After seeing all the bickering on Twitter (“X”) about H1-B visas, and the resulting spillover into the media, it’s hard not to add my perspective as somebody that has been working in tech as long as they’ve been able to find an opening. Here it is:
TECH IS NOT THE ONLY INDUSTRY IN AMERICA THAT MATTERS. Tech skills are not the only thing that matter to most people in life. Tech is just one thing we are doing in this country, and while it has significantly added to our national GDP, most people are annoyed with everything about it at this point.
Why do I say this? Because I really think this country does enough to support the tech industry and everything adjacent. If you want an internship, today that’s far more competitive than it was to get when I was a student, but the government does fund a lot of them. Is that true if you’re studying something outside of STEM? By and large, mostly no. There is a reason that pretty much every college major besides CompSci and Business has fallen off a cliff in recent years, and it’s because politically, we don’t invest in them, we don’t see it as important, it is Not What We Do Here.
Well, we’re paying for that right now. Bigtime. I live in Los Angeles. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that is affiliated with the entertainment industry has complained that productions are mostly moved offshore now. Some of that is the high cost of doing business in California or in the United States in general, but I think that is mostly wishful thinking. Nobody is saying that Taylor Swift is overpaid in the entertainment industry. Rather it’s that we don’t have comparable training in the arts to what exists in Canada or in Europe or the UK where governments subsidize all of this out the wazoo, and our people are losing. Americans are on OnlyFans and doing feet pics while people in Europe get to do Shakespeare and Harry Potter. Is that what we want? Is that really what we want for ourselves? Is that worth it to take a shit on a liberal arts kid and tell them to go work at Starbucks so we don’t have to put 0.00000001% of the federal budget to something other than Medicare or defense contracts? My opinion is that it is not and we have made a terrible mistake and left a generation in some sort of affluent poverty due to a lack of relevant skills or training. Sending everyone to college and making them pay for it didn’t work, STEM for everyone is not working, we need to do the hard work again of investing in a more diverse array of possible industries that can develop people’s talents or we will continue to lose out to the rest of the world on the things that made this country great in the first place.
Entertainment is just one example. People I have talked to way on the other end of the political spectrum in manufacturing have broadly said the same thing, there’s no way to borrow money for equipment now that PPP is over. Banks don’t really lend money out anymore. We have a million random tiny banks that cause tons of problems every 10 years, and none of them will lend you money to go set up your own machine shop and put yourself to work after you get laid off from your unstable job at a cryptocurrency company that also doesn’t add any real liquidity into the non-money laundering economy that uses U.S. dollars to trade goods and services.
If we truly had an economy where people felt able to pursue their ambitions, nobody would care as much about a few people from overseas getting H1-B visas to build software. The problem is, we don’t have the first thing, so people are getting really angry about the second thing. Most STEM jobs are not that interesting or exciting, but they are still better than what the non-STEM workers are mostly left with, and they’re tired of hearing the punchline “would you like fries with that?”. We need to rebuild a middle skill tier of jobs that average people feel more enabled to do instead of telling them all to go compete for the kinds of jobs that are the most vulnerable to offshoring or bringing in talent from overseas. It’s just easier for politicians to yell at us that we’re dumb and lazy than it is for them to fix that problem.