All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:47
Why H-1B Work Visas Are Controversial | John Miano and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Evan Mullany from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Continuing our stroll through the hallowed halls of the Center for Immigration Studies, we are now talking to John Miano.
He is a leading expert on the effect of foreign labor on technology workers and a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, John, is the co-author of the most excellent book and even more excellently titled, Sold Out, How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels are Screwing America's Best and Brightest Workers.
John, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Hey, great for having you, Steph.
So, the idea behind this whole program, which as you pointed out, started in, I think, 1994, was that there was a massive desert wasteland of American talent and the economy was going to collapse in on itself if it wasn't propped up by endless hordes of foreign workers who alone had the skills that the American workforce was deficient in.
Now, of course, anyone who knows anything about economics knows that a deficiency within a particular highly needed field will push wages up and draw more people into that field.
So what kind of problem were they actually trying to solve and what kind of nonsense was being put forward to the American public?
Well, it is a bunch of nonsense being put forward to the American public because if you actually look at the statutes and completely ignore what Congress has said, Just look what they put in the bill.
The purpose of the H-1B program is to replace Americans with cheap foreign workers.
That is what is in the statute.
Congress has explicitly made it legal to replace Americans with foreign workers, except they have it qualify that under certain conditions that will never occur, it's illegal.
But in general, it's explicitly legal.
And Congress has made it legal to pay H-1B workers the, quote, prevailing wage Which can be the 15th percentile.
So a place like Silicon Valley can easily save $40,000 a year on the H-1B program.
So the initial idea was, you know, the superstars of physics and most excellent writers who wanted to come and give lecture tours would be able to participate in the American economy because of their once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-million kind of skill set.
And it seems to have expanded at the point now that you're talking about the sort of 15th percentile.
It seems to have kind of expanded downward and pushed.
I don't know, what are the estimates of, I know it's really tough to gauge, but what are the estimates of how many middle-class skilled American workers have been pushed to the sidelines through this program?
Well, it'll probably be about 800,000 workers.
That's the number that's probably on the H-1B program right now.
And when you talk about high skill, what's kind of funny about the H-1B program, Congress has set up a skill-based prevailing wage system for the H-1B program.
It has four tiers, and the employer picks the skilled worker and then has to pay a corresponding prevailing wage.
Now, you hear the employers claiming that they need all these really high-skilled workers, but when they use the skill-based prevailing wage system, they classify the majority of these workers at the bottom skill level, where the prevailing wage is the 17th percentile.
And only a small fraction of H-1B workers All right.
a skill that commands an average wage.
Right.
Now, the libertarian part of me would say the following, and I think there are some good rebuttals, but I'll leave it to your discretion.
The libertarian part of me says, hey man, it's just free trade.
If you can't compete, if people are willing to do your work for less, then you've got to retrain in something else.
This is just how the market works.
If people can underbid you, so be it.
And what is the response to that from your perspective?
Well, there is no such thing as free trade.
So the counter example for me is how come then the members of the public can't go to a South Sea island, set up a seedy stamping plant, and then import copies of Microsoft Word legally created in that island?
You know, Microsoft wants to have protections on their intellectual property.
They don't want free open borders on intellectual property, but they want open borders on labor.
And the reality is there isn't going to be completely open borders in the libertarian sense.
Right, right.
And also, I mean, the social costs of all of this stuff tends to be offloaded to others.
I'm thinking in terms of some things like the health care costs for people who come in.
If they have lower wages, they're less able to afford it.
And I've certainly heard arguments that immigration, particularly illegal immigration, has something to do with driving Obamacare.
And of course, if people lose their jobs, the social costs of their unemployment insurance, sometimes of their retraining, are borne by society as a whole.
Not by the companies who are making the transition.
That's true.
And you know, the great thing about tech workers here being affected by H-1B is that their salaries have been flat since around 1990 when the H-1B program started, which puts them ahead of everyone else who's seeing declining wages in this country.
And I mean, a large part of that is due to our immigration policies.
If you're an A1 top computer programmer, You know, you can get around the H-1B program to some extent.
As I said, they're importing low-wage workers.
But the reality is, most American computer programmers are average.
And they're the ones facing the competition from the H-1B workers.
