I would have graduated in 1976, but I left during the summer of my junior year and ended up working for AMF Tuboscope in Port Gentil, Gabon, West Africa.
While there I asked my supervisor why there weren’t no other Americans like myself over there and I was told that they had an agreement with Africa to only hire the locals for all but their management jobs.
At the time, I had no idea what this would mean to me some fifty years later, but I do now.
During that time frame, around the mid 70’s, our companies started sending their best paying jobs to other countries seeking lower payroll and regulations.
This decimated many communities in America and when it was brought up, the response was they will find similar or better paying jobs.
For those gardeners among us, we were watering the gardens of other countries while ignoring our own garden here at home.
In 1990, we began importing nonimmigrant guest workers from other countries to take our remaining best paying jobs because they could be sent home if they dared complain about the hours they were required to work at the expense of their families.
Because we barely create enough new jobs each year for our high school graduates, this began to force Americans out of the workforce as shown here.
Again, we were watering the garden of our workers home countries while ignoring our own garden.
This left our citizens with little hope other than to work at big box stores which required little training above the normal.
Now 35 years later one of the heads of our Department of Government Efficiency says that our citizens are not qualified and never even mentions they are not qualified because we have been denying them the opportunity to grow.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates). More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.” Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve. Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest. “Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China. This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
More and more it is looking to me like our Department of Government Efficiency has been put together to eliminate regulations that would protect our American workers and to import more nonimmigrant guest workers to take the place of our American Workers?
To me, Make America Great Again means to make it better for Americans in America, even if we have to water our own garden and train our fellow Americans in skills they don’t have.
What was quoted above was only Vivek Ramaswamy.
This is what Elon Musk has to say.
No, we need more like double that number yesterday! The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low. Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.
Then we have these 2 as told by Laura Loomer.
How about this guy,
? Is this the same guy? Or will you say this is someone else too? Is this your “best and brightest” Indian boy
, David? Is this the “right guy” with the same name who works in VC talking about how INDIAN IMMIGRANTS in tech should scam our immigration system by marrying US citizens so they can get green cards? Or will you tell Trump this is a different guy too? You do know that immigrants plotting to marry US citizens for green cards is immigration fraud right? Why should I stop? I don’t really want people scamming my country or Trump for that matter. I take it very personally. So tell me. Same guy? Different guy? What’s the story now?
Who knows with any of this stuff, but I’ve seen enough to recommend shutting down the Department of Government Efficiency and to end all nonimmigrant guest worker visas until all of the mothers in America are finally seeing their children have a chance to build a future as Americans in America.