"Fewer But Better Immigrants" is a winning compromise
Musk comes around, but Ramaswamy doubles down.
Elon Musk has now more or less retreated to my stated position on immigration, so now is the time to forge a winning political stance that would also be good policy: we want practical reform that will lead to fewer but better immigrants.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.
This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA.
Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.
I’m fine with trading to the tech barons better access to the top 0.1% of would-be immigrants in return for fewer of the 99.9%. It’s time to put forward ideas for how to reform the immigration system to get more of the top 0.1% and less of the bottom 99.9%.
Of course, I’ve stolen “Fewer But Better” from Billy Wilder’s line for 1939’s Ninotchka in which Greta Garbo plays a Kremlin apparatchik endorsing Stalin’s show trials:
Meanwhile, co-head of DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy, shares with us some painful memories of his being cheated out of his rightful status as the most popular boy in high school in Ohio:
@VivekGRamaswamy
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.
Who are these people? TV characters?
Perhaps young Vivek watched more TV than he lets on?
(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.
Oddly enough, nobody seems afraid of the strategic threat posed by the world’s most populous country and source of all those precious high-five figure salary H-1B coders and bookkeepers: India.
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. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸
8:02 AM · Dec 26, 2024
To sum up Vivek’s heartfelt plea: America needs a culture where the spelling bee champ gets the hot blonde girls!
The original controversy sparked by Musk was in fact a matter of two sides discussing two very different problems. Vivek.. well, anyone surprised by his position is also probably surprised when their dog pisses on a fire hydrant or the proverbial face eating leopard eats their face.
Companies like Musk’s I’m sure do struggle to recruit talent and only hire the best and the brightest.
The real scandal isn’t hiring at Tesla or Space X - it’s hiring at Wal Mart, Verizon, Blue Cross Blue Shield, or UPS. Over the last 15 years I’ve consulted in Dev Ops for about half of the Fortune 100, and nearly all have followed the Disney model - laying off Americans or purging them via attrition, only to replace with very low skilled, fake credentialed Indians. Entire floors of 100s of keyboard monkeys and every single one is Indian with maybe a few first generation tokens to act as intermediaries. This is done not just to save money, but to expand the power of middle managers and advance their careers. It is a productivity killer and of course overtly illegal if anyone bothered to look. Companies like Nike have had some minor trouble with this, but company like ATT and Verizon have pulled thousands of CS jobs off the table in cities like Dallas and Atlanta and Phoenix and at most these jobs require a Bachelors, arguably less.
Like many high IQ execs in pure tech, Elon has no exposure to how low IQ, low trust, and low productivity these teams are at legacy corps. Vivek on the other hand absolutely knows and supports it wholeheartedly. If it wasn’t obvious after the Ezra Klein podcast, it certainly is obvious now that Vivek thinks America is successful by accident. He inadvertently made Ann Coulter’s point for her by only citing media consumption habits from the 90s and failing to recognize that our Homecoming Kings won world wars and put men on the moon. Unlike Indians and the Chinese - we can do both. At no point in our culture - even at its zenith - did our youth worship Screech. They worshipped Jon Wayne and Elvis and built a civilization while Vivek’s people were still burning widows and prosecuting witches.
Most people coming from India on H1Bs are literally just completely average IT workers. I worked with many of them at a fortune 20 company. They aren't anything special. We would be fine without them.