by Edward Ring
The H-1B program needs to be fixed, not scrapped.
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.
Edward Ring
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/01/give-me-your-geniuses/
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