RUTHFULLY YOURS

The current clashes over high-skilled immigration between Donald Trump’s right-wing base and his ‘first buddy’, Elon Musk, reveal a fundamental divide within the US president’s odd coalition. On one side are the populists concerned with jobs being prioritised for American workers. On the other, libertarians fret about how businesses can compete on a global scale.

The row was sparked last week by a tweet by Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chair of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, in which he blamed American culture for celebrating ‘mediocrity over excellence’, causing firms to seek skilled workers from abroad rather than hire home-grown talent. Musk has since chimed in to tell opponents of high-skilled immigration to ‘take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face’. ‘I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend’, he wrote on X.

Never one to sweat the details, Trump’s views on this issue are often ill-defined and seem ideal for sparking just such an internal conflict between his base and his Silicon Valley backers.

As the populists point out, H-1B visas – temporary work permits for skilled workers, first introduced in 1990 – have a record of abuse. Most notably, in 2014, Disney was accused of exploiting the H-1B programme to replace American programmers en masse with cheaper Indian ones. In an era of depressed growth in tech jobs, in part due to AI, the oligarchs’ claim that we face a profound shortage of such workers may be increasingly strained.

The populists also have it right in that H-1B visas have accelerated class divides, particularly in places like Silicon Valley. Valley types used to hire from local schools, like San José State University, rather than from places like the Indian Institutes of Technology. Today, roughly three-quarters of the Valley’s jobs go to non-citizens. Tech oligarchs may like this arrangement, but taking jobs from people who vote can have severe political ramifications, something those galaxy-brained techies seem not to comprehend.

What’s more, the widening social divides in the Bay Area have already created a progressive monoculture, while the GOP has all but ceased to exist there. Back in the 1970s, when the Valley was a place of upward mobility, its politics were decidedly centrist.

On the other hand, the oligarchs are also correct, as Ramaswamy has pointed out, about the stark weaknesses of the US educational system. Only five per cent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 per cent in China. In 2016, Chinese universities graduated 4.7million students in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), versus 568,000 in the United States. China also produces six times as many students with engineering and computer-science bachelor’s degrees as the US does.

‘In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields’, Apple CEO Tim Cook has observed, revealing one rationale for keeping virtually all of his company’s production in the Middle Kingdom. Elon Musk disses US higher education in general, saying ‘colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning’.

In fact, the biggest skills gap is not at the top of the job pyramid, as techies insist, but further down. The success of countries like Japan, for example, rests with ‘superior averageness’ that leverages the efforts of workers on the factory floor. In the US, the big shortfall will not be among college grads, but at the production level. A key reason is the US’s traditionally weak trade-school education. It’s hard to build factories, particularly using the latest technology, with an ageing workforce. Right now, estimates suggest as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs generated this decade won’t be filled. And there is no deep bench of talent waiting to replace retirees. Fifty per cent of the active workers in manufacturing are above the age of 45. The current shortage of welders, now 240,000, could grow to 360,000 by 2027.

What the US really needs is neither an open door nor a slamming shut one. The focus should be on how to improve American competitiveness. That would mean making it easier for the most-qualified workers, including skilled technicians, to come into the country, while barring companies from using lower-level, cheaper workers at the expense of American counterparts. Historically, other countries, notably Australia and Canada, have successfully used this approach.

Ultimately, where populists and oligarchs could find common ground is in reforming America’s crumbling education system. A competitive education system cannot be built around DEI or activist scholarship, but on rigorous teaching, with a greater emphasis on skills and work ethic.

For many, trade school already offers the best option. Tuition fees for in-state students to attend a community or technical college in Washington State are more affordable than academic colleges. These graduates often do better financially than those who attend four-year universities. In Virginia, Colorado and Texas, where earnings are tracked, students with certain technically oriented credentials short of bachelor’s degrees earn an average of from $2,000 to $11,000 a year more than bachelor’s degree-holders, according to the American Institutes for Research.

Such an approach would let the two wings of the Trump world work in concert. The populists can develop opportunities for the working class, while the oligarchs get the labour they need. Both can ally themselves in challenging our incompetent, progressive-dominated educracy. This could bring together the classic educators and homeschoolers on the right with those businesses desperately seeking trained workers.

Rather than threaten to ‘go to war’ over H-1Bs, Musk and his coterie would do well to look into restructuring the failing education system. If they can find ways to engage the populists in a constructive way, the current brouhaha would have been worth it.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.