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FOREIGNERS AREHBHBHBHBITTCSHBHBTCSHBMAGAHBMAGAMAGAHBMAGAYour browser does not support the element. taking good American jobs. Some of the very best, frankly. Five of America’s eight trillion-dollar technology giants are run by people born in other countries. Jensen Huang of Nvidia hails from Taiwan; Hock Tan of Broadcom, another chip titan, comes from Malaysia. Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, are run by two Indians, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai. Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, is South African.This is not just true of big tech. Of the 100 most valuable American companies, more than 30 have chief executives who are not sons and daughters of Uncle Sam (though some, including the tech quintet, are naturalised Americans). Many of the most American brands have been entrusted to non-native bosses: Citigroup’s top banker is Scottish; Pepsi’s pedlar-in-chief is a Spaniard; the main Marlboro man is a Pole.American businesses have long been a magnet for the world’s cleverest and its most industrious, be it in the corner office, at the lab bench or on the factory floor. Forget the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency: America’s enduring ability to attract human capital is its most exorbitant privilege. It is now imperilled by the nativist wing of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.Most parts of the Trumpian coalition view illegal immigrants as bad, with the possible exception of some pro-Trump farmers, builders, restaurateurs and hoteliers, who employ them by the millions. Many believe that they should be deported. Nativists accuse them of stealing American jobs. The techno-Trumpists led by Mr Musk, the president-elect’s biggest donor and first buddy, worry that they are Democrats at heart who, if granted citizenship, would turn swing states a woke shade of blue. Either way, both groups arrive at the same conclusion. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses? No, thank you.Opinions begin to diverge when it comes to your trained, your pros, your hoodied maths aces. Yes, please, say Mr Musk and his Silicon Valley pals, who regard such clever clogs as the key to the innovation that keeps America First in perpetuity. Nuh-uh, retort the nativists, who would prefer to see this well-paying work go to real Americans, which is to say those who got there first. The dispute turned ugly just in time for Christmas, and also arcane. Ugly, because one side took to bashing Indians, overrepresented among techies, while the other blamed American culture for venerating “mediocrity over excellence”, in the comparatively mild words of Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist whom Mr Trump has tasked alongside Mr Musk with cutting government waste (and whose parents came from India). Arcane, for it touched on the fine print of immigration policy: “-1”, a category of visa for skilled workers, trended on X, Mr Musk’s social-media mouthpiece.Lots of companies rely on -1s to bring in brainiacs from abroad. If applications exceed the annual quota of 85,000 in the first days of the registration window, as happens most years, new visas are handed out by lottery. To load the dice, large firms often apply for more -1s than they need. In the latest round Microsoft and Google lodged more than 1,000 applications apiece. Amazon filed nearly 4,000 through the e-empire’s various affiliates.Some of the heaviest users of -1s are the American arms of Indian outsourcing firms. , Infosys and Cognizant have between them filed nearly 280,000 petitions over the past 15 years (including renewals). The workers they bring in often stay briefly to meet clients and learn how their systems operate before being sent back abroad to do actual work, observes William Kerr of Harvard Business School. They are also paid less than other -1 holders. In 2024 the median salary of an -1 worker at was $82,000, compared with $160,000 at Microsoft.For fans of -1s the answer to such gaming is to raise the cap or remove it altogether. This could be especially life-changing for startups, which cannot afford to spam the system in the same way. So big tech, little tech and non-tech tend to support loosening the rules. At the same time, immigration hardliners sniff a ruse by business to employ cut-price foreigners instead of Americans. Some would love to see the system scrapped.Mr Trump seems in two minds. On December 28th he told the , his favourite tabloid, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favour of the visas.” Yet amid the covid-19 pandemic during his first term he suspended new work permits, including -1s, to cheers and America Inc’s dismay. Proponents of those curbs, including Stephen Miller, his mass-deportation-loving deputy-chief-of-staff-to-be, still have his ear.Any fresh curbs on immigration, skilled or not, would come at a time when ideas risk hurting firms’ ability to secure human capital in other ways. A recent study by Britta Glennon of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that after a temporary dotcom-era increase in the -1 cap expired in 2004, creating a visa deficit, multinationals compensated by hiring 0.9 workers abroad for every visa rejection at home. In 2007 Microsoft opened a development centre in immigrant-friendlier Canada. Within a year it employed over 300 people from 45 countries.Though not as inimical to the nativists as firms that offshore factories, which Mr Trump’s running mate has threatened with tax rises, such unAmerican behaviour may also invite retaliation. Meanwhile, buying human labour embodied in imported goods would be curtailed by Trumpian tariffs. The preference for hiring locally runs up against a real shortage of both skilled and unskilled labour. It could also be self-defeating, given that economists reckon skilled foreigners in particular create many more jobs than they take. No wonder even bosses appalled by Mr Musk’s right-wing antics are cheering him on in the visa fight.