So, if 800,000 middle-class American workers have been pushed out of the workforce, or at least pushed out of this sector of the workforce, I got to tell you, John, it seems like a bit of a tough sell for a politician to say, hey, vote for me.
And, you know, maybe the price of your software will go down a little, but you'll be able to buy it with precisely zero salary because you'll be out of a job.
So it was sold, of course, as to augment, you know, as immigration always is.
It's going to make us all wealthier and better.
And it's going to be excellent.
And no Americans are going to be pushed out of the workforce.
That was one of the provisions in the earlier approach.
How did that manage to crumble so spectacularly?
Well, one of the things that you should keep in mind is that this episode, this story, has largely been censored by the media.
It's completely politically incorrect because the story the media wants to tell is that immigrants don't take jobs, they create jobs.
And so over the past 27 years of this program, as America has been replaced, the response of the media has been to ignore them, ignore these episodes.
You wouldn't see these stories covered unless you read the computer trade press.
If you read Computer World, you'd know about it.
If you read the Indian press, you'd know about it.
If you read the Washington Post, you wouldn't have a clue that Americans are being replaced by foreign workers.
What's inexplicably happened in the past couple of years is that there have been reports on this.
So, for example, the New York Times reported on Disney and the Los Angeles Times reported on Southern California Edison.
So some national outlets have reported that people are starting to realize what's going on.
And because politicians had that cover, they didn't have to take a position on this issue.
So if we go back, Donald Trump was the very first presidential candidate to say that he was opposed to replacing Americans with foreign workers.
I mean, if you go back there, fortunately in this election cycle, we had actually had Bernie Sanders agree with him on that.
Ted Cruz agreed with him on that.
And then one other.
Hmm.
Well, anyway, I forgot.
I'm believing one good kid had agreed with that.
But in the past, when the politicians were on the other side, they had complete cover because the other guy's on the other side.
So in this election, we had Donald Trump saying he's against replacing Americans with foreign workers.
And we had Hillary Clinton who was promising more foreign replacements.
So there was a clear choice for the American voters and now I think some of these politicians are going to start feeling the heat as people find out about this.
Let's personalize this a little bit and yes I mean I don't imagine that ABC owned by Disney is going to talk about how Disney forced its own workers to dig their own graves and train their own replacements under threat of not getting or at least a subtle threat or maybe even not so subtle threat of not getting their separation benefits but AIG seems to me one of the most powerful stories around this because it is full loop crony capitalism at its finest.
I wonder if you could tell people a little bit about what happened at AIG.
Well AIG was actually the first company to replace large numbers of American workers and this occurred in 1994.
So realize we're talking here 23 years where America's been replaced by foreign workers and Congress has done absolutely nothing to stop it.
What AIG did is they summoned their Um, entire computer programming staff to hotel and directed them to two rooms.
If you went to one room, you were told you're being fired and we're going to be replaced by, uh, foreign workers and would have to train your place at correct severance.
If you went to the smaller room, you were told you were going to be able to hang around.
And AIG, what they do is they hired a company called Sintel, um, which basically is a company that's in the business of importing H1B workers in the United States.
And at that time, it was an early, early practice we hadn't really seen this and so the AIG workers, the American AIG workers went out and then the Sintel workers came back in.
I was a computer programmer at the time and I actually was able to work at AIG after this happened and fortunately this turned out to be a giant disaster for AIG because these high-skilled programmers turned out to be completely incompetent.
There was a little bit of A little bit of payback in that story.
Well, and they ended up receiving one of the largest bailouts in corporate history.
I can't remember the number because I generally read it and then pass out, thinking of the American taxpayer.
Do you remember?
How much money did they get from the government when this all hit the fan?
No, I don't remember.
I thought that was greatly ironic, seeing them getting bailed out like that.
From what I saw at AIGA, it was no surprise that they would need a bailout.
I mean, I spent, I guess, about 15 years or so as a programmer and as a chief technical officer in the IT world.
And the giant grand canyon of understanding between those who understand the technology and innovation, It's ecosystem interrelated complexity where you have systems interacting with each other, millions of lines of code.
You don't just replace people like, oh, well, you've been working on this system for 10 years, you know, all the quirks, you know, all the insides and outsides, you know, where it touches on everything else, what a delicate system it is.
I mean, my first job as a programmer was working with COBOL 74 on a trading system that had been built, you know, years and years and years before that was incredibly complicated.
