I had a front row seat for the founding of the H-1B immigration Visa program in the run up to Y2K. To start my discussion I am going to include a quote: As an American, if you are not grossly offended by this, then read it again...
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
“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.
