? IF there is truly a labor shortage, companies will pay it. They will need the workers and it will be economically productive to get those workers even if it means paying more money for them. It also will not undercut Americans' wages. It will have the side benefit of raising a lot of money for the treasury. I suspect it will also have the side benefit of getting companies to restart their job training programs so that they can get more Americans to have the skill levels in various areas to do the jobs they want done since employing Americans will be cheaper than employing foreigners. It will also mean Americans get their foot on the employment ladder at these companies and therefore will be the ones who get promoted down the road - instead of foreigners. Win, Win, Win, Win.
The only people who would lose under my scheme would be companies which undercut American's wages via bringing in hordes of cheap foreign labor......companies which are lying and cheating to do so.....companies which are not participating in the free market in which supply and demand determine wages but which are instead rigging the game by bringing in a whole bunch of cheap supply from overseas. Frankly....good. I won't mind seeing them take it in the shorts - and finally have to start participating in a truly free market - one bit.
Interesting points. It’s kind of like putting a tariff on H1B workers so other countries don’t dump them here.
Off-Topic: Is your tagline a reference to the movie “Signs”?
I'm a contractor. I do projects for large banks. It took me years and years to finally break in to this industry and I endured a Great Recession that was unbelievably awful first. What I saw when I finally started getting hired for these jobs was that those big bank buildings were absolutely stuffed full of H1b Indians....I'm talking about 1/4 to 1/3rd of the building was H1b Indians. The Banks were claiming there was a labor shortage even during the Great Recession when millions and millions of Americans - highly educated and highly qualified ones - were unemployed.
Everybody talks about Tech. ITS NOT JUST TECH! What banks and others will do is try to make any job sound technical in any way they can...accounting jobs, audit jobs, etc etc. They'll highlight an information system they use or claim they need to work with databases, etc when they don't really and when someone with no background in tech at all could be taught to handle the tech portion of the job very quickly. But they claim that because of whatever technical description they've given in the job description, gosh darn....there just aren't hardly any Americans at all who are qualified. So they'll need to import more of that sweet sweet cheap foreign labor to do that job.
It made me so incredibly pissed when I saw that. They want to participate in the American market with all of its money but they want to screw Americans out of the jobs in that market and give all those jobs to foreigners. They need to be told "Hell no. We will NOT let you do that. You want to be in the American market, then you hire Americans and you pay American wages."
Absolutely correct. Cheap foreign labor BOTH pushes down the wages of Americans employed in Tech and Banking (by an estimated 20-30%) but it also denies young Americans good entry level jobs. Then a few years later because there weren’t hardly any Americans in those entry level jobs, take a wild guess who gets promoted to middle management? That’s what I see happening more and more now at the big banks. They’re not yet at the Senior level but the H1b Indians are definitely filling more and more middle manager level roles. Meanwhile the young Americans who should have gotten those entry level jobs in their 20s are pushed down a rung on the ladder and go to the next most desirable jobs instead of these and the ripple effect is felt throughout the economy as Americans get pushed down one rung of the ladder all the way throughout the economy.
I wouldn't call them that so much as saying they are cheating. They are not participating in a free market in the US where supply and demand would set wage levels. They are instead rigging the game by bringing in huge amounts of cheap foreign labor. Imagine if we passed laws that required them to only employ Americans AND to do so at vastly inflated wage levels. That would be rigging the game in favor of workers to an equal degree to what they're doing. That's not a truly free market. I happen to believe in the free market - which means it applies to both companies and workers and we don't allow any cheating to distort the free market.
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