H1B says, what good are they for anyway? We talk about immigration, anti-white racism, and more with Ryan James Gerduski, Jeremy Carl, and Jeremy Heacock of the Turning Point USA youth organization.
00:00:36.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:39.000So I wanted to have you on because you are an expert on this now very high profile and controversial issue.
00:01:47.000And it shouldn't be that controversial, but I guess that's one way to frame it, which is H-1B visas.
00:01:52.000So the position of this program is Americans come first and America is for Americans only.
00:01:57.000And this is not that controversial of a position that if we're going to have immigration, legal immigration, it should benefit the homeland.
00:02:03.000It should be done very, very intelligently.
00:02:05.000However, we've had this mass migration wave, so it makes sense to allow things to cool down and to reanalyze the way we do immigration altogether.
00:02:13.000With that being said, the people that are pushing for, let's say, more H-1Bs or something similar, I can sympathize with some of their premises.
00:02:22.000So where are we at right now with this H-1B debate, and what do you think is most missing from the current dialogue surrounding it?
00:02:29.000Well, first of all, I mean, immigration, to paraphrase what Bill and Hillary Clinton used to say about abortion in the 90s, immigration should be safe, legal, and rare.
00:02:38.000In a natural market economy, there is no such thing as a long-term labor shortage, right?
00:02:46.000The labor shortage, the ongoing quote-unquote labor shortage, is increasingly worse because of our H-1B visa system and most of our visa systems, actually.
00:02:59.000When the H-1B system was created in 1990, by the way, it's not like we had this in 1776 and we needed it to bring Albert Einstein or Albert Einstein came without an H-1B visa.
00:03:09.000The studies done justifying an H-1B system was created about wages, not about talent.
00:03:17.000It was about how do, one, our employers get involved in the Asian market, and two, how our employers work within a talent pool to work within a wage that works for them, to suppress wages.
00:03:29.000The average H-1B visa worker in this country makes less than $120,000 a year.
00:03:35.000These are not all, you know, the next Tesla or the next Elon Musk or the next anybody.
00:03:41.000And there's been consistent cases of visa fraud in the last two years.
00:03:46.000Under the Biden administration, there were two big cases.
00:03:49.000One being most famously Facebook, which was going straight to foreign countries through the H-1B visa system.
00:03:55.000And they were discriminating wholeheartedly against Americans.
00:03:59.000I think Facebook had to pay $15 million or $14 million for wholeheartedly just disqualifying Americans and discriminating against them.
00:04:07.000And then there was another company called Larson and Turbo Infotech.
00:04:11.000They're a company that has spent like 4.6, 4.7 million in fines because they were firing Americans, qualified Americans, and replacing them with Indian H-1B workers.
00:04:21.000The idea that this is like a DEI program for mediocre Americans who like Like Slater over Screech on Saved by the Bell is completely, just wholeheartedly not true.
00:04:36.000Many times it's qualified Americans who've worked in these jobs for long periods of time who have been displaced by H-1B foreign workers.
00:04:44.000Yeah, but there's also an exceptional talent visa that is being conflated with H-1B, which I think the exceptional talent visa actually has a place.
00:04:56.000Like, if you're Yo-Yo Ma and you want to be able to perform for two years, it's called the O-1 visa, and you want to go perform for the New York Philharmonic, great.
00:05:05.000I mean, I don't know if Yo-Yo Ma is American-born or if he's from Japan.
00:05:08.000He's American-born, but yeah, I get what you're saying.
00:05:45.000If you wanted to bring only Albert Einstein's into this country, right, there are not a lot of geniuses walking around in everyday life in any society whatsoever.
00:05:56.000You could probably reduce the entire visa system of geniuses just down to 2000 people a year, rather than the 85,000 H1Bs.
00:06:06.000H1Bs, you know, they do work of accountants sometimes, They do work of low-skilled technology laborers.
00:06:14.000And when people come on an H-1B visa, their residency to the United States is attached to their occupation.
00:06:21.000So they cannot ever leave their job unless it means leaving the United States.
00:06:29.000They are basically removed from the market of being able to compete for a better job or a better, you know, more qualified bonuses or increased salaries.
00:06:41.000It's literally to suppress those people's wages.
00:06:44.000And a lot of them sometimes are not tremendously skilled.
00:06:48.000Between 55 to 40 percent of all Can you reiterate that?
00:07:03.000Because if I were to, when I speak to, and I'm friends with people on both sides of this aisle, however my position is very clear on this, when I speak to a tech CEO or someone that uses H-1B, they are insistent, Ryan, that Americans are unwilling or unable to do these jobs.
