Over the past two weeks, a healthy debate has begun within the Republican party over H-1B visas. This program allows employers to hire foreign workers in “specialty occupations.” A precipitating event was the appointment of Sriram Krishnan as Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Krishnan is on record calling for the H1 visa program to remove caps on how many can be awarded for any particular country. At face value, this seems reasonable. Why would India, with 1.4 billion citizens, have the same cap as Singapore, with fewer than 4 million citizens?
In a December 23 tweet to her 1.4 million followers, Laura Loomer pounced on Krishnan’s proposal, accusing him of being a leftist and claiming he wants to remove all restrictions on green card caps. In response to Loomer’s tweet, tech entrepreneur and investor David Sacks offered a “point of clarification,” explaining that Krishnan didn’t want to remove the overall cap, just how they are allocated via fixed amounts per country. The debate has become heated, with Steven Bannon and Nick Fuentes lining up behind Loomer and Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Vivek Ramaswamy supporting Krishnan.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but one premise ought to be beyond debate: America should welcome the geniuses of the world. If somebody with an IQ of 170 and a degree in theoretical physics graduates from an American university and wants to work in America, we should not be sending them back to India. Accepting this premise does not conflict with the fact that, as it is today, our H-1B program is flawed and exploited.
To put this into perspective, the U.S. issues 85,000 H-1B visas per year, and of those, 20,000 are reserved for professionals graduating with a master’s degree or doctorate. These visas are good for three years, with one three-year renewal. In all, an estimated 700,000 H-1B visa holders currently work in the U.S. By comparison, the total U.S. workforce is 161.5 million.
This means only one in 230 American workers is here on an H-1B visa. That’s not very many. So why so much acrimony over this policy? Elon Musk, who has joined the debate, has been consistent in his position. It is best expressed in a 2023 tweet where he said, “We should greatly increase legal immigration of anyone who is hard-working, honest, and loves America. Every such person is an asset to the country. But massive illegal immigration of people we know nothing about is insane.”
Musk is right, but the devil is in the details. He suggests that we “greatly increase immigration.” That’s a potentially alarming statement. How much is “greatly?”
Addressing this question reveals tough realities. Starting with how many immigrants should be allowed into America—how many people should live here? How do we cope with the fact that our internal birthrate is way below replacement levels? Should we close our borders and hope American women decide to start having babies again? Should we be indifferent to the possibility that birthrates will continue to crash and rely on automation to raise productivity enough to compensate for the fact that our elderly retirees will eventually outnumber our citizens of working age? And if we do that, will we retain sufficient vitality to repel aggression from other nations? For that matter, would a nation of mostly old people have the vitality to prevent AI-driven automation from going rogue? So what is the optimal population for our country?
Trying to answer this question is helped by referencing what demographers refer to as population pyramids. This is a graphic that depicts a set of horizontal bars stacked on top of each other. Each bar represents a five-year age group, with 0-4 on the bottom, followed by 5-9, then 10-14, etc., until at the top you have the 100+ age group. The width of each of these 20 bars corresponds to the number of people in each age group. In a nation with an expanding population, such as Nigeria, the bars at the bottom are far wider than in the middle. In Nigeria, for every person aged between 60 and 64, there are 8 children under the age of five.
In a nation with an imploding population, these ratios are reversed. In South Korea, for example, for every child under the age of five, there are more than three people between the ages of 60 and 65. South Korea’s fertility rate has crashed to 0.68 children per woman of childbearing age, while the average Nigerian woman is still having five children. For a population merely to remain stable, the average fertility rate needs to be 2.1 per woman.
It’s a mistake to regard population growth as essential to healthy economic growth. That model has worked for centuries but has never before been used to justify population replacement in nations that are experiencing a population crash. In America, the population “pyramid” reveals a slow decline. For every child under the age of five, there are 1.2 people between the ages of 60 and 64. America’s current fertility rate is 1.66 births per woman.
At this fertility rate, without immigration, America’s population will eventually begin to decline by about 20 percent each generation, i.e., by 2 million per year. Until we succeed in increasing the fertility of our own population, that is how many people need to enter the country each year merely for our population to remain stable. Is that a “massive” number of people, and if so, why? This number of people won’t increase demand for housing or jobs, since our population will not increase at that level of immigration.
The problem with immigration in America, especially during the Biden administration, is that we paid minimal attention to who came into the country. The low end of the estimated arrivals during Biden’s term comes in at over 8 million. It may be far greater, with virtually no attention paid to work ethic, character, criminal record, cultural compatibility, job skills, or raw intelligence.
