It’s in our national interest to skim exceptionally gifted people from other countries, but the current system has been exploited.
Well, that, as they say, escalated quickly. Over Christmas, posts on X by Elon Musk and his allies in the tech sector in support of the H-1B visa program drew a backlash from MAGA accounts and created a roiling intra-right debate on immigration. If you ignore a few bigots who richly deserve it, the debate was a nice stocking stuffer for anyone who enjoys factional fights and heated discussion of the finer points of U.S. visa programs
Count us in, but the two sides were largely talking past each other, or, at least, there’s an easy way to reconcile the best points of each side.
Seeking to clarify himself under fire, Musk said he only wants to bring in the top 0.1 percent of engineering talent from the around the world via legal immigration. Although there are MAGA influencers who object to even this idea, it’s obviously in our national interest to skim exceptionally gifted people from other countries to fuel innovative enterprises here in the United States. Musk himself, a native South African who held a H-1B visa at one point, is an example. If the U.S. can fashion the equivalent of Operation Paperclip, which took in top scientists from Germany after World War II (the ethical question in that specific circumstance aside), why wouldn’t we do it?