Real estate agents have a number of maxims buyers and sellers rarely hear, that are only shared among realtors, especially industry veterans:
“Buyers are liars.”
“You want to be someone’s first love, second spouse, and third realtor.”
“In a good transaction, everyone will leave the settlement table a little bit unhappy.”
The Republican Party and the MAGA movement, particularly on X, have debated topics, including who should be Speaker of the House, and what should be allowed in terms of legal immigration, in particular the H1B Visa program. Democrat influencers crowed gleefully that Trump’s supporters were engaged in factional infighting—MSNBC Executive Producer Kyle Griffin tweeting “MAGA diehards are already attacking Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump isn't even in office yet.”
Democrats had gone from primaries made semi-irrelevant by a Politburo of super-delegates at their conventions, to having no primaries at all. As comedian Whitney Cummings observed on CNN, “It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn’t give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate. Kamala was forced on us so hard, you’d think she was patented by Pfizer.” It's not surprising Democrats couldn’t understand what they were seeing when other people had a policy debate.
This H1B debate was perhaps the most informative exchange that’s ever happened on social media. On one side were people initially defending the H1B program and expanded legal immigration, including Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and Scott Adams; on the other many dissident right pundits, including Peachy Keenan. Many of them, particularly Adams and Ramaswamy realized that what was going was not war, but discussion.
Vivek decided to play Life of Pi and throw some chum to excite the sharks by saying Americans weren’t really hard-working (and disciplined studying) enough to create Silicon Valley on their own, without taking in the far-right tip (but just the tip) of India’s bell curve: 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.
Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan, the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, seconded Ramaswamy’s charge that Americans are too ignorant to engineer software or choose good policies, with a Substack post with an argument by analogy (or fallacy of analogy?) on how nuclear power and H1B immigration are alike in that they’re both too complex for ignorant and easily-scared people to understand.
Vivek quickly recovered in subsequent tweets from his rhetorical fail. Everyone slowly came to agree that American K-12 (and university) education was such a failure it was preventing the United States from producing the caliber of high-level STEM workers it needs. Everyone agreed that the H1B program is flawed and corrupt, granting 800,000 visas when by law it should be only 80,000, granting visas to people in fields like accounting for which it was not intended, and placing the H1B visa holder in a kind of indentured servitude where they can’t seek other jobs from other employers, thereby depressing their salaries and the salaries of everyone else in the same field. For free marketers, defending the H1B program is like defending treaties and other systems of government-managed trade that do free up some exchanges between some parties, but only within a system of central planning that has its own goals unrelated to those of market participants.
There are lots of America First pundits who replied to the libertarian/TechBro defenders of the H1B program (or some reformed version of it). But I think the best was from the pseudonymous humorist Peachy Keenan, who thinks of herself as a mom concerned about her children’s future. Her Substack and bangers on X show she’s emerging as a philosopher. A philosopher who last year made us reflect on motherhood, parents, children, and maternal love, and this year is going to make us reflect on citizenship, sovereignty, and what it means to be an American. Mrs. Keenan asks:
Is an American:
—Anyone who believes in the Idea of America? If so, what is this idea? If you live in, say, Madagascar, and you believe in this idea, does that make you American? Or is the idea geolocated; it only works when you believe in the idea AND you are inside one of the 50 states? Also, there are plenty of people who were born here who do not believe in this idea; they hate the founders, the Constitution, etc. Are they still American?
—Anyone who steps foot on the Magic Dirt between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans? What makes the dirt so magical? Is it enough just to make the journey and fill out a few papers?
—Anyone who can game our retarded border system, asylum system, and visa system to get a ticket to JFK?
—Or is it something more?
What’s interesting about this series of questions is that it doesn’t lend itself to answers like “blood and soil” nationalism, which Ann Coulter edged into with her (no doubt true) assumption that the Scotch-Irish and other Anglo settlers of the U.S. had a cultural commitment to classical liberalism and the rule of law not shared by all nationalities.
But it does make you wonder whether the explosion of productivity economists like Caplan say will happen when we allow skilled people to work (which may require letting them immigrate to liberal societies) is sustainable if these immigrants undermine, or don’t understand and support, the liberal capitalist economies that allow their skills to be productive. A number of libertarians, like polemicist Todd Seavey, charge that opposing H1B amounts to affirmative action: “Banning immigrants from jobs in the U.S. is just affirmative action for white people and should be seen as embarrassing—especially to anyone with obnoxious pretensions to being the best ethnic group ever. Maybe you are. Prove it in the marketplace, bro.”
But the existence of that marketplace may require that a sufficient part of the population—and of the middle-, upper-middle, and upper-classes of that population—are part of a culture that supports that marketplace.
Which means that as with any real estate transaction, or any negotiation, there will be a compromise that settles on something that’s as much a matter of art as of science: what’s the number of immigrants a country should absorb in any given period of time.
I should note that some of the discussion was on a much lower level than Keenan, Vivek or Scott Adams, and consisted of people making the charge that Elon Musk or Ramaswamy support H1B visas or immigration because it gives them cheap(er) labor.
Do they really need more money? Couldn’t they educate their own American-born engineers and indenture them to their companies via student loans and contracts? Have all their actions whereby they risked the enmity of the political class and the Democratic Party shown that they are primarily motivated by profit margins?
However, one other writer had an interesting suggestion about Elon and the H1B debate, worth considering though I don’t necessarily agree with her. After the H1B debate began raging on X, Elon initiated a discussion on X and a policy change within X, that have each grown to be larger conflagrations. Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon has a theory: “If you can't tell that this new obsession with rape gangs in the UK is a giant effort to distract from the H-1B debacle and X reverting to the censorship regime of Twitter, I have a bridge to sell you. Disappointing to see folks falling for this.”
Elon is weighing for and against candidates in parties in several countries, including Germany. Given how awake he seems to have become politically, this seems a natural impulse that wouldn’t be limited to the country he happens to live in currently. But one could watch what he chooses to begin campaigning about and when, to see if Ungar-Sargon has identified a tactic he uses.
