In the 1968 Cold War thriller Ice Station Zebra, Patrick McGoohan’s British spy character explains to the American submarine captain played by Rock Hudson, “The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists.” Substitute “Indian programmers” for “German scientists” and you get a sense of how the tech industry tries to frame the immigration issue.
Newly minted tech-industry supporters of Donald Trump have been vocal in calling for increases in immigration as indispensable to American economic and geopolitical success. Elon Musk wrote, “I am very much PRO increasing legal immigration significantly.” Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote that “We could open the floodgates for entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, makers, designers and more,” actually citing the German scientists who came to the United States.
But these men, fleeing to the MAGA camp because of the Democrats’ policies, are now part of a coalition the vast majority of whose members are very much not interested in opening the floodgates.
A 2023 poll by Gallup found that 73 percent of Republicans wanted immigration decreased. That ongoing poll doesn’t distinguish between legal and illegal, but according to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey in September 2022, two-thirds of Republicans who expressed a favorable view of Donald Trump specifically wanted legal immigration reduced.
As he has made clear repeatedly, Trump is not a restrictionist when it comes to legal immigration—but his voters certainly are. This sets up a potential conflict between the incoming president’s new tech industry friends and his base. Politico framed it this way in a recent headline: “Elon Musk vs. Stephen Miller: Washington preps for battle on high-tech immigration.”
It will come as no surprise that I’m on the Stephen Miller side of this dispute. But I don’t want to litigate here the pros and cons of “skilled” immigration. Instead, I want to make the case that this tension need not be fatal—there are ways to address some of the concerns of the tech titans without increasing, or even while decreasing, overall legal immigration.
Let me outline two win-win changes, one administrative, one legislative.
The first involves a change in how we award H-1B visas. These are ostensibly temporary visas for foreign workers in “specialty occupations,” mainly tech. There’s a statutory cap of 85,000 issued per year, set by Congress, and there’s always more demand than supply. Tech industry lobbyists have been relentless in pushing for higher numbers, a change consistently blocked by restrictionists arguing on a variety of grounds—it’s an indentured, cheap-labor program, it undermines the job opportunities of Americans, it creates a dangerous dependence on foreign sources of talent for vital national industries. Most important, the lack of wage growth in science, technology, engineering, and math occupations is a strong indication there is no STEM labor shortage.
Enough lawmakers have been persuaded by these arguments (or fear those who make them) that Congress has not increased the numbers. The way DHS has handled the high demand is to run a lottery, with many employers submitting applications for far more workers than they need, in the hopes of winning a sufficient number in the lottery.
But if we actually want to facilitate the entry of what Elon Musk calls “super talented people,” it’s crazy to choose them by lottery from a pool that also includes many whose skills are middling at best. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security during Donald Trump’s first term issued a regulation to select H-1B applications based on the highest salaries offered. The rationale is that if these are truly high-value workers then employers will value them highly, as reflected in the pay that’s being offered.
Unfortunately, that regulation was issued at the very end of Trump’s first term and was held up in court on technical grounds—a judge ruled that the acting DHS secretary who issued the rule had not been lawfully appointed. Rather than litigate that issue, the Biden administration simply withdrew the regulation, and we went back to H-1B business as usual.
“This rule would significantly raise the average quality of H-1B visa recipients.”
Reissuing this rule would significantly raise the average quality of H-1B visa recipients and smooth the path for Musk’s super-talented foreign workers. While it would not address restrictionists’ concerns that the number of such visas is too high, it would reduce the exploitative nature of the visa.
So-called body shops—rent-a-programmer staffing companies—are involved in many of the H-1B outrages reported in the media, such as when Disney in 2014 replaced its American IT staff with H-1Bs, and forced the fired workers to train their foreign replacements as a condition of receiving severance. This has happened in scores of firms nationwide and is explicitly permitted by federal law. An administrative change in the method of selecting H-1B applications would limit the number of visas available to the body shops, since they’re far more likely to submit thousands of applications for relatively low-skilled programmers in order to get enough visas to stock their stable of cheap workers.
The above change is eminently doable. A more difficult reform, but one eminently worth arguing for, would require congressional action on the way green cards are allocated. Currently, DHS gives green cards to around 1.1 million foreigners each year. In the 2023 fiscal year, about one out of six was issued based on the applicant’s skill or education or employment prospects. In contrast, nearly two-thirds were issued based solely on family relationships, with an additional 6 percent selected via the so-called “Diversity Visa Lottery” from among millions of applicants with little more than a high school diploma. (The remainder are refugees, asylees, and other small categories.)
Increasing the share of new immigrants selected based on their skills—described as a “merit-based” system—has long been a goal of President Trump.
But how to do it?
One approach would be to increase the number of skill-based visas, added on top of the current system. This would raise the share issued based on skill, but would also increase total immigration. Given that the foreign-born share of our population has exceeded anything ever recorded—it’s higher now than it was during the Ellis Island era, with no natural end in sight—increasing the overall level of immigration is a non-starter, however much Trump’s new tech friends may want that.
Or, you could abolish the chain-migration family categories for any but the husbands, wives, and little children of US citizens and eliminate the Diversity Visa Lottery and reassign all those 450,000-500,000 green cards to skills-based admissions, leaving the overall annual level of immigration the same.
Recall, though, that the large majority of Trump supporters don’t just want the level of legal immigration to stay the same—they want it reduced. The obvious win-win, then, is to eliminate the chain-migration categories and the visa lottery and reallocate, say, half of those visas to the current skilled categories. This would result in both an increase in the number and share of new immigrants chosen for their skills and a reduction in the overall level of immigration.
“A split in Silicon Valley on immigration would deal a real blow to the anti-borders agenda.”
Legislation such as Sen. Tom Cotton’s RAISE Act would have done just this, and it was endorsed by President Trump during his first term. Getting a significant number of tech figures on board for such an approach would represent a real change from the past, when IT lobbyists were joined at the hip with those pushing for amnesty and increased family-based immigration. Groups like Fwd.us (founded a decade ago by Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley figures) and Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for the New American Economy (recently absorbed by the immigration lawyers’ lobby) are allied with the usual suspects on the left to push for amnesty and full-spectrum increases in immigration. A split in Silicon Valley on immigration would deal a real blow to the anti-borders agenda.
The signs of an entente between Trump’s immigration-expansionist tech supporters and his restrictionist base are there. For instance, investor David Sacks, Trump’s designee as White House AI and Cryptocurrency Czar, after being hammered online by opponents of increased skilled immigration, tweeted, “As a start, maybe we should focus on the 95% where we all agree,” meaning that ending illegal immigration and removing illegal aliens should be the first priority, before any discussion of legal immigration.
And the German scientists I began this essay with? The United States launched something called Operation Paperclip to bring top German talent here after the war. The total number of German scientists, engineers, and technicians it brought here over a period of 15 years? Not 100,000, not 10,000, but just 1,600, an average of little more than 100 per year. It had no meaningful demographic impact on the country but contributed mightily to the space program and other areas of technology.
Of course, we’d want to avoid the moral compromises we had to make regarding some of these German scientists, but in principle this is the kind of skilled immigration even restrictionists can get behind.