To say that the Great H1B Debate of Christmas 2025 was…heated…is an understatement. Like a lake of magma held just below the surface under immense pressure, several prominent Trump supporters voiced their support for the visa program while insulting American workers themselves, believing they were on solid ground, but unwittingly puncturing the soil and unleashing a caldera that swept them up before they could flee to safety.
Vivek Ramaswamy ignited the debate with his flagrant insults aimed at American culture:
The ensuing criticisms of our overly generous visa program were relentless and unimpeachable, and vaporized everyone attempting a rebuttal. Popular misconceptions of the visa program were suddenly exposed and refuted. Those watching the debate from the grandstands learned more in two days on the topic than they would have in a grad school seminar. What did we learn? That American mega corps are essentially importing slave labor, forcing 80-hour work weeks on them, to do…what? American workers were gratuitously insulted in the process, as if a government should force its own citizens to compete with the entire world for their jobs. Shouldn’t Americans have priority over foreign labor when it comes to employment? The question quickly boiled down to “what is an American?”, echoing the Left’s epic struggles with “what is a woman?”. Is an American someone who moves here and becomes a citizen? Is it instead someone who is born here? How easy should it be to gain citizenship in this country? How easy is it to game the system, not just with citizenship, but with employment? Why is it offensive for American citizens to assert their right to preserve their nation from outside influx?
The entire episode apparently had a deleterious mental health effect on Elon Musk, rabid supporter of H1B’s, and, in a bloodbath of sour grapes, dropped the ban hammer on hundreds of X accounts, removed blue checks, demonetized various and sundry visa critics, basically obliterating his free speech pledge in one fell swoop. See below:
Musk’s response to the ordeal is telling. People have been ridiculing him savagely ever since he bought the platform, but he’s laughed it all off. But the visa criticism was a bridge too far, apparently. Why? Because the flak was being flung from the crowd he desperately wished adulation from, and felt entitled to.
The real question is whether America is a nation first, or an economy first. Is GDP some god that requires constant sacrifice, including rapid and irreversible demographic change? Is GDP maximization a goal to be had at any cost? This is the attitude that girds the position of the visa supporters. “We must compete with China and India!” …Why? We have something that they will never have, albeit in an anemic and diminished form. We have freedom. We are the global destination, we are the Third World fever dream. Not China, not India, America. Could free speech ever take root in China? Not a snowball’s chance. But that simple freedom is priceless next to China’s supposed “competitiveness”. Our kids learn about the glories and beauty of China in our schools, while failing to learn that its citizens are effectively slaves. Can they own a gun, can they insult their leader, do they have a say in their national destiny?
Yes, it is possible to beat and berate a child into becoming a human calculator, deprive them of culture, and a childhood, and then place them into soulless “tech” jobs where they’re willing to work 80 hours a week because they have no self-esteem and no personality. But is that living? Is that the kind of living that should be encouraged here? Part of what makes America great is our culture’s capacity for joy, although that joy is being snuffed out slowly. Should we be ashamed of our joy, and the manifestations of that joy which include prom queens, jocks, hot rods, and, well, good old chaotic fun? Look at who staffed NASA in the 60’s and 70’s. Were those guys nerds? They don’t look like it. Nerds have their place, but I prefer prom queen supremacy, which means an America that holds herself in high regard, rightly so. The nerds are in power, and no single event has made that more evident than the COVID pandemic. The embittered, vengeful nerds locked us down. Sedentary endomorphs issued public health commands and expected us to bend the knee, but the former jocks and prom queens realized that these were just the dweebs from high school, and resisted their rule.
America for Americans, it’s a simple philosophy. And we should stop caring who is insulted by it.