You couldn't touch that without 16 different levels of QA and, you know, all of the experienced guys pouring over it.
So the idea, I guess people go to the management and say, well, you can save money on these programmers by bringing in these other people from, you know, the general Indian or third world diploma mills and who knows how good they are because they're just typing.
You know, it's only a bunch of keys on a keyboard.
They'll just be different typists.
So it doesn't really matter.
But it really does matter how competent, how skilled and how experienced programmers are.
And this replacement gave them a short term stock boost, but I would argue then in the long run, It has given them a significant competitive disadvantage.
Yes, I always hear afterwards that these outsourcings turn out to be giant disasters.
Because as you described, in computer programming, there's a wide range of skills.
You know, in a typical computer project, you have six people, and one person does half the work.
And if you place that one person with an average person, then you're being cut back.
And what we have in the industry, The fundamental problem is software development costs are too expensive.
Everyone knows it.
Software projects fail.
As engineers, you and I probably know why these things occur, why software is too expensive, why projects fail.
But accountants don't.
They don't appreciate the amount of time a programmer sits in front of the computer waiting for a program to compile and then a faster computer would alleviate it.
They don't know about, you know, how more efficient office space, you know, that cuts out noise would boost productivity.
These things are totally alien.
Accountant goes out and sees, well, I can save $10 an hour hiring an Indian programmer.
Let's just do it.
And these decisions are made by accountants, not by people who are working to improve the system.
Well, and of course, the accountant doesn't see what I found to be the biggest challenge in developing software, which was a scope creep.
In other words, allowing salespeople to talk to the customers from, you know, we were always in the tech dungeon, you know, it's like, Oh, no!
A salesperson is on the phone with the customer.
Oh, no!
Bye-bye weekend!
Bye-bye summer!
Bye-bye sunshine!
I'm not going to go out into the big blue room and meet the flesh people for quite some time because promises are being made.
And the scope creep is a huge issue.
There are studies and studies that show that if you solve a problem in the design phase, it's nine times cheaper than solving it later.
So if there's a structural problem where you have Tech-illiterate salespeople talking to greedy customers promising the moon so they can get their commission.
Bringing in Indian programmers or any programmers is not going to solve the problem because the problem is structural.
It's not hourly.
I'll tell you, if we're talking tech, it'll be a funny program.
I worked on a system that was a Microsoft Windows-based system written in Pascal that was slow.
And the reason it was slow was that the queries had been written poorly.
Rather than joining tables, they were doing nested queries.
So rather than doing one query joining tables, they would do a million queries, literally, nested tables.
And not taking advantage of any indexing, usually, or keys or anything like that.
Okay, so we have that problem.
And so I was working on fixing that problem at the time.
And then someone in the accountants, somebody up high, came up with the solution to the problem, they would hire an Indian outsourcing company to rewrite the program in Java.
So they rewrote the program in Java, keeping all the queries exactly the same, and it was even slower.
Well, sure.
I mean, Java has to run in the sandbox as an interpreted language and therefore it's going to... Anyway, we won't geek out too much.
But yeah, I mean, this is the kind of decisions that people do.
And this gap is a huge, it's a big cultural problem.
It's a big business problem.
And there needs to be ways to solve it.
But this addiction for sort of short-term profitability, I mean, my general theory, I call it the supercharged stock market, which is that the government forces so much people to throw their money into the stock market where they don't really want to be there, but it's either invested or you have to pay it in taxes.
I'm thinking sort of retirement savings plans and other sort of tax maneuvers.
So there's way too much money sloshing around in the stock market looking for way too little profitability.
And so people have this very short-term thinking, you know, oh, Over the next quarter, if everyone assumes everything's going to be the same but I've cut my payroll by X percentage points and everyone's going to think that on the other end these magic bales of golden profits are going to come kicking out the combine harvester, but of course it's not.
that way.
And the systems that are built by less competent programmers, it's not only like they're not as good as, I mean, because you actually, they end up having, they give information that enables business executives to make bad decisions and coming in and fixing it, you have to analyze the whole they give information that enables business executives to make bad decisions and coming in and fixing it, you have to analyze the whole mess, see if So when it drifts, it's like shooting a movie where the camera is increasingly going out of focus.
You know, what do you have to reshoot?
What can you fix?
I mean, it's a huge mess.