That is what must change. We must restore strict standards and only admit people based on these merits. Then we must enforce a cap on total immigration. H-1B visas are the least of our worries. In a merit-based immigration policy with a reasonable overall cap, H-1B visas could be increased. The H-1B program needs to be fixed, not scrapped.
There are bigger issues that have made this debate heated. But we may hope that Musk, Loomer, Ramaswamy, Bannon, and countless others will step back and agree on a few fundamentals. Let’s set a standard of excellence and agree that immigrants who exceed that standard will be allowed to work here. At the same time, let’s direct unified vitriol at even bigger threats, starting with the teachers union and the millions of cowardly bureaucrats, public and private, that have sabotaged the culture of excellence that has made America great. And then let’s get on with the rest of the MAGA agenda:
We must abolish DEI, end all forms of discrimination including institutionalized discrimination against white men, restore SAT/ACT scores as the primary criteria for college admissions, scrap the watered-down SAT tests that falsely understate the already alarming level of decline in test scores, outlaw teachers unions, establish school choice and education vouchers nationwide, and fire 90 percent of the “administrators” that clog our K-12 and higher education institutions and make them mediocre and unaffordable.
At the same time, we must end the cultural war on motherhood and restore it as a highly respected achievement and responsibility. To make motherhood an economically viable choice, we must deregulate our housing and energy sectors and restrict public infrastructure investment to projects that are practical and yield long-term economic benefits. These policies will lower the cost of living so families can again thrive with only one person working.
Finally, and only after accomplishing these other objectives, we need to slash spending on entitlements for everyone of working age. Once millions of Americans are no longer vilified and discriminated against based on race and gender quotas and believe that home ownership and financial stability are not impossible aspirations, they will rejoin the workforce with enthusiasm.
These things are possible. This is where unity is required from all factions of the MAGA movement.
Possibly the biggest challenge in the world today is evolving an economic system that flourishes even when each year there are fewer people. In the meantime, to cope with what’s coming over the next few decades, we need every genius we can get. Let them in.
A horrible piece, filled with inaccuracies and lies. Ring should stick to pieces analyzing and suggesting reforms for the most broken state in America: California.
O visas are for “geniuses”. H1B (as Ring’s far more knowledgeable peer at AG, Christopher Roach, wrote yesterday) is a temporary work visa used/abused most often to replace American workers in existing jobs. The H1B is supposed to be an attempt to fill a job where “no American” is in it, not a way to lower labor costs. Although the official cap of H1B is 85,000, that number is gamed in so ways, that exceptions and allotments as well as multiple lotteries are held for specialty occupations like, those hard-to-fill “brainiac” golf instructors, cashiers and dog trainers, that, in 2023 alone, the United States admitted 755,000 H1B visa workers. According to CIS.org, more than 4,980,290 temporary workers and their families were admitted to the United States in 2023 in total. That accounts for one year’s entries on work visas, which is only one part of the 68,227,240 foreign citizens admitted on an I-94, which DHS issues and uses to track legal foreign entries to the United States and the duration for which foreigners are allowed to remain in the U.S. In short, these numbers illustrate an ongoing invasion, not an attempt to fill jobs Americans won’t do.
I take exception to this notion that the US should only pay attention to “skills” or “genius”. That may be great for Big Pharma, Silicon Valley, or any number of industries, but it isn’t great at building a country with citizens who are capable of self-governance. A country exists for its own people, or it won’t exist long. It’s fair to state that the United States is teetering on the edge of extinction if American citizens do not get a moratorium on work visas, and many other non-immigrant forms of invasion. I just never realized how many of the countries’ enemies pretend to play on our team.
Shame on Ring. An unapologetic middle finger to American workers and citizens is no way start the New Year.
Despite the efforts of the Left to portray this immigration discussion as a MAGA rift, very positive things will emerge from the back and forth. Ring makes a valid point when discussing the population pyramid. We ARE approaching a point when we will fall below birth replacement. Throughout our past we have had waves of immigrants whose birthrates were slightly higher than the groups already here. And it has worked for us.
The heart of the issue as addressed by us MAGA types is that we see legal immigration as a net positive. Illegal immigration is both a net and gross loss. We don’t mind people coming, we just want to know who they are and how they will best benefit the nation. To me, that is a very reasonable premise. Before all of this is over, all facets of legal immigration will be addressed and adjustments will be made. If one doesn’t like watching the process of sausage making, avert your eyes and simply buy the finished product in the meat aisle.
