I was reminded of my grandmother over the past week, when an internecine debate bordering on a brawl broke out among supporters of President Donald Trump, despite being an essentially a minor issue concerning some 85,000 visas issued annually, where multiple things can be true simultaneously.
My grandmother used to say that there are three sides to every story: The husband’s, the wife’s, and the truth. This was no mere adage for her, either. She was my father’s mother, living with her son, daughter in law, and their children, myself included, while they were going through a messy divorce. Given that she was an opinionated woman in many cases – asking her what she thought of David Letterman compared to Johnny Carson for instance would prompt a legendary look of disgust before launching into Mr. Letterman’s many flaws in her mind, starting with how he moved his tongue in his mouth – this probably wasn’t an easy neutrality to keep when things got tough, but rather than take sides, she preferred to acknowledge that people tend to see things from their own point of view while disparaging or at least limiting the perspective of others, especially in the heat of an argument. I was reminded of this over the past week, when an internecine debate bordering on a brawl broke out among supporters of President Donald Trump over the issue of H-1B visas, which are used primarily in the technology sector to allow immigrants to fill computer programming, biotech, and other skilled positions. The spat began when President Trump nominated a visa holder, Sriram Krishnan, to be his Artificial Intelligence advisor, rather than a native born American. The more nativist – for lack of a better word – wing of the Republican base objected almost immediately, prompting both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to object to their objection, claiming programs designed to recruit high tech talent from outside the United States are vital to a thriving American future. Rather than retreat, Mr. Musk doubled down, literally calling for a doubling of the program, “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,” he wrote on X. “I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning. Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct,” he added. Mr. Ramaswamy chose to wade into the cultural dynamics underlying the need, claiming that American culture right now “has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” particularly in education, and that US students lack the focus and background in science, math, and technology to fill the current demand. “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,” he wrote last Thursday. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
The backlash was swift and at times, fierce. Conservative firebrand Laura Loomer posted on X, “The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar a Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave laborers from India and China who never assimilate. I don’t care about being called ‘racist’ by people who don’t have the best interest of the American worker in mind. If India is such a high skilled society, why does it look like this? Just admit you want cheap labor. I don’t care about being called ‘racist’.” Conservative filmmaker, author, and influencer, Mike Cernovich posted repeatedly on the topic, claiming variously that the system was corrupt, H-1B visa holders were subject to “indentured servitude,” and that the real issue was competing value systems between the “tech right” and “MAGA.” “Game of Thrones re: X. MAGA is the Starks, honor culture based, simultaneously warm-but-cold. Tech right is the Lannisters worshipping gold. Conservative Inc is House Frey. Democrats are the army of the dead. Elon is either Jon Snow or Daenerys, time will tell!” Previously, he’d criticized the “tech right” as committing a “Covid Redux,” “Tech Right, MAGA right, and a Covid Redux. Covid is a case study in the differing values system among the people who are in an alliance of convenience, and useful for understanding immigration. When Covid hit, THE TECH RIGHT LEFT. It didn’t occur to them to stay here and risk it.” He phrased a similar sentiment this way, “Tech right is gonna have to learn how to talk to people who don’t want their money and frankly don’t value it the way the usual suck-ups and social climbers do. Different values system.” Mr. Cernovich also claimed the issue was one of potential discrimination against conservatives, believing the H-1B program wouldn’t be needed if technology companies weren’t woke, insisting “There’s a labor shortage because you won’t hire Trump voters.” Even more moderate voices in the Republican party, such as former Presidential Candidate and Ambassador the United Nations, Nikki Haley rejected the notion that the visa program is necessary while criticizing Mr. Ramaswamy’s comments. “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers,” she wrote last week. Over the weekend, the President-elect himself weighed in, essentially endorsing the positions of Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” he told The New York Post on Saturday.
Perhaps needless to say, the mainstream media was quick to elevate the debate, argument, or whatever you prefer to call into a full blown Civil War. CNN’s Stephen Collinson described it on Monday as a “full-blown storm”, writing “Donald Trump’s siding with Elon Musk over visas for high-tech workers is the most significant example yet of the president-elect favoring powerful elements in his new MAGA coalition over his base’s anti-immigrant DNA that he twice tapped in his rise to power. The boiling holiday feud over H-1B visas exposed new fissures across Trump’s broadened support base and reflected the contradictions between his populist ideology and the self-interests of many of the key players in his refashioned inner circle.” In the meantime, at least some conservative commentators saw these developments as a sign of a healthy debate. Kurt Schlicter, writing for Townhall.com, noted “Coalition partners work out their issues. That’s what’s going to happen here. The tech bros can’t really go to the Democrats who hate them with a passion. America Firsters can’t win without tech money and savvy. We need each other. We’ve got to make this work. And we will. But one thing we need to do when we are debating is to understand that it’s a debate. It’s not personal unless you make it personal. You may feel strongly that Vivek’s critique was wrong or even insulting. Get over it and grow up. We’ve been taught that disagreement must be a bloodsport, but that’s not true. Save the vitriol for the real enemy, the communists. You can have people tell you things that you think are wrong and survive. You don’t always have to go for their throat. Try going for their argument instead. And to their credit, many, if not most, of those of us within the America First coalition did just that.” Roger Simon, writing on Substack, claimed something similar, noting “this is indeed nothing but a kerfuffle of the most minor sort that has been taken up by the media ad nauseam in recent days. This is especially so since the room for compromise here couldn’t be clearer. Toughen up the rules for qualifying for H1-B—they may actually be there; in that case, observe them —make sure it isn’t a form of discount labor, and continue the program under more stringent guidelines.” Mr. Simon, rightly in my view, attributed much of the outburst to an observation from Sigmund Freud about the “narcissism of small differences”. “In this case, Wikipedia explains it well: ‘… the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences.’ We all recognize this pattern that manifests in various ways from the bickering of married couples to successful rock bands breaking up. The most minor disputes explode into major ones that no one wanted in the first place with sometimes disastrous results. This fits the internal MAGA dispute over H1-B visas to the proverbial T. The only ones who profit from this kerfuffle, or whatever it is, are the left and their fading media allies, desperate for something to latch onto about MAGA and create dissension.”
While I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Simon and to a large extent, Mr. Schlicter, watching the issue explode on X between supposed political allies wasn’t exactly heartening. In partisan politics, it’s necessary and natural for the opposition party to oppose. We might like to believe the better angels of our nature can overcome the zero-sum nature of political power, but hundreds of years of history clearly shows the opposite. Rarely, if ever, does one side of the aisle give the other any credit, or even the benefit of any doubt, no should we expect them to. The Democrats only goal for the next two years is to win back the House of Representatives. They will not do so by joining forces with Republicans, helping to solve our problems, and I can’t blame them for it when I would advocate the same if the roles were reversed. At the same time, Republicans will most definitely not benefit in any way by attacking each other, transforming differences of opinion and policy into fundamental differences of values and philosophies. This should certainly be the case during what is essentially a minor debate concerning some 85,000 visas issued annually, where multiple things can be true simultaneously. Indeed, many of the people who criticized Mr. Ramaswamy’s take on American culture had said similar things themselves in the past – do you know any conservative who thinks the education system is working as planned, bringing out the best and brightest, or do they insist it’s an industry devoted to indoctrination? – while those who defended the program have previously questioned every government program imaginable, concluding that the entire government is essentially corrupt, so bad that about a quarter of its total operating budget can be cut with no impact on the public. In terms of this debate, it is almost certainly true that there is a shortage of skilled technology workers. The technology sector in general is dominated by the foreign born, and as anyone who has actually hired a developer or engineer can attest, the vast majority of applicants for these job openings are visa holders in the first place. Further, these trends started decades ago, when the initial program was launched in 1991. Today, there are around 600,000 workers in the United States on H-1B’s, representing less than .4% of the total workforce. Thus, the program is both necessary and tightly targeted, but it can also be true that companies have exploited and corrupted the process, using it to depress wages, fill jobs where qualified Americans were ready and able, and because the visa is held by the company, not the individual, greatly limiting their ability to change jobs and making them much more beholden to the company they work for than an American citizen. From that perspective, there is ample opportunity for reform, but even at a broader, more foundational level there is reason to be concerned about at least some of the commentary on both sides.
Mr. Musk, Mr. Ramaswamy, and others who support the program likely wouldn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to visas for migrant workers, particularly in the farming industry. In that case, many would argue that Americans can fill these jobs and only choose not to because the salaries are so low, yet to at least some extent, the same argument can apply here. If technology salaries doubled overnight as some insist, it’s certainly likely that more native born citizens would enter the field, practically overnight. The nativist contingent is consistent in both of these cases, though both sides ignore the obvious potential impact on either prices or supply, but they are also simultaneously stretching populism to the limit while focusing their ire on some of the most highly paid workers in the United States, whether they be foreign born or otherwise. Mr. Cernovich, for example, repeatedly railed about the long hours many in the tech industry are “forced” to work, believing this limits US citizen interest in the positions, but why anyone should sympathize with salaries generally over, if not well over $100,000 per year even a few years into a career is left unsaid, much less why a hungry American thirty something wouldn’t jump at the opportunity. Ultimately, arguing over those who make double the median income while lower income people have been struggling with massive inflation doesn’t strike me as productive, not when the argument is among those who are supposed to be part of the same coalition. To be sure, Mr. Cernovich later made clear that his ire is not for Mr. Musk in particular, claiming that he views the tech billionaire as true MAGA and of his own kind. This suggests that the dispute will rapidly fade from memory and doesn’t represent a true fissure in President Trump’s coalition, but the fact that it was even a question before the man takes office in less than three weeks cannot possibly be interpreted as a positive sign. Ultimately, the next time differences like this arrive, I urge everyone to heed my grandmother’s advance, air your opinion without self-righteously proclaiming your values are superior, and use both sides of the story to determine the truth.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 