As a lawyer, I was working at a company just a few years ago where everything was offshore to India for development.
And the Indians would write spaghetti code And one component had to be rewritten 15 times, because every time they wanted to make a change, the people going back couldn't do anything with existing code, and so it had to be rewritten.
And the same piece of software, and it wasn't all that large, was rewritten 15 times.
Just for those who don't know, and it's important to know if you have any money in the stock market or in tech companies, So if you break your code into modules, it's easier to understand.
If you comment the code, if you use common sense, variable names, if you, if you document it well, you know, I mean, it's, it's software is like 90% design and 10% typing if you're doing it right.
But if you just go in and make it work, okay, you can make it work, but it's, you know, it's duct tape and spit on your engine wing.
It's usually not long until you have a spiral.
Well, people, people in, Outside of the industry we don't appreciate, but the state of the computer industry and software development industry right now, if it were analogous to the civil engineering industry, it would be one where two-thirds of the buildings fall down after they're constructed.
That's not really an exaggeration.
At the worst, in the old days when they were building the cathedrals and they did them entirely without calculus, entirely by instinct, You know, they did have a few cathedrals fall down, like Ely and Obey, what came crashing down, but most of them stayed up.
So the medieval cathedral builders were more efficient than the current software developers are.
The problem is we can't visualize it.
A building falling down in Manhattan, you can see that.
Or a $20 million dollar building in a suburb crashing down, you can visualize that.
But in software, when these disasters happen, and they're multi-million dollar disasters, no one sees them.
And everyone is rushing to cover them up.
Right and of course since and it's not always the case but I think in general in my experience the problem had to do with poor specifications and realistic expectations or changes in requirements you know you can't be changing the plane when it's taking off you know you kind of have to do that design part before it's leaving the ground and of course it's a lot easier for the business managers
To say, well, the cost overruns occurred at the programmer salary level rather than at the executive design level or the executive project management level, because then they get to blame others, keep their bonuses, and pretend that the problem is with the typists and not the designers.
For the people who might know, usually when a project is going to be a disaster, the programmers know about it well in advance.
And they raise winnings!
And the term they use for it is a death march.
It's a death march project.
And if you bring this back to H1, if we were actually, through the H1B program, we're improving America, improving productivity, I'd be jumping up in favor.
It's very hard to find top 1% programmers.
But we're not dealing with top 1%.
We're dealing with bottom one-third programmers.
And America, as every country, Has a surplus of bottom one third programmers, right?
And, you know, and we might as well be using those positions for our own people.
And, um, and the other thing is if, if we didn't have the H1B program, I mean, I, my thought was that the industry would correct itself and become more efficient.
And, you know, it just hasn't, I mean, you know, that's one of the great tragedies.
I think, you know, looking at software development is it hasn't improved in the past 20, 30 years.
So let's talk about this myth of the high-skilled worker shortage that was used to sell this initial idea to the American public before it generally got covered up through corporate media, hiding it.
What were the arguments against the idea that there was this dearth of STEM technology, technological expertise in America?
Well, mainly the economic argument that you said, okay, so that the You know, we would expect salaries to rise.
You know, how can we have all these Americans in technology fields who can't find jobs?
How come the number of engineers is declining as we lose manufacturing?
How can we have this huge glut of people in the life sciences?
Those were the empirical data, and we had the unemployment data as well.
That went up against the industry lobby, which the industry had used studies about unfilled jobs.
They would claim that there were 200,000 unfilled jobs.
They would claim there were 700,000 unfilled jobs.
And the reality is, you could say any number of jobs are unfilled.
Every corporation has jobs in their work chart that no one's even attempting to fill.
And so, they were just spouting these numbers left and right, you know, like in the Manchurian candidate where the senator talks about the number of communists and he just throws out a number every time.
The tech lobby was doing that, just throwing numbers out.
Don't get me started on McCarthyism.
I just did a whole presentation on that, so let's step aside that one, because some of those numbers were good.
But yeah, it's sort of like saying, you know, there are women out there who don't have boyfriends, so let's import a bunch of men.
That's, you know, not necessarily going to solve the problem.
But you see, these are just being numbers thrown out, just like in the movies that were completely inconsistent.
But the only reason they do these is to provide the politicians cover.
