The Christmas H-1B Wars—Tech Immigration Just Displaces A Better Class Of American Worker

Twitter has recently seen something of a war over the question of importing workers on H-1B visas to replace American workers. This started with posts from Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk supporting the idea, and has seen an amazing amount of pushback from patriotic immigration restrictionists, both in advocacy organizations like the Center For Immigration Studies, and from ordinary American workers.

Here’s a shortened Tweet from Vivek Ramaswamy, which claims that companies are hiring foreign workers because American culture valorizes jocks and prom queens over nerds:

This is no longer true, if it ever was—12 seasons of The Big Bang Theory have shown that.

Ramaswamy is a first-generation American, which is why he could run as a more or less doomed candidacy for President, although his Presidential run and support for Trump may have been what got him named as a leader in the proposed Department of Government Efficiency in the second Trump Administration.

Wikipedia says Ramaswamy was

born on August 9, 1985, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Indian Hindu immigrant parents. His parents are Tamil-speaking Brahmins from Kerala. His father, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a graduate of the National Institute of Technology Calicut, worked as an engineer and patent attorney for General Electric, while his mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, a graduate of the Mysore Medical College & Research Institute, worked as a geriatric psychiatrist. His parents immigrated from Palakkad district in Kerala, where the family had an ancestral home in a traditional agraharam in the town of Vadakkencherry.

The parents, like Ramaswamy (a self-made billionaire) are obviously on the high end of the IQ spectrum, and unlike Mexican illegals and Somali refugees, contribute more in taxes to the American government than they consume in government services.

A Mexican illegal with four kids in school will consume a lot more American money than he ever pays in taxes, and that’s even more true of refugees who are eligible for welfare and may not work at all.

Ramasawamy’s parent, by contrast, paid for his education an expensive Catholic school after he was assaulted at school.

Was he, as some suggested on Twitter, shoved into a locker by this guy?

Not exactly. According to the Times Of India [When a ‘big Black kid’ pushed nerdy Vivek Ramaswamy in school: Unpacking his rant against American culture, December 28, 2024]

In an old podcast, he said he attended a public school which was not particularly great. There he got pushed down the stairs and this incident forced his parents to change his school. Ramaswamy did not name the school but it was identified as Princeton Junior High School in Cincinnati. In his book, he recounted the incident and wrote: “...a big Black kid thought it would be amusing to push a nerdy high-achieving Indian kid down the stairs. Whether our races were relevant, I don’t know, but I’ve learned that others think it’s part of these stories.”

So while Ramaswamy isn’t making America poorer as a he makes himself richer, like the hordes of illegals, what you have to remember about such people is that they displace a better class of Americans.

There’s a law school in Cincinnati which could have provided GE with a perfectly good American lawyer, and a medical school which could have provided the local hospitals with a geriatric psychiatrist who was a native speaker of American English. (This is important—I recall hearing the story of the immigrant psychiatrist who thought a patient was hallucinating because he said he had “butterflies in his stomach.”)

Elon Musk, a white immigrant himself from South Africa, said he thought the H-1B program provided America—and American employers—”top ~0.1%” of engineering talent.”

Elon may be in the “top ~0.1%” of engineering talent” himself, but the (mostly Indian) tech workers hired by American firms are simply cheaper—for the employers—than Americans. They are willing to work harder and cheaper because their employers are able to offer them the inestimable benefit of American residence and possible American citizenship.

The American workers who were born with these things are losing out, because of government’s visa policies, helped by hiring managers who may be Indian themselves, and of course the fact that Indians add to the diversity quotient and are protected under anti-discrimination law.

What’s good about this is that there is now a debate about this on Elon Musk’s Twitter, and Musk, Ramaswamy, and President-Elect Trump are learning about how the American worker (and voter) feels about this.

One last word from the owner of the dissident publisher Passage Publishing: