Well, that, as they say, escalated quickly.
Over Christmas, posts on X by Elon Musk and his allies in the tech sector in support of the H-1B visa program drew a backlash from MAGA accounts and created a roiling intra-right debate on immigration. If you ignore a few bigots who richly deserve it, the debate was a nice stocking stuffer for anyone who enjoys factional fights and heated discussion of the finer points of U.S. visa programs
Count us in, but the two sides were largely talking past each other, or, at least, there’s an easy way to reconcile the best points of each side.
Seeking to clarify himself under fire, Musk said he only wants to bring in the top 0.1 percent of engineering talent from the around the world via legal immigration. Although there are MAGA influencers who object to even this idea, it’s obviously in our national interest to skim exceptionally gifted people from other countries to fuel innovative enterprises here in the United States. Musk himself, a native South African who held a H-1B visa at one point, is an example. If the U.S. can fashion the equivalent of Operation Paperclip, which took in top scientists from Germany after World War II (the ethical question in that specific circumstance aside), why wouldn’t we do it?
But the immigration restrictionists are correct that the H-1B visa program is, if nothing else, badly in need of reform. The visas are scammy, often aren’t used to bring in top talent as advertised, and have been exploited by employers to dump American workers while creating uniquely abusive employment relationships that re-create some of the worst features of indentured servitude. By restricting the ability of H-1B visa-holders to seek new, different jobs, the visas can artificially tilt the playing field on salary and working conditions toward the companies that employ them. That runs counter to the free-labor philosophy that has been at the heart of the Republican Party since its founding.
Musk posted his assent to a suggestion that we welcome top talent while reining in H-1B abuses.
The billionaire and his supporters took comfort in Donald Trump’s telling the New York Post that he has always liked the H-1B visa program. Trump, though, has long been all over the map on questions related to legal immigration. In 2016, he promised to eliminate H-1B visas, and although Trump told the Post he has used H-1B visas many times, he has mainly used different visas for agricultural and seasonal employees. In short, Trump’s vaguely positive sentiment about H-1B visas doesn’t rule anything in or out.
Where does this leave us? As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies notes, the natural move would be for the incoming Trump administration to try to select H-1B visa recipients by highest salary offers rather than by lottery (the first Trump administration attempted this but got blocked in the courts). The logic is that if we are truly recruiting the most valuable talent, companies will demonstrate it with a willingness to pay up. As it is, the H-1B program is benefiting many mid-level employees who are hardly irreplaceable. According to the New York Times, a couple of years ago the company that runs Truth Social sought a H-1B visa for a “product data analyst” who would make $65,000. Are we really supposed to believe that there was no one in the United States who could do that job, or the person who would fill it was potentially the next Edward Teller?
More broadly, the immigration system, which admits more than a million people annually, should be reformed by Congress to put a much greater emphasis on merit rather than family connections. This could be done easily (in theory), without increasing the total number of immigrants, or even while reducing them. With the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born at a historic high, we don’t, as Musk has suggested, need to boost the overall numbers, and higher numbers certainly aren’t necessary to admit geniuses, who, by definition, are a tiny group of people.
Musk usefully stirred the pot on this issue. Here’s hoping the new administration heeds his impulse to admit the very most talented foreigners while tightening up on a ramshackle legal immigration system that serves our interests poorly.