No Need for Foreign Workers

News:

President Donald Trump drew criticism from those within his "Make America Great Again" base after he reinvigorated debate on one of his party's most controversial issues: H-1B visas.

The visas allow U.S. companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers for up to six years.

The issue resurfaced after Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in an interview that aired Tuesday that bringing foreign workers to the U.S. on H-1B visas is important to "bring in talent" to the U.S. While Ingraham argued that the U.S. has talent at home, Trump said that wasn’t the case.

It is not true that the visas are for highly skilled workers. There are other visa programs for that: EB-2, EB-3, O-1. The H-1B visas go to Indians and others will skills comparable to an average American college graduate.

Ben Shapiro defended the visas citing Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He says they created many thousands of American jobs.

I can see the argument for Musk as he founded SpaceX, and essentially founded Tesla and a couple of other companies. But Nadella and Pichai happened to be at the right place at the right time, and cashed in on cloud computing and AI developed by others.

Google and Microsoft hired thousands of Indian programmers and engineers as cheaper substitutes for Americans, and then had to hire Indians to manage them. Nadella and Pichai rose in that environment, but are they responsible for any innovative products that created jobs? Not that I have heard. They are now making good AI products, but they are playing catchup to OpenAI and Anthropic.