There's this whole industry of writing studies in Washington to provide cover, and you can get any answer you want on anything, and then you'll see these politicians parroting figures.
I remember John McCain talking about how each H-1B visa creates 10 jobs for America, that he's been fed by someone.
So they're armed with these figures that they can get, and they're not doing any objective analysis.
Meanwhile, along with these figures comes Mr. Green in boatloads.
Also, didn't Obama recently change it so that the people coming over could bring spouses as well?
Are those spouses allowed to work and compete with Americans?
They aren't, generally.
He changed the rule to allow certain spouses, if they'd apply for green cards, to work as well.
Now this, everyone knew, was just a precursor to expanding it to everyone.
So what they would do in Washington with regulations like that, is you make it to a narrow group of people.
You know, like here, in this case, it was two spouses of green cards.
And you'd say, you know, so if it gets challenged, you say, you know, it's only a small number of people who are already in the pipeline for immigration.
And then the industry lobby wants to be able to expand to everyone so they can get a twofer on the H-1B visa.
So when that would happen, then if someone challenged it, then the government would say, oh we've been doing this for years, it's just expanding an existing program that's perfectly legal.
Sometimes a slippery slope argument is not invalid, the thin edge of the wedge stuff.
Now the other pushback, let me know what you think, the other pushback that occurred to me about this sort of free market argument is Aren't they kind of chained to their desks, like the H-1B people?
I mean, can they just sort of say, well, you know, I'm going to go and bid myself out to the highest guy, go across the street and so on?
To me, it's not really a free trade argument.
If, you know, the social costs are borne by the taxpayers of the displacement, if it's not honestly presented to the American public and the American voter, and also if you basically get tech serfs who come in and sort of as the old medieval serfs were tied to the land, they're kind of tied to the job, that is not a very free market environment.
I think it goes beyond change of the desk.
It's more like boot to the throat.
That the system is designed to keep the worker chained, as you're describing.
For example, in 1998, Congress changed the law to allow employers to charge a penalty, a liquidated damages is the technical term.
It can't be a penalty.
It has to be called liquidated damages if the worker quits.
So you go out there and you put a contract that says that you come here on an H-1B visa and if you quit, you're going to have to pay the employer $30,000.
And then maybe you go enforce that in an Indian court.
You know, that kind of thing.
Then the other thing they use to chain it is this whole green card system.
Prior to 1990, if you were in the H category, this is before the actual H-1B, there was an earlier H visa, The H category was strictly non-immigrant.
So that meant that there wasn't a path from an H visa to a green card.
There were some ways of getting around it, but it wasn't open that you could come here on an H visa and then get a green card.
So then they changed that in 1990 to allow H-1B workers to apply for green cards.
to allow H-1B workers to apply for green cards.
Now, in green cards, there are 144,000 a year, but because of our system of diversity, no country can get more than 7%, so which is roughly 10,000 green cards a year.
Now, we get about 80,000 people a year from India on H-1B visas, and we tell them to apply for 10,000 green cards.
So, that creates backlogs.
Now, that was something that I think an engineer would have predicted, but remember, these laws are written by lawyers.
And you would see if you say, we'll allow 80,000 people to apply for a 10,000 green card to get a backlog.
Then in 2004, China was seeing this huge backlog.
It was now so, for India, it was so long that people would fall off the end of the H-1B six years and wouldn't get the green card.
So Congress then changed the law to allow people to stay in the United States in H-1B status once their green card petition was going.
Which then has the effect of making the backlog even longer.
So now the backlog leaves 12 years for India to get a green card.
And then the talked-about solution for this is to eliminate these per-country quotas, which would then have the Indian problem flow to the entire immigration system and turn it into a total disaster.
So one of the things the public probably doesn't perceive is the people writing these bills are lawyers who benefit from chaos, not engineers who are trying to make a rational system.
Well, as a non-engineer even I can tell that that's going to lead to a backlog.
Now, as far as solutions go, this is a challenge.
Congress, you know, I've always said and other people have said to that congressman should come with like corporate logos on them you know like like nascar car so you know exactly who's running their particular agenda and thankfully of course president trump is outside to a large degree that whole um bought and sold uh soulless marketplace but um what can he do uh
Because, of course, the moment he tries to do anything, all the immigration lawyers who are feasting off the complexity of this system are going to file suit against him.
What are his options if he wants to start bringing this under some kind of control?
