The U.S. government must let companies import “competent” people ranging from waiters to engineers, President Donald Trump said on his second day in office.
In a White House press event to showcase his meeting with three major investors, he was asked: “There’s been some debate within your orbit over whether or not to keep or eliminate H-1B visas … Do you want to keep H-1Bs or do you want to get?”
“I like both sides of the argument,” Trump responded, implicitly recognizing his supporters’ rising middle-class opposition to the H-1B and other white-collar migration programs. He continued:
But I also like very competent people coming into our country, even if that involves them training and helping other people that may not have the qualifications they do, but I don’t want to stop [bringing in people] and I’m not just talking about engineers. I’m talking about people at all levels.
We want competent people coming into our country and H-B1, I know the program very well. I use the program [to bring in] Maitre D’s, wine experts — even waiters, high-quality waiters. You’ve got to get the best people.
Now then you go into people like Larry [Ellison, CEO of Oracle], he needs engineers and Massa [Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank] needs [engineers] and this gentleman [Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI] needs engineers like nobody’s ever needed engineers, right? So we have to have the quality people coming in.
Now by doing that, we’re expanding businesses and that takes care of everybody [ordinary Americans]. So I’m sort of on both sides of the argument, but what I really do feel is that we have to let really competent people — great people — come into our country, and we do that through the [H-1B] program.
Notably, Trump did not call for an expansion of the huge and unpopular H-1B program — but nor did he suggest a reduction that would boost the hiring of young American professionals.
Trump’s comments about waiters likely refer to his employment of H-2B service workers.
His strong support for “competent” legal migration is also very different from his visceral opposition to chaotic illegal migration across the southern border. Left-wing District Attorneys “are not looking for the [illegal migrant] murders, the people that are killing everybody,” he said in the same meeting with reporters, adding:
We are, though, and we’re getting them out of the country. We just started that. We’re getting them out of the country. They’re going to be gotten out of the country fast. They came in illegally, from jails and from prisons. They killed many people. Some of them killed many people. About 50 percent of them killed more than one person. They were released into our country. That’s what we’re focused on.
Trump’s zig-zagging on legal migration shows how the issue is rapidly becoming more prominent because white-collar professionals are organizing politically, said Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers.
The debate over white-collar, mixed-skill H-1B migration exploded on Christmas, and it is “forcing people to look at employment visas in the proper way, using the proper nuances,” said Lynn:
The country will always need competent citizens and competent immigrants. But these employment visa programs, the entire legal immigration system, isn’t producing that and it needs to be completely reworked. I believe that is ultimately where we’re going to end up. So you’re going to see over the next year incremental changes … building to one big crescendo of meaningful reform that puts Americans first.
A rising number of white-collar professions “are prepared for the [political] zigzag,” Lynn said.
Since Christmas, many U.S. professionals have been trading stories about the massive inflow of lower-wage, mixed-skill Indian and Chinese visa workers into their jobs, companies, and careers. For example, more than 70 percent of the workforce in Silicon Valley is now Indian or Chinese because the migration has replaced two innovative generations of American professionals with a labor force of deportable Indians who are working to get the golden prize of government-funded citizenship.
Most of the U.S. professionals lost their jobs to nepotistic Indian managers and workers who are imported via the H-1B visa program by corporate investors who are focused on boosting their near-term stock prices.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” an American professional told Breitbart News. However, he said, the rules were different in his Silicon Valley office which was run by an Indian manager.
“One of the things that got me in the biggest trouble with the Indians was when I found a bug … It was clearly our device causing the problem,” he said. So he released news of the problem via a department email, and the Indian manager “became unglued … screamed at me in a conference room and called me the worst engineer,” he said.
The lesson for Americans working in Indian offices, he said, is:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
“Now, most of the managers are Indian so it is very hard for an American to get hired over there … I’d go into a room of 30 people and 15 to 17 of them are from India,” he said, adding:
They all come from the same area [in India], they all know each other, they all hang out together … The Indians are a very, very tight group. They automatically know the caste system … The guys at the bottom, they know to suck up to the caste guys above them.
Unsurprisingly, many U.S. companies have been wrecked by the investors’ stock-focused decisions to rely on cheaper and subordinated Indian workers.
The resulting loss of innovation among U.S. companies comes as Chinese companies produce marketplace-leading electric autos, AI software, handheld cellphones, and 5g telecommunications gear that are more advanced than what is offered by U.S. companies.
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