If Elite Composition Matters, Skilled Immigration Matters

Politics

If Elite Composition Matters, Skilled Immigration Matters

Self-proclaimed America Firsters can subscribe to elite theory or wish to open the floodgates on skilled immigration, but not both.

There are clarifying moments in the history of a movement. Donald Trump’s electoral victory has left the “New Right” coalition—an unhappy moniker in a number of ways, not least in that it used to be applied to the movement it allegedly replaces—in possession of the field, which means its constituents can turn their attention to the important business of bickering over the spoils.

The current stars of the movement are Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both recent converts from being center-left Democrats, who, having considered the problems of the nation and the world, have settled on the novel solution of checking government waste, fraud, and abuse. (Why has no one ever thought of this before?) The dyad, along with the incoming administration’s AI czar, David Sacks, has backed the incoming AI advisor Sriram Krishnan’s suggestion that caps on H1B visa numbers for Indian engineers be done away with. The argument is that hoovering up foreign talent will cement the American tech industry’s supremacy, and that this is an “America First” outcome. The camisas viejas, on the other hand, have noted that this is (gently put) in tension with the immigration restrictionist rhetoric traditionally associated with the phrase.

Ramaswamy, to his credit, got out ahead of the clash this summer, identifying within the America First coalition a tension or dispute between “National Libertarianism”—which is free-trade, pro-immigration, anti–state power, and basically looks an awful lot like fusionism with an injection of foreign-policy realism—and “National Conservatism,” which is protectionist, anti-immigration, pro–state power, and basically looks an awful lot like paleoconservatism without its traditional moral streak (or its skepticism of Israel, let alone of every former Warsaw Pact country that comes hat-in-hand to American political conferences). Ramaswamy weighed in Thursday about visa workers on X with a long post, almost a screed, about why companies prefer foreign skilled labor to American. The upshot: Americans are lazy and aspire to mediocrity. Well, then.

The New Right (including Ramaswamy) has spent a lot of time and ink jabbering about elite theory—elite overproduction, counterelites, meritocracy, and so on. This isn’t a knock; we’re not above it ourselves. You have to do some pretty footwork to shoehorn this into what everyone insists is the “populist moment,” but columnists need to eat. On the H1B question, we’d put a little catechism to the pro side: Does a nation have a culture—a set of shared public norms of behavior, language, belief? Does a nation have an interest in preserving the continuity of its culture? Does America in particular have an interest in preserving its own culture? Are there greater or lesser differences between one culture and various others? Do large groups of people from outside a place tend to be more resistant to assimilation than smaller such groups? Do elites have disproportionate influence over a culture?

It is not “racist” to suggest that people in places like India have significant cultural differences from Americans, perhaps greater than the cultural differences of people from Norway or Chile. India never underwent the formative experiences of modern Western countries: the secularization of Christian principles, the wars of religion, the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of nationalism. Instead, it has its own distinct set of formative historical moments; much of the modern nation’s history has been dominated by efforts to digest Western theoretical constructs like economic planning and the nation-state, not to mention its own wars of religion and the postcolonial hangover. It would be strange if different historical matrices didn’t result in tangible differences of culture, not all of them easily reconcilable or particularly welcome. The left’s own felt need to legislate against caste discrimination is one instructive example.

Working-class immigrants have more incentive to assimilate than elites—that is, they tend to have less choice. This is borne out by historical experience. The second-wave immigrant groups were predominantly working-class. By the third generation, had mostly become monolingual English-speakers, were integrated into mainstream American civil society structures, and so on. (This is not to say that there weren’t persistent difficulties in their assimilation, like Italian organized crime and the Irish penchant for public disorder, still on full display every March 17 on Boston’s T.) Elite immigrants, particularly if they are in groups large enough to maintain their native cultures internally, are in a position to change culture to fit their own predilections rather than to assimilate. If, as Ramaswamy suggests, an innate poverty of spirit lies at the heart of American culture—that is, if his answer answer to question 3 above (“Does America in particular have an interest in preserving its own culture?”) is “no,” as it seems to be—maybe that’s a good thing. I would suggest, though, that such an argument is not an especially America First cut. 

There are few absolute evils in statesmanship. Skilled immigrants may provide a stopgap for acute labor shortages in strategic industries—the ongoing drama of the TSMC fab in Arizona comes to mind. Yet it seems feckless to pretend that large, monied, prestigious immigrant groups will not exert strong and unexpected influences over American culture, some perhaps good, some perhaps ill. America Firsters, particularly while they have a mandate to step back from the revolutionary immigration policies of the left, should be skeptical of calls for a fresh round of uncontrolled population composition experiments.

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