As the debate over H1Bs heats up, I’ll weigh in with my two cents. As a Border Patrol Agent, I didn’t run into too many of these visas. When we were doing transportation checks at buses and airports was usually the only time we would see them, not on the banks of the Rio Grande. The CBP Officers who work at ports of entry were much more expert on these visas since they see them on a daily basis. It seemed to me like the H1B visa holders we did run into were always trying to change their status to get green cards. This happened over and over again. Once they get that green card, they are no longer counted as an H1B, so, it makes the program look like there are fewer of them than there actually are. Also, due to spouses getting H1Bs too, the whole family can come to America. Once here, drop an anchor baby and wait for the free bag of goodies to start coming.
American Renaissance had a recent good article by an Indian detailing how horrible India is. Sample quote from the article titled “India: It’s Worse Than You Think“,
“I had first returned to India with the idea of improving it, but after 11 years, I realized that India was a sinking ship, with worsening and increasingly shameless corruption, degraded people, and a society that was falling apart. I had never met an honest bureaucrat or politician. I applied to emigrate to Canada and my application was approved in a record three weeks.
I now advise East Asian and Western corporations on investing in India. Most of what I tell them sounds to them exaggerated, unrealistic, and unbelievable. After much dance, drama, and a great deal of lost money, they begin to believe what I tell them. However, this learning is never institutionalized because of a refusal to understand India. This is a form of political correctness, a poison eating away the innards of Western values.”
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Americans in general seem to romanticize the foreigner and don’t realize that the immigrant brings their dysfunction with them.
I can remember investigating one Indian restaurant owner who forced another Indian migrant to pay him rent because the second Indian had a food stand on the public sidewalk in front of his restaurant. It was totally illegal (the restaurant owner didn’t own the sidewalk), but it was enforced like a mafia boss would do.
Another time, I remember talking to an Indian engineer who was working as a truck driver. He had come in on an H1B to work at an automotive plant (GM I think), but then left once he got his green card. I was a little shocked that he preferred working as a truck driver to being the engineer he was supposedly trained to do. However, I’ve come to find out that in a lot of foreign cultures owning your own business is placed in much higher esteem than working for someone else. So, this Indian was trying to start his own trucking company.
Thank God Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t get closer to the presidency than he did. He talked a good game, but did he actually believe in any of it? Vivek talked of gutting the H1B visa while on the campaign trail, but he has since reversed himself completely. See here, and here for his old stance. Watching Great Britain from across the pond, it wasn’t a surprise that Rishi Sunak only wanted to reduce illegal immigration. He still wanted to continue replacement migration, but just do it legally. From the Wikipedia entry on Rishi, “In 2019 the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson pledged to reduce net migration below 250,000 per year, but Sunak said in 2023 that the priority was not to reduce legal immigration but to stop illegal immigration.[132] Nearly 30,000 undocumented migrants crossed the Channel in small boats to the UK in 2023.[133] Long-term net migration to the United Kingdom (the number of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) reached a record high of 764,000 in 2022,[134] with legal immigration at 1.26 million and emigration at 493,000.[135] Of the 1,218,000 legal migrants coming to the UK in 2023, only 10% were EU Nationals.”
In the end, Indians will protect Indians. This shouldn’t be a surprise. When Ann Coulter appeared on Vivek’s show, she told him she wouldn’t vote for him because he was Indian. She should have elaborated by pointing out what Rishi did (or did not do) on immigration in Britain. It’s why if I were a Brit, I wouldn’t trust Suella Braverman either even if she says the right things on one day.
The H1B visa fight may well divide the GOP. The GOP is undergoing a transformation from being the party of Big Business to a party that supports the American middle class. With that are a lot of growing pains. Immigration patriot Stephen Miller stands on one side of the divide against Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. I’ve always liked Stephen Miller and I hope he doesn’t cave in to the billionaires.
One place I like to go to for immigration information is the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS.org). Mark Krikorian of CIS has an article up at the Compact in which he tries to make peace between the two sides of the immigration debate: “Recall, though, that the large majority of Trump supporters don’t just want the level of legal immigration to stay the same—they want it reduced. The obvious win-win, then, is to eliminate the chain-migration categories and the visa lottery and reallocate, say, half of those visas to the current skilled categories. This would result in both an increase in the number and share of new immigrants chosen for their skills and a reduction in the overall level of immigration.
Legislation such as Sen. Tom Cotton’s RAISE Act would have done just this, and it was endorsed by President Trump during his first term.”
Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t seem to be on board with it this time around. Here’s one article on Trump from back when he ran for president the first time admitting that he used H1B visas, and saying that the program should end. Here’s another article, still from the first time he ran, in which he already flip flops on the issue by saying that he is in favor of them. Since that time, he has stayed somewhat consistent in his support for the replacement of American workers.
The Trump administration (in its schizophrenic wisdom) did pressure the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) into rehiring its American workers after it fired 200 of them in 2020. However, now Trump has named Sriram Krishnan his policy advisor on AI, and Krishnan wants no caps on H1B visa workers. (BTW, lest you believe all H1B visas are high tech workers, do a search for H1B cooks and see how many come up).
Finally, if you have the time to watch it, Michelle Malkin had a good investigative report from four years ago in which she showed that not only was the H1B bad for American tech workers, it destroyed diversity, and increased security risks. After watching her report, it left me wanting to see the whole program scrapped. It shows that a lot more Americans have lost their jobs due to the H1B visa than the oligarchs would have you believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm-wMOuTSzE.
P.S. There have been studies showing that conservatives tend to be more attractive than liberals on average. Michelle Malkin certainly proves that, but so too does Sara Blackwell, the founder of “Protect US Workers”. (Sadly, that organization appears to no longer exist. Who will there be to speak for the Americans?)
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century".
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
