Elon Musk is wrong about legal immigration. To explain why, I will start with the story of Kevin Flanagan.
Flanagan shot himself in the head with a shotgun after Bank of America forced him and his colleagues to train their replacements: H-1B visa workers who, though not as skilled as they were, could be paid less and treated worse than Americans.
Bank of America made Flanagan’s severance contingent upon him agreeing to train his replacement. It was a humiliating session that lasted for months.
Here was a man who had done everything we tell people to do in life in order to succeed. Go to school. Work hard.
Flagan studied computer science and philosophy at California State University in Long Beach. By all accounts, he was bright and competent. He was the kind of person who operates under the old belief that the American dream comes to those who strive for it. He was wrong.
Why pay a hard-working American an honest wage when you can replace him with someone who can be paid less and exploited? That’s what Bank of America did. That’s what a lot of companies still do today.
“Week after week,” wrote journalists Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, “Kevin saw his little group of programmers whittled down” by Bank of America’s outsourcing efforts.
Flanagan watched colleagues be let go, one after another, until finally, “his unit was down to one–him.”
On the last day of work, the last day of his life, Flanagan was reportedly in good spirits. But he did what I think a lot of men do when they commit themselves to suicide. Go through the motions, smile, gather your belongings from the office, don’t telegraph. That’s what Kevin did before climbing into his truck, driving into a parking garage, and shooting himself in the head.
Flanagan’s father said that his being replaced by Bank of America was “the defining event in his decision to end his life.”
That should have been the moment everything changed. But, of course, it wasn’t. Vivek Paul, a tech executive, told reporters at the time that despite this high-profile tragedy, the wheels of outsourcing would remain in motion.
“We know how this movie ends,” he said, and it ends with Americans getting pink slips from greedy companies.
In 2021, Facebook was ordered by the Justice Department to pay millions of dollars to settle a case that alleged American workers were denied employment because the company reserved jobs for foreign workers with temporary visas–specifically, H-1B holders. According to the lawsuit, Facebook used sham job openings to disqualify qualified Americans and give preference to visa workers.
The Justice Department viewed it as a civil rights violation against U.S. citizens. The companies that exploit these visa programs just see it as good business.
Pretty much every argument in defense of this system is based on half-truths and whole lies, like the idea these visa workers are just as talented as the Americans they replace.
Using data from the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies, the Center for Immigration Studies found that foreign-educated immigrants with a college or advanced degree perform poorly in literacy and computer operations, scoring at the level of Americans with only a high school diploma. One in six foreign degree holders scores “below basic” in numeracy. These disparities endure even after foreign degree holders have spent years in the U.S. to learn English.
In short, we still can produce the best and brightest, but the system isn’t built around them.
What about the supposed STEM worker shortage? In 2020, Rachel Rosenthal, an editor with Bloomberg, demonstrated that it’s mostly exaggerated.
Rosenthal looked at data from 2018 that showed the U.S. had between 95,500 and 143,000 job openings in IT occupations. She found that “American citizens and permanent residents earned about 100,000 degrees in computer science or related engineering fields, filling the low end of that estimate.” She also noted that two-thirds of new entrants in IT occupations major in other disciplines, so there is actually a much larger pool of candidates than it seems.
This analysis also put a dent in the skills myth.
When Rosenthal examined data from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she found that American seniors majoring in computer science “substantially outperform” their counterparts in China, India, and Russia.
The bottom line is this: the skilled worker crisis is more like companies wanting an unending supply of cheap labor. They don’t want a tight labor market that gives an advantage to workers, one that could have tipped the scales in favor of someone like Kevin Flanagan. But the narrative persists, as Rosenthal writes, because “Deep-pocketed tech companies that lobby Washington on immigration are joined by universities and research institutions seeking to expand their STEM programs and attract foreign students willing to pay top dollar tuition, in part to get into the U.S. employment pipeline.”
Musk has a big platform. I hope he will reconsider his view on this issue and help people see that the scam of mass legal immigration is a crime against Americans.
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