00:07:46.000Secondly, the idea, and you've seen this a lot on the internet, I'm sure, that American education is just so antiquated, so bad, that we need to bring in workers from other countries because we rank 15th or 16th in the world for math and science.
00:08:00.000We rank 15th or 16th according to the PISA scores in elementary schools behind only a handful of countries, mostly in Western Europe and East Asia.
00:08:10.000Most countries in the world do not even take the PISA tests because they score so badly.
00:08:17.000India, for example, which has become a hot-button subject given how many applicants come from India.
00:08:22.000India has not taken the test since 2009 because the last time they took the test They ranked second to last behind Sub-Saharan Africa.
00:08:30.000So the idea that our students are just so incredibly stupid and we shouldn't invest in the youth of America because they're just being displaced by hardworking people who, you know, they don't love the prom king.
00:08:46.000Completely and totally incoherent and not correct whatsoever.
00:08:50.000There is no data that ever backs that up.
00:08:53.000I mean, yes, there are some people in East Asia, some people in Western Europe that are doing better in math and science than ours, but overall, not even a question.
00:09:02.000The American talent is far overwhelming than that of other countries.
00:09:07.000We have a lot of suppressed talent in the United States because of ordinary white people being discriminated against at every level of American life.
00:09:18.000Listen, Charlie, one of my donors for my PAC, who is a very, very wealthy individual, said to me one day, and they're white, and they said, I am genuinely worried that my children cannot get a good enough job and they will be discriminated because of their race.
00:09:33.000We have seen this time and time and time again.
00:09:35.000Again, it is a silent conversation that a lot of people and middle class parents have with their kids.
00:09:42.000And they worry about technological changes.
00:09:45.000They worry about how would their kid get a job, but also about the disqualifications on just being a white person.
00:09:51.000Despite the fact, this is an interesting, this is according to the census and the CDC.
00:09:56.000Despite the fact that Native Americans, people of American Indian ancestry, have some of the lowest birth rates in history, in an entire country.
00:10:04.000their population is increasing every single year.
00:10:07.000Now we can't import more American Indians than Native Americans, so where are they coming from?
00:10:12.000It's white people saying they're 1 16th Cherokee just so they can check off a different box so they are not discriminated against and they feel it and they're worried about it and hopefully more states take action using the Harvard lawsuit saying you can't discriminate people based on race for jobs.
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00:11:28.000Well, what I was saying is that there's a lot of people, middle American people, who are genuinely worried that their children will be discriminated against in employment and in government contracts, if they're small business owners, or at college admissions because of their skin color.
00:11:42.000And that is why you're seeing an enormous amount of people point that, oh, I'm 116th Cherokee, therefore I am not white, I'm Native American.
00:11:52.000That is what a lot of people are doing, because there is a genuine fear of it, and there is a lot of discrimination from corporations when it comes to hiring Americans.
00:12:01.000I mean, that has been proven evident in all of these lawsuits over H-1B visa fraud.
00:12:07.000So, the way that this conversation started was around an appointment in the White House, and it has kind of turned into now a multi-day debate.
00:12:19.000What has this debate told you about the state of the current coalition and the conservative movement?
00:12:25.000I think that, it's funny, I've just been writing about this.
00:12:28.000I think that if, you know, listen, we have a new coalition within the Republican Party that Donald Trump built in 2024. It is very working class.
00:12:37.000We have seen overseas people build new coalitions that give them governing majorities.
00:12:43.000We just saw it in the UK when they had Brexit.
00:12:45.000Boris Johnson built this fabulously large conservative party organization of working class people to achieve Brexit.
00:12:50.000The people wanted lower levels of immigration.
00:12:56.000If tech bros who did not like the trans stuff or the woke stuff or the taxes or whatever they did not like that or crime in the cities, whatever they did not like that brought them to the Republican Party.
00:13:07.000If they believe that that means they can remake the Republican Party or the MAGA Party or the Donald Trump coalition in their image, They are being extremely naive because the genuine consensus from Americans is there has been too much immigration and we need to have lower limits.
00:13:27.000That means we discriminate against people from certain regions of the country or, you know, race or religion or whatever.
00:13:37.000In some capacity, we bring over a million people per year, the most generous nation in the world as far as refugees go and asylum seekers.
00:13:44.000We need some me time to work on our Americans who have been suffering because of the Biden administration.
