The H-1B Fight Is About So Much More

If you were busy spending time with your family over the holidays, you may have missed The Great H-1B Visa Debate of Christmas 2024. On one hand, you didn’t miss much. Nearly everyone agreed that system is badly broken and frequently abused. We ended up with one side defending the premise that we should welcome truly world-class talent like NBA All-Stars, with which almost no one disagrees, and the other side attacking a modified form of indentured servitude for entry-level IT outsourcers, with which almost no one disagrees.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who found himself in the middle of the controversy, tweeted, “I’ve advocated for years to gut the H-1B system: replace the lottery with merit-based entry & end indentured service at one company, while also making the process simpler & faster for the cream of the crop to enter our country & make contributions. This shouldn’t be controversial.” Indeed this is not controversial, and differs little from American Compass’s own H-1B recommendation “to award visas only to those jobs offering the highest wages and phase it down as part of any transition to a skills-based immigration system.” 

On the other hand, the conflict was very real, and very important. Politics is not only, or even primarily, about the details of policy design. What the tech libertarians did wrong, prompting conservatives to take entirely appropriate umbrage, was evince disinterest in and even outright disdain for American workers.

Venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan’s initial comment had been a response to Elon Musk’s invitation to send the Department of Government Efficiency ideas about “wasteful” and “insanely dumb” spending. “Anything to … unlock skilled immigration would be huge,” said Krishnan.

Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale came to Krishnan’s defense by arguing: “For USA to have the highest standard of living, generous govt services, and strongest military, we need to recruit the best and brightest and build the best companies.” Musk responded to this with, “the ‘fixed pie’ fallacy is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking. There is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation. Think of all the things that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago!”

The shared obsession underlying these comments is with a particular type of company employing a particular type of worker. What should a “department of government efficiency” do? Anything to unlock skilled immigration. It’s a peculiar place to start. 

Will this payoff for American workers too? Well, no, the claim is that it will guarantee us “the highest standard of living, generous govt services, and strongest military.” So, consumption, redistribution, and empire. This sounds familiar, and is cause for great concern. If there is truly infinite potential for job creation, would it be too much to ask that these masters of the universe create the kinds of jobs that, you know, they could hire Americans for?