Foreigners aren't taking jobs from Americans only because of H1-B visas

Not enough well-educated Americans for high-tech

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s picks for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), recently created a brouhaha when they suggested that H1-B visas be expanded to bring in more foreigners to fill top high-tech engineering positions, as Rolling Stone’s Naomi LaChance reported. She quoted Musk who argued on X that in order to win you need to bring in top talent wherever they may be. 

The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote. “Think of this like a pro sports team: 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.

She also quoted Ramaswamy who took issue with the American culture and educational system which, he claimed, is not as focused on education as other countries. 

Ramaswamy further argued on Thursday that tech firms need foreign workers because Americans don’t have a good enough work ethic — blaming the culture.

“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,” wrote Ramaswamy.

He continued: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Could it be the U.S. education system?

While this created an uproar among many who took exception to their assertions, as LaChance further noted, the American Thinker published an article by John M. Grondelski that gives credence to Musk and Ramaswamy’s assertions. Grondelski, who had been “an associate dean at a private, tuition-driven Catholic university," critiqued a New York Times report from early December 2024 discussing reasons for the poor math and science performance of American elementary and middle school students in relationship to those of their foreign counterparts.

The New York Times reported December 4 that math and science test scores for U.S. fourth and eighth graders have been essentially stagnant since 1995. Nor have they have been stagnant near the top -- lots of countries outrank us -- but rather in the middling middle. American elementary/middle school students perform behind Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, England, Ireland, and Poland.

“This is alarming,” opined a Department of Education commissioner.

Dana Goldstein, the article’s author, attributed the poor performance to the pandemic and wrote that experts are trying to figure out what the potential causes were.” However, this couldn’t be a problem solely related to the pandemic since it has been going on for the past 30 years. He blamed the poor scores on the Board of Education.

[W]hile the pandemic affected scores, Goldstein’s article notes that America’s mediocre scores have been stagnant since 1995. That’s thirty years ago. That’s over three, almost four complete cycles of elementary school students.

Which means the problem is not just the pandemic. It’s the Department of Education.

Grondelski wrote that it was more likely the “Ideological nonsense,” that was being taught in the schools and which parents were finally becoming aware of, that was responsible.

Yes, the pandemic did contribute to suppressing scores, just as it contributed to parents discovering all the ideological nonsense crammed into the curriculum that displaces time for substantive education. Kids might not know what it is to diagram a sentence (and where the “pronoun” fits in that diagram) but they waste plenty of time picking their “pronouns.

Money poured into the DOE never improved students' performance, he continued. He believes tThe bureaucrats at the Department of Education need to go.

While “experts” debate “causes” and DoE bureaucrats wring hands about “alarming” results, the truth is that the almost half-century old DoE has almost nothing to show for its existence in terms of improving American students’ educational performance. Its advocates will identify tons of legislation that have poured millions of dollars into “standards,” but we all see the subminimal results of federally imposed ‘standards.”

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” That classic definition makes the case for renaming DoE the “Department of Insanity,” because, despite half a century’s investments, little has changed but we are nevertheless told the dire consequences that would befall little Johnny and Mary should President Trump succeed in putting those failing bureaucrats out of taxpayers’ misery.

Employers take advantage of broken program to replace U.S. workers

Employers have been using the visa program to replace U.S. employees with cheaper foreign workers.

Disney

Disney laid off IT workers to replace them with cheaper foreign workers. Before they were let go they had to train their replacements. Catholic Vote tweeted a former Disney employee who exposed the company’s devastating actions:

WATCH: Former Disney employee breaks down in tears, exposing how Disney callously replaced an entire group of IT workers with foreign labor brought in under the H-1B visa program.

Uber

Don Keith tweeted Tucker Carlson’s report about Uber firing its domestic drivers in favor of foreigners 

Another video of @TuckerCarlson in opposition to Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s position on H1B visas. Who do you trust more on this issue?

AT&T

In 2020 Tucker Carlson revealed on Fox News that AT&T had replaced its workers with H1-B visa holders, primarily from India, while requiring the American workers to train their replacements. He interviewed several employees who told their stories in the clip below:

Musk recalibrates—H1-B visa program is broken

Publius tweeted Musk’s update of his stance on the H1-B visa program following the uproar. Musk says the system is broken and in need of reform and that H1-B abuse (in which 'hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT" employees are recruited even though Americans could fill the positions) can be dealt with by making it more expensive to employ visa holders.

BREAKING:  Elon Musk gives UPDATE on his H-1B VISA program position:

"Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.  

I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform."

