A small scale war in the MAGA movement cranked up the other day when Elon Musk went on the attack against the limitations of the H-1B Visa scheme in the USA.

These are special business visas that allow immigrants to work legally for all sorts of companies in America. They’re limited by law to just 85,000 per year and last only as long as the job does. There are about 700,000 holders in the USA currently. So in terms of numbers and controls they’re not even close to being the problem that illegal immigration is. In fact its those restrictions that have been a long-known problem in the US tech sector, as the following Tweet explained:

As you can imagine elements of the MAGA movement did not take that lying down, as their concerns are with all US immigration, not just the illegals:

Other Trump allies have opposed H-1B visas and the tech leaders’ comments in response, with right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich saying Big Tech is responsible for the rise in foreign workers and “now they want more H-1B’s for their self-inflicted wound,” while Loomer said, “Allowing big tech executives into Mar a Lago is going to be the death of our country. Isn’t it?”

The fight also dragged in another wealthy MAGA member, and actually Musk’s DOGE co-leader, to also speak up on the subject, albeit with a different focus:

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.

That just added fuel to the fire as people took umbrage at Ramaswamy’s “brutal honesty” about how legal immigrant parents have steered their kids away from such aspects of American culture to focus on study, science fairs and such, resulting in the success of their kids today. I suspect those who countered Ramaswamy and Musk are well aware of all this, including the education system issues, and even agree – but they also think that the scheme screws non-immigrant American STEM graduates.

They may be correct. In 1990 I had to review all the legal paperwork done by the KPMG lawyers for my H-1B visa to get my job in Chicago and the part I recall was where they argued that my position could not be filled by an American. Grateful as I was for the job, even at the time that sounded like bullshit to me. There must have been thousands of Americans in their late twenties with IT degrees and several years of work experience, including even the specific consulting skills KPMG needed. Oh, and when I finally got my Green Card I left the job and tripled my salary for doing the same work!!!

Support for that observation has come from none other than the woman RFK Jnr picked as his VP-elect for his independent run, Nicole Shanahan, a woman who has since found more comfort in the MAGA world than in her original Democrat Party or even her California Lefty world (who’ve pulled the usual hate campaign on her as an apostate). Moreover she knows of what she speaks since she’s a Silicon Valley veteran too. You can read her whole X-thread on the subject here, but these are the key points (somewhat out of order):

I take issue with some of the discourse I’ve read online today suggesting “lazy American culture” is the main driver for why we need to continue the H-1B program. Let’s be real: tech companies getting massive breaks on cheap labor at the expense of the American way of life is predatory. Blaming our culture for why American STEM grads won’t take underpaying jobs is ridiculous and insulting,

Holy shit! She sounds like Bernie Sanders!

She writes of those jobs being filled by Chinese and Indian engineers (again, something I personally witnessed even in the 1990’s), not because the jobs don’t exist back in their native countries and not because the pay is great, but because it’s their way of getting into the USA:

The system we’ve constructed with H-1B visas, whether we like it or not, incentivizes people to come here and serve as essentially indentured servants for Big Tech, taking on the tough, grueling jobs that few here in America are excited to perform at the current suppressed salaries. In return, if you’re good at your job, you’re then put on a fast track to get a Green Card, which means legal status and the chance to bring your family over through chain migration

She holds that both the education and immigration systems are broken, but she doesn’t think that “teaching kids to code” is simply the answer given that these are “not fun jobs”, and although she says that she can’t blame Big Tech for taking this approach, given the screwed up incentives in both areas (for US graduates it’s debt, for immigrants it’s attaining legal status), she does takes an implied swipe at Musk:

Instead of tackling these complex issues head-on, Big Tech monopolies and tech VCs are looking for the fastest way to outcompete globally and become industry giants. It’s paid off—look at the insane valuations of these companies! We can’t entirely blame them for this approach—it’s been the industry norm for 40 years—but we can insist they seek out the tough, lasting solutions. No more temporary fixes.
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Do I think removing the incentive of attaining legal status would reduce the volume of foreign applicants? Absolutely. And, guess what? That might finally force Big Tech to look for workers right here at home (and pay them a competitive wage).

She also takes another implied swipe at Ramaswamy:

Meritocracy is key to America’s greatness, but so are justice and fairness—we shouldn’t keep rewarding an industry that has curtailed free speech and American values. After Trump’s recent victory, the everyday worker feels empowered like never before. They won’t surrender that power, and frankly, it’s not right to imply they should.

Spoken as a Rich Lefty and as such she misses another American factor that’s driving this – DEI – and here are two personal stories to illustrate that problem.

Eric Raymond is from my IT world and generation:

When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male. I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.

Racism, straight up, but ignored by the Left because it fits the current Oppressor vs. Oppressed dynamic where White Men can never be the latter. And he absolutely captures the Gen-Z attitude that is currently driving employers crazy in the US:

It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.
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You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.

Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for “high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.

And it’s not just the IT world, as this testimony from a youngish American research scientist with a solid slew of published studies shows when he started applying for junior professor positions in the USA, Canada and Europe:

In one case however I had the dean – a portly Hispanic woman – tell me two minutes into the interview that “women in STEM are very important to me”… I [wasn’t] hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they’d hired … no one.
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Meanwhile in Canada, where open discrimination against white men is not only legally allowed but federally mandated, the federal government rolled out a research chair program that was only available to applicants who weren’t white men, while telling universities that if their faculties weren’t diversifying overall they wouldn’t qualify for the research chairs.
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One European university I applied to provided detailed feedback, not just on my application but those of other applicants, due to some kind of transparency policy. This was very informative. Not only was the (female) referee noticeably biased towards women, she gave a 1/5 rating to every teaching statement that didn’t mention diversity (“no mention of diversity” was literally the only comment she made on most of the teaching statements).

Even without these specific blockages some 90% of jobs he did not apply for because they required “diversity statements” and he was not going to write glowing bullshit about DEI when it was screwing him. Ultimately there is a repeat of Eric Raymond’s line above about how “American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago”:

Needless to say, as this situation continued, I became rather discouraged. My research activity slowed and then basically stopped. What the fuck is the point. I killed myself for like a decade, for what?

Multiply that across hundreds of thousands of White American Men and you’re looking at an economy and a culture of mediocrity that no amount of legal immigration (or “diversity”) can fix.

Trump has since stamped all over this fire and put it out by talking about he loves the H1-B visa scheme and while that will annoy some of his MAGA followers it won’t stop them from trying to change the system even as it gets swamped in the news by all the deporting of illegal aliens. Moreover, with people like Shanahan whispering in Kennedy’s (and perhaps Trump’s ear) their may be overall changes that satisfy both sides.

After all, that is politics.