It never made much sense to me for U.S.-based colleges and universities to educate the world’s best and brightest, only for them to get the immigration heave-ho when their education was done.
From Stanford to MIT and a thousand schools in between, the foreign-born student has always played a pivotal role in America’s tech-driven prosperity.
It is impossible to conceive of an American economy not propelled by immigrant-founded Apple, Amazon, Google or Facebook. Together those tech giants add trillions to the U.S. economy, hundreds of thousands earning millions in taxable income.
The founders of Oracle and PayPal also reflect the immigrant-origin stories that inspire multiple generations of American students who want to grow up to be like Amazon’s second-generation Cuban immigrant Jeff Bezos or Google’s Russian-born tech mega brainiac Sergey Brin. So, what’s the problem?
Many of those who rallied to support Donald Trump are fervently anti-immigrant. They and their representatives in D.C. are pushing for ever stricter regulations, resulting in shorter visas and the exporting of many of those budding billionaires-to-be.
Their battle cry is clear. There is too much competition to allow in more immigrants, however tech-savvy. What happened to America First? Why let them come to steal jobs and opportunities that should by rights go to citizens and legal residents of the U.S.?
This issue threatens to tear apart the Trump-led coalition that forged his historic victory in the 2024 elections.
Reading the apocryphal on-line outrage that festers in the breast of many a young American who has not hit the technology jackpot, the problem is the competition these foreigners represent. Most tech-savvy recent foreign-born grads will end up joining our native-born dreamers and strivers looking for a job or investment opportunity upon graduation.
There may eventually be a Brin or Musk-like simmering genius among them.
Forbes reports an important study that “Immigrants contribute disproportionally to entrepreneurship in many countries, accounting for a quarter of new employer businesses in the U.S.” Still, most recent grads will end up working in middle-income jobs that will eventually land them in the home-owning class, but probably not in a sprawling mansion in Austin or Silicon Valley.
The backlash against Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Big New Tech Deal represents a potential unraveling of the Trump coalition. It is one thing to keep American-educated tech geniuses in America. It is something entirely different to scale up the H-1B visa programs to allow ever larger numbers to remain in the United States where they will be competing with citizen young people for entry-level jobs.
Musk wrote on his X, “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.” A fine concept, unless you’ve got a tech-educated son or daughter who can’t make the “TEAM” and find a job. Their parents’ frustration is aggravated by the fact many of the kids looking for work now hail from places like South Asia and Latin America. As a conflicted person named @Frog wrote on X,
“Elon Musk isn’t evil. He simply has no idea of what it’s like being a normal white middle-class American watching the country you grew up in disappear into a neverending sea of brown foreigners…”
Put aside the obvious racism in his reference to that never-ending sea of “brown foreigners” (wouldn’t Frog still be pissed if the foreigners hailed from, say, Sweden or Slovakia?), the fear and anger @Frog expresses is Musk’s toughest hurdle.