My wife isn’t an American citizen: She’s Dutch. (So I guess it’s true, foreigners really are doing the “work” that native-born Americans refuse to do.) She was raised in French Polynesia, earned her master’s in accounting from the University of Hawaii, and when we moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a local accounting firm sponsored her H-1B visa.
It sucked. She couldn’t be paid until the application was approved and it tethered her to one single company. She worked without pay for several months.
I offer this backdrop for an important reason: The MAGAverse is currently being divided by the H-1B visa debate. On one side, there’s Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, along with most of the Big Tech movers and shakers. (Which makes sense: Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are America’s top H-1B visa sponsors.)
On the other side, you have Steve Bannon and most of the grassroots MAGA movement, who question how and/or why increasing the number of foreign workers in lucrative, high-paying STEM jobs aligns with “Making America Great Again.”