Well, he actually has a large number of things that, in theory, he can do.
As you point out, the court problem, the courts obviously do not like Donald Trump.
The same Ninth Circuit that said Obama can do absolutely whatever he wants says that President Trump can't do what is explicitly authorized in the statute.
So that is an obvious problem for him.
But if we talk about the law as it's actually printed, not how it might occur with judicial activism, the first thing is that there are certain interpretive things that he could do.
So currently there's an H-1B lottery given out every year because there's so many H-1B petitions.
I mean, there's so much demand for this cheap labor.
They used the entire quota up on the first day.
The law says the first day the visas are available.
The law says that these visas are supposed to be processed in order received.
But when you have 200,000 visa petitions arrive at multiple locations around the country on the same day, there's no way you can do these in order.
So as a matter of interpretation, USCIS for the past few years has had a random lottery where they just pick out of them.
That is entirely an issue of interpretation.
There's no regulation.
That's just what they do.
One of the things that's been suggested is that Trump changed that to a system that is wage-based or skill-based.
As we said, there are these skill level classifications.
In the H-1B system, one way would be to have a first ever lottery at the highest skill level.
If there are any left, move down to the next skill level.
And if there are any left, move down to the next level.
And if there are any left, you go to the fourth skill level.
That he could do unilaterally and just announce.
There have been threats of lawsuits against that.
Of course, one of the things Donald Trump could do is if it got blocked, he could just not hand out the visas.
So he could basically just put the whole program on hold until the courts were to untangle this kind of issue, which would be several times around the sun, I would assume.
Yeah, which could take three, four years.
I have one court case that's been going on for 10 years on a similar regulation.
So that would be one of his alternatives if he gets a lawsuit.
That action would have a slight impact in wages because H-1B wages are so low anyway.
That basically that would cut out the people in the range from the 17th percentile to the 34th percentile.
And then you'd have the fight for visas would be in the 34th to 50th percentile, still below average.
So that's unilateral type stuff.
You could also do regulations.
For example, one of the things is that the duration of an H-1B visa is set by regulation.
Congress says that it can be a maximum of six years.
And that's it.
Through interpretation, they've made it three years with one renewal.
They can change the regulations to say it's only one one set of three years, no renewal or even make it one year or two years.
So that's an opportunity for him.
Now, how how dependent, John, have tech companies in America become on this program?
Because remember, everyone who gets information on the web, and of course, even on TV, right?
I mean, TV is owned by a lot of companies that are not tech-specific, like Disney and so on, that have taken advantage of this program at the expense of the American worker.
So the information that's flowing towards you is coming from corporate entities that may be heavily invested in the continuance of this program and have a big incentive to keep good information from you.
And one of the things I was thinking about, I don't know if you've got any information on this, but I was thinking like, so I was a chief technical officer, head of research, and I had a very, very high strung, creative, brilliant research team that I was kind of wrangling like a bunch of cocaine addicted cats trying to get them all to go in the same direction.
They weren't actually addicted to anything.
It's just an analogy.
But, I mean, and a great, fun, exciting group of people to work for.
Now, if somebody had said to me at some point, hey, Steph, I got a great idea.
Why don't you go and manage these people who are not legally allowed or really practically allowed to leave their jobs?
I'd have been like, ew, no thanks.
I don't want to be like a tyrant.
I don't want to be like some medieval lord with his serfs.
I mean, I think that maybe the corporate culture has adapted itself over the last 20, 25 years.
To the point where the managers just don't, maybe they don't even have the skills to manage people who have the option to leaving.
I mean, they've really invested, and I think the corporate culture may have even wrapped around this quasi-medieval work environment.
Well, one of the things that's changed is the quick riches.
I mean, probably when we started this, there was no such thing as a company like Facebook going from nothing to billions of dollars in value.
In a very, very short period of time, companies built up.
I mean, you generally didn't even go public until your company was profitable.
And so the leaders had a different mindset.
I worked at Digital Equipment and the president was Ken Olsen.
Ken Olsen was famous for his prayer breakfasts and that kind of thing.
And then we shifted Over the years to CEOs who became notorious for their arrests for speeding in their in their fancy cars, and we don't have the same The people who were leading the companies when I started in the 80s had a completely different mindset.