00:13:51.000And by the way, before that, under the Obama administration.
00:13:54.000I mean, it's been 16 years out of the last, or sorry, 12 years out of the last 16 of Democrat control, and it hasn't always worked out.
00:14:02.000So I think that really taking a pause, taking a me time from a constant overflow of people wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
00:14:09.000And if anyone thinks they're going to change that because they have money or social media platform or a podcast or whatever the case is, they are very, very, very mistaken.
00:14:20.000And telling Americans, sorry, you're too fat and like the wrong people and you're too lazy and you rooted for screech over Slater on Saved by the Bell from 35 years ago is really not a winning message to politicians and to people who aspire to run for president again.
00:14:36.000So, yeah, in closing here, the this was an obvious fault line when you and I would we saw this six, six months ago.
00:14:45.000I had a call yesterday from somebody who, very high up tech leader, and he said, Charlie, a year and a half ago you told me that the base of MAGA wants zero legal immigration.
00:14:56.000He said, I had never heard that from anybody until you said that to me.
00:15:00.000And now he's looking through Twitter and he's like, that seems to be the consensus view.
00:15:31.000They did a study, they did a poll, and it was like 44% of Americans wanted a 90% reduction in legal immigration.
00:15:38.000It was like 75% wanted a 50% cut in legal immigration.
00:15:41.000And among the Republican base, and that was before Biden.
00:15:44.000That was all before the Biden invasion.
00:15:47.000Right now, it's got to be close to 90% of Republicans and probably over 60% of independents say, we need a pause.
00:15:54.000And if this moment did anything besides making them realize that, hey, they're not giving up just because, you know, we won the election or they like Elon Musk now or they like whoever, whatever the case may be, they really feel this.
00:16:07.000And this has to be achieved in some way in order to make the base feel like they are voting for Trump and putting everything in line for Trump meant something.
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00:17:26.000Mike Johnson has been endorsed by President Trump to be Speaker of the House.
00:18:44.000And I think he's right and certainly has the credibility to say that.
00:18:47.000I just think it was a very practical decision on President Trump's part.
00:18:51.000I think he doesn't need the disruption.
00:18:53.000I think it's very different to have a big game of chicken when we don't control the White House and we don't control the Senate, as opposed to a time where we have the new president coming in, we've got all three branches of government, and we just don't need the distraction.
00:19:09.000So do you think that if we get a new speaker, there could be any potential delay in the certification of the presidential election results?
00:19:17.000Well, I think that's what some folks are worried about.
00:19:21.000I mean, I don't think that we're going to wind up with some weird thing where it's like, oh gosh, you know, some weird thing happened and all of a sudden we're going to have President Harris.
00:19:31.000I mean, I understand why folks are going to be concerned about that, but it just seems sort of far-fetched.
00:19:36.000But I think people are just trying to avoid chaos.
00:19:38.000They're trying to avoid a bad look and they're just...
00:19:41.000Going to go forward on that basis that they want everything to run smoothly and maybe Johnson is not the ideal guy but he's the guy we have and so we're going to go forward with him.
00:20:16.000Yeah, well, I think, as usual, the truth is often somewhere in between.
00:20:21.000I think that this has actually been a really healthy debate.
00:20:24.000I'm not one of those folks who's been discouraged by it.
00:20:27.000Charlie, I know you've been pretty vocal about the fact that we need to find a kind of way to work together with all the members of this coalition, but I'm glad we had the discussion.
00:20:39.000I think what it has exposed is that a lot of these H-1B folks are actually not at all elite.
00:20:45.000And at the very worst, I think we can come out of this with an H-1B system like my friend Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies has pushed that you would have an auction so that you really are only getting at least higher scale, higher folks up on the food chain to do this.
00:21:01.000But I think, look, immigration is going to be an issue for the base.
00:21:05.000And I'm glad that we put a shot across the bow.
00:21:08.000And I think hopefully the tech right folks are going to pause a little bit and realize that we need to get some real wins on immigration if they're going to get anything that they really want on H-1B. So one of the big concerns is they say, well, there isn't enough talent here.
00:21:23.000You wrote a whole book about anti-white racism.
00:21:25.000One of the reasons why there might not appear to be the talent that they might want is that we've done quite a heck of a job of tamping down potential excellence in the majority of the country, which is white America.
00:21:39.000Can you connect those two on how anti-white racism is actually connected with the H-1B debate?
00:21:48.000And in fact, I have a whole chapter in my book that's essentially on Silicon Valley and what happened here.