Challenges beyond H1-B visas

Legally obligated to hire asylum seekers

It may be more than just the issue with the visa holders that needs to be addressed when it comes to foreigners taking American jobs. Companies are being forced by law to hire asylum seekers (people who haven’t yet been granted asylum). Musk explained to Tucker how the DOJ sued his company SpaceX for not hiring them, yet another law forbade his company from hiring people who weren't American citizens or permanent residents because of the sensitive nature of their work. Tucker Carlson Network Fan Account tweeted the interview:

WATCH - Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson discuss how SpaceX was sued by the Biden DOJ for not hiring asylum seekers even though SpaceX is only allowed to hire permanent US residents.

This type of lawfare is RAMPANT under the current DOJ.

American male employment rates down; migrant rates up

Companies are taking advantage of government-backed migration to hire workers who are cheaper than Americans. Blacks in particular have suffered from this replacement scheme, as Neil Munro reported for Breitbart in July 2023.  

Government-backed migration allows employers to hire young, healthy, cheap, grateful, and hard-working people in place of unwanted American employees, such as former convicts, older and unhealthy Americans, or workers they deem to be lazy or resentful. In many cases, those replaced U.S. workers may be black — and federal data now show that black Americans are seeing a notable rise in unemployment.

Job growth went to immigrants

It’s not just black males, however. As the NY Post and Breitbart reported this past July, Americans are being crowded out of the job market by legal and illegal immigrants.

According to the NY Post’s Steven Camarota, post-pandemic job gains have favored immigrants over U.S.-born workers.

Put simply, compared to 2019, all the net job growth has gone to immigrants.

To be clear, employment for both groups has rebounded significantly since the depths of the COVID-19 recession in 2020. But the number of US-born workers has not returned to the level it was before the pandemic, while immigrant employment (legal and illegal together) has ballooned.

How do we know this? The government collects the Current Population Survey (CPS) each month specifically to measure employment. It asks people where they were born and if they are US citizens.

Camarota provided the graph below depicting the imbalance.

Of the 2.9 million new jobs that went to people who are not U.S.-born, 1.7 million of the workers are not American citizens, Camarato noted, while the remainder are naturalized citizens.

Based on this and some other information in the data, it is very possible that half the net increase in jobs went to illegal immigrants.

Pew Research shows that, as of 2022, native-born Americans are competing for jobs with legal and illegal immigrants and visa holders—and they are losing out, as Breitbart’s John Binder notes.

Working- and middle-class Americans are competing for jobs against more than 30 million migrants, including legal immigrants, visa workers, and illegal aliens, the Pew Research Center revealed.

More specifically, the number of legal immigrants alone who were holding American jobs as of 2022 increased by almost 30 percent since 2007.

Meanwhile, during the same 15-year period, the number of native-born Americans who have been added to the United States workforce has increased by less than 10 percent.

The data shows that the federal government has used mass immigration as a labor policy to fill the U.S. workforce with millions of newly arrived migrants that working- and middle-class Americans are forced to compete against in the labor market.

. . . 

Last month, research from the Center for Immigration Studies found that from May 2019 to May 2024, about 75 percent of all U.S. job growth has gone to newly arrived migrants, both legal immigrants and illegal aliens.

No college degree, no job

Camarota reported that it’s U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree who are mostly being shut out of the job market in favor of immigrants. He cited the statistics, noting that those who have not looked for a job in the previous four months are not counted among the unemployed. [Some of those not counted would include individuals who have given up on finding a job.]

Today, the labor force participation rate of US-born men without a bachelor’s (ages 18 to 64) stands at 75.6% — still below the 76.3% rate it was in the fourth quarter of 2019.

And both those figures are far below the 80.6% rate in 2006 and 82.6% in 2000.

Back in the 1960s, nearly 90% of these men were in the labor force.

Unemployment—bad for the individual, bad for society

This matters on the grand scale, he argues, because of the effect that it has on everyone from the unemployed individual and their families to society at large. Unemployment is linked to depression and suicide out of despair, as well as increased crime.

Less illegal immigration and less generous welfare and disability benefits are all measures that could help increase the number of American men participating in the workforce.

Reducing illegal immigration and allowing wages to rise for jobs performed by those without a college degree would help coax Americans back to work.

To be sure, many factors other than immigration have contributed to the decline in labor force participation, including overly generous welfare and disability programs, a long-term fall-off in wages for jobs that require modest levels of education, and changing social norms.

A path forward

The challenges facing the American workforce extend beyond the H1-B visa program, though reforms to the program could address certain issues. Data highlights persistent problems, including an education system that has struggled to keep pace with international standards, a labor market impacted by millions of legal and illegal migrants willing to work for lower wages, stagnant pay for non-college-educated workers, and welfare programs that can discourage employment. Addressing these challenges will likely require systemic changes, such as reforming education and enforcing and reforming immigration laws. These steps may help strengthen the labor market and improve opportunities for U.S.-born workers.