MAGA visa rift misses broader point about immigration and workforce

They’re mad about the program, which aims to bring foreign workers to the U.S. for skilled jobs when Americans can’t fill them, in general. It implicitly contradicts plans by President-elect Donald Trump to limit immigration.

They’re also angry specifically at a pair of H-1B program defenders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are advising Trump on cutting federal spending. The pair also recently urged his next administration to bring in more foreign tech workers. They cite businesses that rely on the H-1B visa program to bring in thousands of foreign engineers and other skilled workers each year from India, China, and other nations.

Musk and Ramaswamy’s views have sparked an intra-MAGA online spat between factions of Trump’s supporters over immigration and the tech industry, whose businesses rely on the H-1B visa program. Over the holidays, Musk and Ramaswamy, who will lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, were branded “sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley” by MAGA muckraker Steve Bannon for their passionate defense of H-1B visas, linking their support to outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden, no less.

“The workers that are here on H-1B visas should be deported at the same time we’re deporting the 15 million illegal aliens Biden brought across the border to suppress wages to low-income workers,” said Bannon, echoing the occasionally racially charged rhetoric raging at Musk and Ramaswamy. “American workers should be hired immediately to fill those gaps, and then we should start the discussions on reparations, on what they knowingly did to American tech workers.”

That’s a wrong and misguided view because, as a matter of political expedience, it’s an obsessive and disproportionate focus on a single sliver of legal immigrants while the nation’s illegal immigration influx has soared to record highs.

After all, the federal government is legally barred from authorizing more than 85,000 new H-1B visas each year. Because H-1B visas only last for three years, with limited options for extensions, only 206,002 immigrants were working in the country with H-1B visas as of 2022. By contrast, at least 10 million migrants have illegally entered the country since the start of Biden’s presidency four years ago, with the current population of illegal immigrants still in the U.S. estimated to be above 12 million migrants.

H-1B visas don’t even make up a significant share of the visas granted to noncitizens that allow legal entry into the country. The Biden administration issued a record 11.5 million visas in fiscal 2024, and fewer than 1 million were authorized for immigrants to work in the U.S. H-2 visas, which allow agricultural and nonagricultural workers to come to the country temporarily, make up a majority of the employment visas issued each year.

In other words, H-1B visas authorized annually don’t just account for a fraction of 1% of the country’s current illegal population, but also a fraction of 1% of all the visas issued to migrants each year to come to the country legally.

Also, the consistently tightest U.S. labor market in at least half a century requires our legal immigration programs to listen more to the employers operating in the free market than bureaucratic orders from Washington. Consider that of the 1.1 million green cards issued each year, just 1 in 6 are issued based on merit, whereas the majority are based on family or, even less logically, “diversity.” Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of whether to increase or decrease legal immigration as a whole, it is in the objective economic interest to expand the share of visas and green cards issued to workers based on merit.

Consider that nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Last year, the revenue of these companies was as large as the entire annual economic output of Germany and Japan combined. Between just the most notable companies Musk has personally founded or spearheaded — Neuralink, OpenAI, PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla — he has created almost 183,000 jobs still employing Americans to this day.

Ramaswamy, who, like Trump, was born in America to an immigrant mother, has created nearly 1,000 jobs just with his biotech firm Roivant Sciences. Geetha Ramaswamy immigrated from southern India to practice geriatric psychiatry in Cincinnati.

High-skilled immigrant workers such as those championed by Musk and Ramaswamy create new jobs on top of their obvious benefits to American GDP and tax revenue. Plus, they’re right that Americans are increasingly unable or unwilling to fulfill the vanguard of employment in AI and STEM.

The majority of eighth graders surveyed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2022 failed to meet basic reading expectations, with a full 30% deemed functionally illiterate. According to the last Program for International Student Assessment, American 15-year-olds averaged below that of others in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the international intergovernmental organization. And whereas a humiliating 16% of American high school graduates reported taking calculus in 2019, the advanced matter course is essentially required for high school students in the academic tracks in Germany, South Korea, and Vietnam.

I can speak from experience in saying that the most privileged Americans are ceding tech jobs to immigrants in large part because we largely cannot or will not take them. Another lifetime ago, I was an economics-mathematics dual major at the University of Southern California. Unlike the engineering or computer science majors, which required a separate admissions process within the university, USC’s math major was a part of the larger humanities college. So, if you wanted a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, you could earn one simply by taking the classes. If native-born Americans were being overtly discriminated against in STEM fields, then we would expect to see loads of them in these math classes with virtually zero barriers to entry.

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Well, by sophomore year mathematics, I was one of a handful of women in the class, and by junior year maths, I was often the only American-born woman and one of a few American-born students, period. Fellow American-born students tended to gravitate toward “softer” STEM fields or away from STEM completely, leaving the overwhelming majority of elite math classes populated by students from China, India, and South Korea.

In the interest of delivering the MAGA mandate Trump has promised to his voters, Republicans would be wise to focus on the crisis of millions of criminal migrants among us rather than focus friendly fire on our most influential operatives who are among 1% of all legal immigrants in the country. More broadly, the question of whether our next generation is capable of working the jobs of the future should ignite a greater movement toward reforming an education system that begins to fail our children a dozen years before they try and fail to pivot to STEM, only to learn it’s too late.