Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur whom Trump tapped to co-lead his new “Department of Government Efficiency” with Musk, said last week on X that hiring guest workers through H-1B visas was necessary in part because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence.”
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote, drawing some rebukes from other conservatives.
I was a team project manager to remediate legacy COBOL code for Y2K. Computer storage in the early day of computing was expensive, and requires huge amount of space plus extensive cooling. To mitigate this, wherever storage space could be saved it was. Dates stored the year in two digit "YY" and not four; 1980 became 80. So, with 2000 looming with its "00" year all date calculations from mortgage end dates, to birthday would provide a calculation error.
The company I worked with took full advantage of the panic and charged enormous rates to remediate the legacy code. To maximize their already over-the-top profits they imported 1000s of programmers from India, provided H-1B visas, housed them in slum houses and paid a fraction of what my American counterparts were getting. The floodgate was opened.
Fast forward 2025
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) picked a fight with billionaire Elon Musk over the H-1B visa program just this past week, saying the visas enrich wealthy business owners by pushing down [American] workers’ wages.
“Elon Musk is wrong,” the Vermont senator posted on X, the social platform owned by Musk and formally known as Twitter. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
Bottom Line: The former President consistently hires cheap foreign labor for his hotels, but rails against illegal immigration trumpeting his “America First” rhetoric. He supports H-1B visas along with his billionaire friends as they strongly imply that American tech workers as lazy and inferior.
So our, once again elected, president is obviously a hypocrite and is getting away with it. This give all of his wealthy supporters permission to be hypocrites as well. If you, the middle class (common man), think Trump is "Your President", think again.
It will be interesting to see how this hypocrisy continues to pay big dividends in our new oligarchical government.
If the H1-B visa allowed workers to stay indefinitely and switch jobs at will, then I wouldn't have a problem with it. America could poach the best and brightest from other countries and keep those people here. Instead, the H1-B program has been used to use low wage foreigners to learn skills held by Americans and offshore those jobs over time. As a result, we have less skilled people working in America than would be if this visa program had not existed.
ReplyDeleteIt would be simple to fix the problem - disconnect H1-B visas from specific employer sponsoring (save for a first job which may require the visa holder to stay on a job for 2 years or so), and allow them to stay as long as they are gainfully employed after that. Sadly, Elon doesn't believe in anything but serfdom for the average Joe.
You are absolutely right on this. Been there too (different neighborhood - no data division, but malloc() and friends...). Musk is not about Americanism, just greed, -- Juliet
ReplyDeletethe biggest problem with this program is the lack of verifying that a shortage actually exists in the occupation involved with the application. This function is supposed to be performed through the states' Labor Departments but they are so underfunded that minimal attention is given. many employers use this as a device to bring in a relative and this occurs at all levels. one example that pops up regularly-Chinese restaurant requires a chef that speaks a certain dialect needed to order supplies
ReplyDelete