They were more like the slow and steady wins the race, built foundations, built each level carefully rather than this sort of the hare racing around the landscape and then getting lost.
It's a different set of morality.
There are people who would be an alien concept For them to do what you're describing, to manage people who operate as serfs.
But we're developing that culture in this country and you can see it all around.
It's, I think, part of the coursing of America.
It was acceptable.
So what do you think these tech companies and other companies, dependent on this, how invested are they, do you think, in this and how close to the wall are they going to get in fighting against it?
Well, it depends on what the company is.
For example, if you're one of the service companies in the business of selling H1B workers, and that would include a company like IBM, but also Indian companies and the accounting companies that got into technology consulting, this would be a major hit.
They're the big ones.
The other business that also would be a big hit is the immigration lawyers.
The H-1B program created the business of the immigration lawyer.
Prior to 1990, there weren't very many immigration lawyers in this country, and they've exploded, and they've become a powerful force.
As far as the actual high-tech companies, like Microsoft and that, it may be an irritant, but I don't think it wouldn't be serious.
But on the other hand, the political fight, The tech industry fights on H-1B like the NRA fights on guns.
Give no quarter.
It's a good strategy, but you have to recognize that's how they fight.
Even basic provisions, like you can't place an American with a foreign worker, they fought to keep out of the law.
So they're going to fight hard.
One thing against them though, I'll say, is that they've completely alienated President Trump.
Trump owes them absolutely nothing here.
So I think they're going to have a hard time actually blocking anything that he does through regulation.
On the other hand, in Congress, If you go into Washington and refer to the Senator from Microsoft or the Senator from Goldman Sachs, people know who you're talking about.
And so if Trump's going to do this through legislation, his biggest challenge is going to be the Republicans who are completely in the tank with the tech industry.
Well, I, you know, I always hesitate to sort of step into political strategy, but the way I would do it is, you know, if tech companies fought me on this, I'd simply take the fight to the social media.
I'd take the fight to, to Twitter.
I'd take the fight to Facebook.
I'd take the fight wherever I could and then say, well, these guys are fighting a law that, or finding a change in law that would be beneficial to America.
And American workers.
And, you know, what do you think of that, consumers?
And I think you'd have to weigh it to the point where they'd say, okay, well, you know, we're losing enough customers.
We're getting out of negative press through this that we're going to have to back out of this fight.
Well, I mean, President Trump could praise exactly what you're saying very, very simply.
Senator, your Senator supports replacing Americans with foreign workers, you know, and, you know, that's not, that kind of thing clearly stated will not go well.
And one of the big changes here is that Trump has the ability of getting publicity for this, if he chooses to do it.
And the industry and the politicians have relied on a lack of publicity.
No one knew that this was going on.
When people hear that Americans are being placed by foreign workers, they usually say, well, don't you have to show that you couldn't find an American before you got a foreign worker?
No.
And people don't know that.
So Trump can come bring that to the forefront, you know.
And if you're a company that does one of these massive outsourcing, you know, your CEO might get a call from President Trump, you know.
One of the things that, you know, the bad publicity that people don't think about is, you know, Disney was the company that brought this to the forefront.
And this was done by Disney Resorts.
And it happened, I believe it was, get the year right, but I think it was the end of 2014 when this occurred.
It was the end of 2014-2015.
It took place, and then it got reported in the computer trade press, and there was absolute silence everywhere.
There was very marginal coverage even locally.
Then, shortly thereafter, the head of Disney Resorts was promoted and was tapped to be the new CEO.
Then the New York Times broke the story about six months later, and all hell broke loose.
And since then, the newly appointed potential CEO was forced to leave the company.
And I understand the CIO who made the decision also has been forced to leave the company.
So Trump can affect this by giving bad publicity to companies that do this.
Well, let's hope that a combination of awareness and potential consumer reactions to this kind of behavior will help the companies make better decisions.
I think that the immigration lawyers may be beyond hope as a whole, but hopefully we can help them influence that, get a couple of hundred thousand eyeballs on this conversation and get the information out there, because this is part of the hidden cohort that helped bring Trump to power.
And again, it's not admitted or acknowledged by the left in general, but it is and some elements of the right who are in the pocket of these corporations.
But it's a very, very important Group of people who are very well educated very articulate very intelligent and very motivated to get a better life so John.
Thanks so much for
▲
Export Selection