Perhaps the least surprising news story of the year have been early signs of tension between Trump’s backers and supporters over highly skilled visas in the US tech industry. After all, perhaps the most stunning aspect of Donald Trump’s win in this year’s US election is that a party lead by people who couldn’t represent the economic status quo any more if they tried, would be able to convince millions of Americans that they would somehow shake up that very status quo.
To complicate matters, many of those arguing against H-1B visas are doing so in very explicitly racist terms. H-1B visas are often used in the US tech industry to recruit from countries such as India. Many of the people on the anti H-1B side of this debate have not been restrained in their thoughts on the people that move to the US on these visas and the countries that they come from.
Yet despite this, the validity of their core argument - that the US tech industry should employ Americans before recruiting those from other countries - is hard to ignore. They may be proposing simplistic or racist answers but it shouldn’t distract from the fact that there is something quite wrong with the US tech industry - it is overwhelmingly built using foreign workers and has been for a long time.
I saw this personally in my time of just over a decade in the US tech industry (indeed being initially recruited on an E-3 visa, the Australian equivalent to the H-1B). Regularly teams that I was on or interacted with had one and sometimes no natively born Americans on them, significantly outnumbered by those recruited on visas. A far cry from Musk’s musing that such visa programs are reserved for “~0.1% of engineering talent”.
“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” Elon Musk wrote on X and I do actually believe this. From what I saw, the US tech industry does genuinely struggle to hire local workers in the US and has exhausted the pool of qualified candidates in various areas.
But rather than stating this fact as Musk and others have done and offering H-1B visas as the seemingly permanent solution, the follow-up question should be why. Why is America a country that has a massive shortage of highly skilled workers but also simultaneously a massive problem of unemployment and underemployment, particularly in rural areas.
Perhaps phrased this way the answer is obvious - the US also has a massive mis-match between the skills in the volume industries such as tech need and that which the US education system provides. The success of the US tech industry has not been driven by a success in the US education system.
The US education system educates a vanishingly small fraction extremely well, a small fraction well but then leaves the rest to a chronically underfunded public system and, at the end, limited employment opportunities.
This does mean that tech leaders can question if there are any “instances where qualified native born Americans couldn’t get jobs in tech because foreigners took all of them” and for this to be technically true. Perhaps a more important question though is that if the US had spent money to educate more of its citizens to a higher level over the preceding decades would this still be true.
Uncomfortably for those tech leaders but also for the US more generally, the answer is likely to be no. Arguments over a deficient American culture are a distraction. Uncomfortably even for those on the centre and centre-left, some of the economic anxieties that lead to Trump’s popularity are valid - if I grew up in rural America with limited education and then employment opportunities I would be pretty annoyed seeing companies in my own country being massively successful on the back of a steady steam of foreign-trained workers.
This is also not to say that highly skilled immigration is not useful. It definitely is - either as a mechanism to recruit genuinely unique talent or to respond to short term skills shortages. However the response to an ongoing skills shortfall should be to train local workers in that area to eventually cover that gap rather than immigration being used to permanently avoid the cost of local training.
This circumstance hasn’t just happened by chance; in economic terms it is cheapest for a country like the US. It enables a highly successful tech sector without the need to fund the education of those making that sector possible. It also likely lessens the immediate impact of funding cuts to the education system.
For a long time it seemed to work but now it looks like the section of society left behind has come for vengeance. To solve these problems the US, and to lesser extend other countries, will need to have difficult conversations about how important it is to educate the majority of their population, regardless of the economic circumstances of their parents, and the costs involved to do so.