Conservative social media blew up last month in a heated debate between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on one side and die-hard MAGA loyalists on the other. The topic was the H-1B visa program, which Musk and Ramaswamy support but some on the right want to see eliminated.
The H-1B program is supposedly designed to allow U.S. companies to bring in talented foreign workers, especially for high-tech jobs. While few would dispute that the program has been sorely abused, with some companies exploiting it to import cheap, unskilled labor and undercutting American workers, others argue that it can benefit the economy.
I actually don’t think the two sides are as far apart as the fiery rhetoric suggests. Almost no one believes the program does not need to be reformed, yet most agree companies should have some mechanism for recruiting the best and brightest minds from around the world. The sticking point has to do with how much of this we allow and how we go about it.
[RELATED: No Borders: Higher Education Enables Illegal Immigration]
Many America-first types didn’t take kindly to Ramaswamy’s implication, in a post he made on X (embedded below), that America simply isn’t producing enough top-quality graduates to power our economy. And while I don’t know if he’s correct about that, I’m also not certain he’s wrong.
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…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
Personally, I believe the top echelon of graduates from U.S. colleges and universities can compete with anyone in the world. But that’s not really the question. Those people are going to get jobs, anyway. The real question is, can the second tier of American-trained workers compete with the top tier from the rest of the world?
If they can’t, that’s a problem. And even if they can, the belief that they might not be able to, which both Musk and Ramaswamy clearly hold, is a problem all by itself.
It should not, however, come as any surprise. A June 2024 Gallup poll found that only about a third of Americans now have any confidence in our universities—down 20 points from just a decade ago.
This is a crisis, one that is clearly influencing the debate over legal immigration. If U.S. companies don’t think homegrown workers can cut it—if they perceive, as Ramaswamy wrote on X, that “our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long”—that perception must be based to some extent on experience with recent college grads. No wonder they’re looking to bring in talent from elsewhere.
The failure of our education system to create a culture of excellence is due, I believe, to four main factors. The first, as Loretta Breuning recently noted in Minding the Campus, is social promotion in the K-12 school system—advancing and even graduating students based on age rather than achievement. As Ramaswamy observed in his X post, embracing mediocrity “doesn’t start in college.”
For colleges, though, that translates to large numbers of students arriving on campus unprepared for college-level work. Institutions are then faced with a difficult choice: either lower standards and expectations, in essence perpetuating the social promotion tragedy or confront the professional stigma and PR nightmare associated with “low graduation rates.”
The second factor follows naturally from the first: a general “dumbing down” of the curriculum, specifically general education requirements. Many students these days can “earn” a bachelor’s degree without ever reading Shakespeare, taking a higher-level math course, learning American or European history, or passing a basic civics exam.
The third factor represents the culmination of the first two: Colleges do a terrible job of producing independent-minded critical thinkers. Arum and Roksa pointed this out more than a decade ago in their landmark book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on Campus, and things have evidently not improved since. In survey after survey, employers complain that the ability to think critically is the job skill most lacking in new hires.
[RELATED: Colleges and the Dumbing Down of America]
The fourth and most significant factor, however, is the decade-long dominance of campus “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, which routinely privilege “diversity” and “equity” over merit.
It’s not that people from “underrepresented groups” can’t be excellent. Of course, they can. The problem is that when you prioritize something else over merit—in admissions, graduation, or hiring—you generally get something other than merit. In other words, if entrepreneurs like Musk and Ramaswamy perceive that American colleges no longer consistently produce excellent graduates, perhaps it’s because they’re no longer even trying to do so.
So, while I might not entirely agree with those guys, I can certainly understand where they’re coming from. And that puts the onus directly on colleges to hold students to a higher standard and do a better job of preparing them for successful careers. It might also behoove recent graduates to get off their phones, stop kvetching about having to go into the office, and show American companies what American workers can do.
Image by cristianstorto — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 626847651
Please, you need to read DOJ vs Facebook 2020 and DOJ vs Apple 2023. Tim Cook even made a public apology. 2600+ cases of discrimination against better qualfied local engineers, over just the 1.5 years covered by the Federal Investigation.
In the Facebook indictment, Facebook’s own HR told Federal Investigators that Facebook finds 30x more highly qualified local engineers than it can hire.
Facebook’s actively employed HR told Federal Investigators that the 97% of highly qualified local SOFTWARE engineers that they turn away were better qualified than foreign engineers at Facebook undergoing Green Card certification for similar jobs.
Green Card certification is “Supposed to” include, looking for better qualified local applicants. But Facebook’s HR was forbidden, by an illegal company policy, from forwarding the resumes of the local applicants they turn away, to the hiring managers involved in the Green Card process.
Because that would immediately invalidate the Green Card application.
