On Vivek And The H1B Indians
You probably saw the X post by Vivek Ramaswamy earlier this week which touched off a major controversy within the MAGA movement. Ramaswamy took up for the H1B visa program, which gives entry to foreign workers in highly-skilled vocations and enables the U.S. to brain-drain other countries.
Most of what Ramaswamy said wasn’t wrong. He might not have been as tactful as he could have been in saying it, though, and he’s been getting hit ever since.
Here was Ramaswamy’s post…
The full statement…
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
Look, for the most part this is correct. The nerds and geeks Ramaswamy is saying we need more of are necessary in a technological society, and it isn’t a good thing that our educational system and the culture it fosters makes them out to be weird or undesirable. He’s also correct in noting that our educational system and the culture it fosters promotes mediocrity. We’re seeing a great deal of that in Western Europe, a culture which has been enervated by precisely the cultural Marxism that America is now struggling to unload.
But the unspoken context Ramaswamy is operating from is what irritated many. So here was my response…
The whole thing:
India has a lot of great engineers for a very simple, obvious reason: India has a whole lot of people.
There aren’t great engineers on every street corner in India.
In fact, the vast bulk of India’s population is capable only of mere subsistence in the very squalid conditions nearly the whole of the country lives in.
It’s a shocking number given my experiences with Indians here in America, who are some of the brightest, most successful people I know, but the average IQ there, per published studies, is like 76.
Indians are successful here because the folks making it here from there are the absolute elite.
And it’s excellent to have them.
Except that American culture is superior to Indian culture. Even with all of the manifest flaws in our culture today, something I’m hoping we’ve finally begun to reject and remedy, we still promote more virtue and accomplishment than they do.
That isn’t a racist or bigoted statement, it’s simply a fact, and I can defend it by pointing out that lots of Indians want to come here and very, very few Americans want to go there for more than a few days.
So if we’re going to have immigration from India, I can live with it if it’s somewhat limited and principally through the H1B program so that we’re getting the best and not the wretched refuse of the slums.
But we don’t want much of an increase in Indian culture. It’s not a successful culture in comparison to American culture. So whatever Indians we do bring in need to understand the necessity of assimilation.
Teddy Roosevelt stressed the importance of immigrants becoming Americans, and not merely foreign nationals here for their own benefit or that of some faceless corporation. He was right about that, and we should follow his guidance.
If we don’t have enough engineers, then let’s ditch our terrible education system and replace it with something that produces more of them. This is actually pretty simple to do if there is enough will to do it, and it has far fewer moving parts than trying to import an entirely new workforce from foreign cultures which is rootless and unassimilated.
There is a synthesis to be had between Ramaswamy’s position and that of the traditionalists within the MAGA movement.
We aren’t producing enough children in America right now to replace our population, so we do need to supplement with immigration. But we need public policies and cultural changes which serve to bring our birth rate back to replacement, and as we do that we are going to need to curtail the amount of immigrants we take in, taking only those who can (1) successfully assimilate into American culture and (2) contribute to society rather than feed off it, mostly because they possess marketable skills.
American history is a succession of off-and-on when it comes to immigration. We haven’t had a persistent surge of immigrants throughout our history; in fact, we historically will take in a wave of immigrants over 20-25 years and then turn off the spigot for at least an equal period of time. Our current flood which has lasted since the 1960’s is a massive deviation from the normal pattern, and it has changed our culture in ways which aren’t altogether desirable.
In the past, we’ve followed waves of immigration with periods of assimilation, and immigrants have been required to dive into the melting pot. A key component of the MAGA movement is an insistence on this, which is neither extreme nor even remarkable; it’s what we’ve done.
Ramaswamy is noting that in a technologically innovative society which is in a struggle with China for global hegemony, we can’t ignore the necessity of cornering the market on engineers. He isn’t wrong. But culture is at least as important as technology. It has to be preserved as well.
And to achieve that synthesis, it’s clear the first thing which must be done is to sweep away the failure of American public education as currently constituted and replace it with something much more innovative, market-based and success-oriented.
Ramaswamy wouldn’t argue with that. In fact, it’s part of his message – and something even his critics can get on board with.
