The Impact of the H-1B Visa Debate on U.S. Education

The H-1B visa program allows tens of thousands of foreign nationals with special skills to work in the United States. We’re not talking agricultural workers here. H-1B visas are mainly issued to technology workers hired by Google, Apple, and similar behemoths.

True and longstanding Trump supporters want the program ended and those jobs reserved for U.S. citizens. Late-coming Trump backers Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the tech industry love the program and want it extended. That’s the nexus of an inflammatory word war that’s now ravaging Trumpland.

The visa issue clearly is a red line to anti-immigration Trump supporters and has the potential to blow up the Trump coalition even before he takes office. Musk, Ramaswamy, and tech industry leaders defend the special treatment of foreign tech workers on two grounds: cost and education. American workers, they claim, are far more expensive, and because of inferior U.S. education, there aren’t enough of them.

The H-1B Visa Debate: A Catalyst for the Right-Wing Education Agenda

The cost question is easily explained. It’s been a driver of U.S. big business for decades, and not just the tech industry. Cheap foreign labor means richer profits and happier shareholders.

The education question is a pillar of the right-wing political movement, neatly condensed in this recent statement by Ramaswamy:

“American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long…. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.” 

The irony and hypocrisy of Vivek Ramaswamy’s view is that his own family came to the U.S. from India in search of a better life. He’s a product of Cincinnati public schools where his early education was good enough to ground him for degrees at Yale and Harvard. It was an educational path that led to his becoming a billionaire at an early age. Ramaswamy could be a poster boy for the success of the U.S. system of public education.

Is the U.S. Public Education System Really Inferior?

It’s not just Ramaswamy. One of the cornerstones of right-wing politics is that U.S. public education is inferior, that teachers are self-interested union hacks, and that privately-funded and religion-based schools—or even home teaching—would be superior and money better spent.

If that were true, why have more than 70% of all Nobel prizes gone to Americans? Why weren’t Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and nearly all the giant tech companies birthed in Japan, China, or Europe? Why do U.S. athletes regularly win the most medals at the Olympic Games? How did our economy grow to be the envy of the world, the dollar become the world’s strongest currency, and the military the world’s strongest fighting force?

Why, until political tensions arose in the last year or so, did more than a quarter of a million Chinese students attend U.S. schools each year, paid for by the Chinese government?

True, measured on test scores, U.S. students seldom do well in the aggregate. That should not be a surprise. What other country is as wide open and welcoming to all students at every level of education, for students who speak more than 400 languages, and legally requires public education to teach students with unlimited forms of physical and mental disability?

The Resilience of the U.S. Education System

The U.S. system of education is not as test-centric as those in some countries. It’s more open to training for specific vocations than many other systems. Most importantly, it’s adaptable to local conditions and changing times. That’s likely the reason for our continued success. In all human history, no civilization has had to adapt more quickly to science, religious and life-style changes in health, technology, transportation, agriculture, energy, and just about every area of human activity.

Trashing our public education system is a great injustice to those who work in the classrooms of America every day, rain or shine, to teach children from a Heinz 57 pool of backgrounds and home situations, and in class sizes that often are much larger than optimal.

And, by the way, the most egregious thing about this libel on U.S. education is not what Ramaswamy, Musk, and the other Trumpeteers say—it’s what they’re about to do. Their stated first goal, supposedly to upgrade U.S. education, is to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.

Comments? Criticism? Contact Joe Rothstein at jrothstein@rothstein.net