An American culture that venerates mediocrity?
How sad, they’re fighting already.
A multi-day firestorm has erupted over comments made by two incoming advisers to President-elect Donald Trump about H-1B temporary worker visas, a carve-out for high-skilled workers that some in MAGA world say are taking American jobs.
It’s so sad when racism and nativism can’t get along with greed and self-dealing.
Vivek Ramaswamy, in a post on X, criticized an American culture that he said “venerated mediocrity over excellence,” attributing this as one reason for the influx of foreign tech workers. Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, went on to say he hopes Trump’s presidency can start an American culture that prioritizes “hard work over laziness.” Tech executives have called for greater access to the widely used immigration visa, arguing that it is necessary to fill high-skilled tech and other specialized jobs.
…
Trump adviser Elon Musk, with whom Ramaswamy is a co-leader of Trump’s incoming Department of Government Efficiency, had posted yesterday on X in response to a tweet about a shortage of skilled workers in Silicon Valley that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.” Musk, who was born in South Africa and is a naturalized American citizen, urged people to “[t]hink of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
The posts generated backlash among ardent MAGA supporters who want a hardline approach to all forms of immigration and exposed a chasm in the relationship with a right-wing faction of some of Trump’s closest allies and advisers from the tech sector.
You mean some Trump fans are racist and ethnocentric? Really??? Well knock me down with a feather.
Some attempted to broker agreement between the factions, with venture capitalist Shaun Maguire defending Krishnan and writing that “the tech community should also hear MAGA’s points,” namely that immigrants “should be skilled AND aligned w/ American values” and fully assimilate.
Which American values? The ones that got Trump elected for instance? Greed, corruption, criminality, bullying, lying, cheating, stealing, boasting?
Should make for some entertainment at least.
Dear Mr Ramaswamy,
Here is the news.
It may have taken more than 20 years, but the message corporate America and its spruikers pounded into our brains has finally been adopted as the norm. We no longer work harder, we work, as you exhorted, smarter.
We now have Minimal Mondays and Quiet Quitting. We work only the hours for which we are paid, and we will no longer “go above and beyond” when our wages stay below and constrained.
We saw you unwind the stable work and secure housing of our grandparents generation and turn it into unreliable casualisation and insecure housing that only enriches slumlords. We examined how far ahead those who “work hard” get, and determined that if hard work was the criteria for success, America would be overflowing with billionaire cleaners and millionaire Walmart “associates”.
We have decided we will no longer play by your rules, but have rewritten the rules to suit our need for a better work/life balance, we are putting our mental and physical health ahead of your share portfolios and yachts, and we will not be shamed for that.
Yours faithfully,
Generation Z
Oddly I’m with Musk and Rancidshawarma on this one… I want the world’s best and brightest to all live here in the United States. The MAGA crowd are mostly the laziest and dumbest shitheads around barring a handful. They’re the “third world America” in truth.
H1B workers are easier for companies to exploit than US citizens, because the threat of revoking their visa is always hanging over them.
H1-B visas are a perennial controversy in the tech community. The big tech firms are constantly going to congress, wailing that they can’t get the “high-skilled” workers that they need, and lobbying to raise the number of H1-B visas issued (currently 65K per year).
The workers that they bring in tend to be mid- to low- skilled (for the tech field), and rather than filling unmet needs, they displace existing American workers at lower wages. There are staffing firms (Cognizant, Tata, Infosys, Wipro) that exist for the sole purpose of gaming the system to keep this pipeline going.
Disney got caught doing this 10 years ago (https://www.epi.org/blog/disney-h1b-scandal-in-spotlight-meet-american-workers-whose-jobs-careers-were-destroyed/) and nothing has changed since then.
Well that’s charming.
This whole argument about American workers being lazy is plainly ridiculous. The USA has higher productivity than most countries; our workers have outproduced other countries for a long time, largely because the corporations and churches have convinced us that everything is about hard work and money. So we work. We have shorter vacations and less sick leave than in most countries, and a lot of us spend at least part of our vacation answering phone calls and emails from our bosses, who refuse to accept that we can be away from our desk for three days.
The whole trope about ‘jobs Americans won’t do’ and ‘lazy Americans’ was used to justify bringing in immigrants to do the jobs – immigrants who work for less pay because they aren’t unionized, they can be kicked out, and they are afraid to complain. The immigrants have been used to bust unions; that ploy has been successful to the point that the few remaining unions – such as the teacher’s union, for instance – are largely toothless in a lot of ways. They function mostly for collective bargaining, and often cave quickly when challenged by the bosses.
The left picked this trope up and adopted it because it fit one of their pet narratives – the narrative that other countries are superior to the US, and the idea that we don’t work as hard, we aren’t as reliable, etc, etc, etc, fits their narrative of white, imperialist USA being bad in everything they do. So they have assisted with the goals of lowering wages and killing unions, without understanding what they are doing.