Donald Trump has never been bashful about saying he is pro-immigration, despite the slurs by the Leftist media. He, like all of us, merely wants to know who is coming in AND to have control of the types of people we invite in. Do we have to re-prove that countries like Venezuela and others have, indeed, emptied their prisons and insane asylums and pointed them northward? Or that organized gangs have made concerted efforts to establish chapters in numerous states? Please!
We are all children of immigrants—even to Native Americans whose ancestors crossed a land bridge across the Bering Strait. Immigration success lies in having similar values and also having the assimilation time for these values to blend with those who have long been here—them to us as well as we to them. In the last four years, we have not had that----and it’s all going to change, Bigly.
The unfortunate aspect of immigration reform, which Mr. Ring maturely and intelligently discusses, is that any reform will be sabotaged by the DEI scolds screaming racism and white privilege. This is a shame because American values do not belong to any race or color, and said values are certainly not indicative of white privilege–or any privilege–other than a shared belief system that has made this country preeminent.
I am neither racist nor xenophobic, but I do think any immigration reform should be calibrated to accept immigrants who genuinely want to assimilate, understand and respect American values (Muslims should be vetted with particular circumspection due to anti-Western, anti-modernist beliefs such as intermarriage, honor killings, female genital mutilation, religious intolerance, and even personal hygiene practices), and have a fervent desire to pursue and share the American dream with their new countrymen.
More to the point; its our country and We the People absolutely should get a say in who is allowed in. And if racist martinets howl that the aforementioned vetting criteria makes me a xenophobic racist, then I will gladly have a T-shirt emblazoned with this manufactured slur and proudly wear it for one and all.
After how many generations do we get to claim the status “native born Americans”? Would that be three generations? Five? Ten? I’m curious as this “We are all immigrants” meme appears to be a pretext to continue flooding this country with unassimilable frauds, or replace Americans with/ ever cheaper foreign labor. Securing borders against invasion is the bare minimum. Limiting all legal immigration and halting it when there is a sizable population of one’s own people displaced is only the beginning. Trump clearly is no Calvin Coolidge. He needs to be. Learning the lessons of mass, uncontrolled legal immigration has yet to sink into the political class.
It’s becoming patently obvious too many are completely ignorant of conditions in flyover country. Soaring property taxes and school budgets in small town schools? No problem! Those Haitians/Venezuelans/Guatemalans came “legally” on a TPS, H2 [fill in the blank] which was subsequently renewed, all with the assistance of the nice people at Catholic Charities. Oh, and let’s remember that the average IQ of an Indian is about 77 and they’re still shitting on the streets over there. Yeah, they’ll Make America Great Again, won’t they? Ensuring we dilute average IQs by 20 or 30 points will surely put Americans in their place, right? After all, they were getting way too uppity, weren’t they? And that’s not even addressing the insanity of allowing an entire industry supposedly crucial to this country’s dominance and national security to be staffed by a foreign majority, a sizable percentage of which come from our chief global adversary. Admit it. That is insanity. It’s all OK according to Ring et al., as “conservatives” can now virtue signal with the rest of them.
Ring is wrong as he so often is on issues affecting anyone outside of Cali. Donald Trump flip-flopped on the immigration issue, especially H1B, as he promised in 2016 to do his utmost to eliminate it, a position republished, and widely prior to November 2024. How many working age white males would have turned out to vote for Trump had he announced his support for the Great Replacement prior to this election? I cannot imagine a more effective way to kill MAGA than to continue supporting any immigration at this point in history when a plurality of citizens want it stopped. This issue IS MAGA and it IS a rift, no need to bring in any opinions from the Left.
LK, I upvoted your comment because it was passionate, however I think we are arguing two different things.
I consider illegal immigration a burst artery. I consider the LEGAL immigration as a paper cut. Before all of this is done, LEGAL immigration will be looked at too. But it is way down on my list of priorities. One thing the HB (fill in the blank) system does allow is identification of those coming in----regardless of the issues within the system. Many are deemed essential workers within specific fields. That many game that system indicates things need revision----BUT at least they are within defined categories.
I refuse to get sucked into an argument over this. I want the border closed to illegal immigration first, last, and always. Once that is done, the politicians can take the time necessary to emplace controls on legal immigration. I think the greatest bone of contention is the chain migration segment. Okay fine. We can fix it. For others, the bone of contention is that corporations are gaming it to get professionals at a lower wage. If that is it, we can fix that too.