So, when Vivek says there is a problem with our education system and culture, he is doing nothing but repeating JUNK thinking, that the C-suite puts out about American Engineers.
And we know this is the case, because the information came directly from Facebook’s own actively employed HR personnel talking to Federal Investigators.
Facebook protects foreign workers, with sham Green Card process, because the workers are stuck at Facebook, forever, until the Green Card is actually delivered.
Facebook hid the Green Card certification job ads in 2-Sunday print editions of the San Francisco Chronicle. Facebook refused the FREE offer of the San Francisco Chronicle to place these job ads on the Chronicle’s jobs website.
If a local engineer found these job ads (in the Sunday print edition), they had to send their resume by stamped letter, to a lawyer’s office in Palo Alto.
We need to look at the actual information revealed in court cases. The C-suite is putting up a smoke screen that this is about skill. What it is about is ILLEGAL discrimination based upon Visa status.
There is even a lawsuit by and experience foreign software engineer, against Facebook, for discrimination against him based upon the fact that he already has a Green Card.
The Cognizant case shows that companies have an illegal preference for foreign workers based upon their visa status. And that Cognizant engaged in visa fraud on the behalf of foreign workers. Just go read about the case, court papers.
The Silicon Valley no Poaching is another key piece of evidence. Email exchanges between Eric Schmidt and other CEOs (notably Steve Jobs) point out that Silicon Valley CEOs despise a citizen engineer’s right to leave the job for any competitor. This was illegal conspiracy, and there is a hint in one Email discussing how to cover it up.
You cannot trust off the cuff comments by CEOs trying put up a smoke screen to hide the awful discrimination and indenturement that is going at U.S. tech companies.
This article is based on a ridiculous premise:
“The real question is, can the second tier of American-trained workers compete with the top tier from the rest of the world?”
Well, I’ve got news for you, if the question is whether second tier of American engineers, say IQ 120, can compete with the top tier of the whole wide world, say IQ 135, or 145, the second tier engineers are going to have a hard time. Is your son or daughter going to be as smart as, say, Vivek Ramaswamy? It’s probably not going to happen that way if your son is an above-average but not brilliant student. Yeah, go ahead and crush your son’s self-motivation before the start, and direct him to trade school. (The Americans actually will have some advantages, and that gets into some complicated questions.)
But trashing American engineering schools below the level of say, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley is a terrible misrepresentation, and does a terrible disservice. I suggest Rob Jenkins try for a week sitting in on engineering classes. The problems in higher education described by Arum and Roksa mainly resided elsewhere. (Hint: soft “professions” and business programs.) In fact, if you attend some of the sub-stellar to medium engineering schools, you will likely find quite a few foreign students, mainly non-Europeans, who are thrilled to be paying tuition and attending school. Oh, I should add, not a few of those non-Europeans will be second gen Americans of Asian descent, with quite a few Latin Americans, Africans, and others.
In case I seem hot-collared about this, I am.
“The real question is, can the second tier of American-trained workers compete with the top tier from the rest of the world?”
No, I think it is more a question of why should they participate in a rigged game.
If you are going to expect an American to put in the dozen years of hard work necessary to earn a STEM BS — and you really have to start being serious about math in 4th grade in order to take Algebra in 7th grade, which is necessary to take Calculus in 12th grade — then American children have to see a clear financial benefit from doing this. They have to see people like them doing well.
What they see now are AMERICAN engineers not only being fired but being told that they must train their H1-B replacements. What incentive is there for a young person to strive for a job that will either go to a H1-B replacement or essentially be a “MacJob” because they can be so easily replaced with H1-B foreign workers.
Yes, the H1-B wages are lucrative by Indian standards, but this isn’t India…
Both gilds and unions were created to provide economic stability for the members by restricting entry into the job — to prevent cheap wages from forcing theirs down. And that’s what’s happening here — the H1-B workers aren’t better, they are just cheaper and we need to say no.
During the Depression, Roosevelt established the “prevailing wage” law — essentially that anyone bidding on public works project had to pay his people the “prevailing wage” for various trades. I’m told that when they were building the US Supreme Court building, there was a line of men wanting to be hired that extended, every day, to the Capitol.
We can argue as to if that was a good idea then — but when you are talking about bringing people into the country to REPLACE American workers, there is a real issue…
It’s an especially acute issue when you consider that academia have no H-1b caps and are completely dominated by foreign Visas. These are the very ones that are supposed to be training Americans. In the technical sciences. We have the same degrees from the same institutions that they have with the same H-1B professors, but Elon et al. won’t hire us. They go out of their way to try to prove that we don’t have the skills.
Perhaps we should stop bringing them over if they can’t transfer the knowledge to us. They may blame it on American “Motivation”, but the fact is foreigners come here because they want to be lazy just like us. By the time the first or second generation is born, the magic is gone.