MAGA Betrayed By Tech Oligarchs
A bureaucrat who is for the working class would look at low wages, expensive education, and tech companies struggling to fill vacancies and realize that America needs a federal training program. A program that works with businesses to offer accessible certificates and job placement for in-need skills such as programming, scripting, data management and analysis, and AI.
Instead, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, bureaucrats assigned to head up Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, have both championed the need to increase the number of H-1B visas given to foreign college-educated workers with skills in specialized fields. The US tech industry heavily relies on these for jobs that are difficult or expensive to fill with American workers.
Taking a stance of wanting to increase the number of immigrants filling US jobs after being a part of a campaign based on mass deportations is causing a rift in the MAGA movement between the oligarch tech bros looking to further enrich themselves and the voters who wanted leaders to bring about better opportunities and prosperity for working and middle-class Americans.
How did the party that has been pro-business and anti-worker for over 50 years manage to convince millions of struggling Americans to vote for them?
When people are facing hardship, they want someone to blame and an easy, straightforward solution to solve their problem. They don’t want to hear how the issue is complex, global, or requires them to change. In that situation, the easiest thing a politician can do is to tell voters what they want to hear, even if none of what they’re saying is true.
Telling Americans that their problems are caused by immigrants, DEI hiring, liberal education, science, and the “deep state” is designed to give people an enemy and to make sure they’re looking in the wrong direction.
The truth is that immigrants aren’t your enemy or the cause of your problems. They’re part of the solution. Immigrants increase prosperity for the nation, fill jobs that either Americans don’t want to do or aren’t trained to do, keep our population growing instead of shrinking, and commit crimes at lower rates than Americans. And that applies to H-1B visa workers as well.
Corporations, on the other hand, are more than happy to take from you, to keep your pay low, and to pocket all of the gains made by your productivity increases. That is where America should be looking, but the heavily pro-business and pro-wealthy party works hard to keep the focus elsewhere.
Foreign workers are needed for many US jobs, including tech, and millions of Americans see that the times are changing. However, they don’t have the resources or understanding to learn new skills to adapt or don’t want to, and they feel left behind. This is precisely why a federal job training program would greatly benefit our country. But even that would take time, and those jobs need to be filled now.
If a company can’t fill its jobs with native workers and cannot bring in foreign workers, it is forced to open offices in other countries and move the jobs there. That happened during Trump’s first term when he pushed back against H-1B visas and increased the denial rate for new petitions from 6% in 2015 to 24% by 2018. Businesses responded by opening more offices and expanding job openings in existing offices in China, Canada, and India.
In other words, H-1B visas are currently necessary, just like undocumented migrants are needed to keep multiple industries fulfilling America’s needs.
The solution isn’t mass deportations, tariffs, billionaire oligarchs, or drilling for more oil.
Better solutions are:
Strengthening unions. Collective bargaining leads to increased wages, not just for union workers but for everyone. The 40-hour workweek and having weekends off came from unions, too.
The federal minimum wage needs to be increased and set to automatically adjust for inflation so it doesn’t fall further behind.
Higher education needs to be much more affordable, apprenticeships need to be more common, and once again, we need federal job training programs that help workers move from careers being phased out to ones that pay better and are on the rise. Coal miners become green energy workers, data entry becomes data analysts, and clerks become scripters or AI operators.
MAGA is beginning to learn that the same billionaires who have been taking advantage of American workers for decades misled voters to gain more influence and power.
This is why we need the news to correct the lies, corporate money, and super PACs out of politics, as well as a progressive movement that can help the nation understand that progressive policies benefit everyone.
It is time to help Americans be informed enough to vote for their interests instead of against them.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa-program-fact-sheet
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-declining-occupations.htm
https://cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-kept-pace-with-productivity/