00:21:53.000And I've got a subsection to that chapter called the H-1B scam that kind of goes into this a lot.
00:21:59.000So I think you've got all sorts of concerning things happen.
00:22:03.000You have a lot of ethnic nepotism in hiring going on.
00:22:07.000Once you get whites kind of getting shoved out of these processes, you get white White middle Americans often not even kind of being in the position set where they're considered.
00:22:20.000Often that's a public school system failure.
00:22:24.000But you've also had, over the last few decades, you've had a net white flight from Silicon Valley that we haven't talked about.
00:22:30.000It hasn't just been a question of, oh, we've brought in all these great immigrant engineers and everybody's living happily ever after.
00:22:36.000It's we've changed the country in that area so dramatically that the people who used to live there have kind of gone elsewhere despite the huge economic opportunities.
00:22:47.000And I don't think that in an unrestrained way, at least, that's something that we want to repeat in the country as a whole.
00:22:54.000And so talk more about in your book how systemic this is and what can President Trump do now with his victory to legislatively or through executive order, executively fix the entrenched anti-white racism within public policy in this country?
00:23:13.000It's going to be really hard because the Civil Rights Division of DOJ is not going to want to move, but we've got a nominee there, Harmeet Dhillon, who is going to be terrific.
00:23:22.000And I think she'll do everything she can to make it move.
00:23:26.000But a lot of these things are actually, as much as people like me do talk about how we need to reform a lot of our civil rights laws, a lot of our existing laws are being violated by these companies pretty blatantly.
00:23:40.000And Marc Andreessen, who's sort of been a tech ally of the right, has been talking about this recently.
00:23:46.000They've got all these companies that are just doing racially preferential things that damage white people that are not allowed under current law.
00:23:54.000And so I think if we go after these guys, that's going to help a lot.
00:23:58.000If we look, I mean, there are situations where there was a whistleblower...
00:24:02.000Google, I talk about in my book, who says that they were explicitly being told to, like, discard the resumes of white men in particular.
00:24:09.000I mean, you get a couple of painful civil rights decisions against these guys, and you're going to get different outcomes.
00:24:18.000So I think there's a lot that Trump can do just with the executive branch.
00:24:21.000And if we can do things with laws, that's obviously great as well, but that's always a heavier lift than just using the powers that we are going to have walking in the door.
00:24:29.000Talk also about the education system as well.
00:24:31.000Foreign students taking American spots.
00:24:36.000Yeah, I mean, certainly I spent 14 years at Stanford and we saw this where you, in engineering particularly, you had just all of these spots being taken by foreign grads.
00:24:48.000There's a number of problems with that.
00:24:49.000And of course, in a place like Stanford, look, I mean, these guys were really smart, certainly at the top of the level.
00:24:54.000These were the sort of 0.1% that everybody talks about.
00:24:57.000But I'll tell you, and this was not something that Stanford I think has talked about it publicly, but nobody put me under an NDA, so I'll talk about it.
00:25:05.000I can tell you that among our engineering and science profs, there was real concern about espionage, particularly from China, among some of these graduate students.
00:25:15.000And there were, in fact, departments and programs where there was sensitivity about even having graduate students from some countries.
00:25:22.000So there is some awareness Even among these top universities about what is going on, but there's a reluctance to talk about it.
00:25:31.000And we're also boxing out our own people.
00:25:33.000And I think part of the really good discussion that's come out of our side is that we're not just having some sort of war of all against all where every native born American should have to work 80 hours a week to compete with some foreigner.
00:25:46.000We should unapologetically significantly favor our own citizens.
00:25:58.000It's just the way that the country should operate.
00:26:00.000So, speaking more broadly, from the immigration perspective, the consensus that the electorate gave President Trump through this mandate is that American workers come first, that the citizenry is in charge of the government.
00:26:30.000I'm close with everybody involved in this whole thing, and everyone knows where I stand on stuff.
00:26:35.000I'm one of the few kind of people that's trying to mediate.
00:26:40.000Can you talk about the need and the importance, better said, of keeping this coalition together despite disagreements on this one issue because our agreements on some of the more macro issues are dominant and very strong?
00:26:56.000Yeah, no, I think it's critical, Charlie.
00:26:58.000And again, I've really appreciated you taking that role.
00:27:01.000And that's certainly the role that I've tried to play in a more minor key as well.
00:27:08.000I kind of understand how those guys think.
00:27:10.000I've also been involved in In the kind of immigration patriot movement since even long before MAGA, so I certainly, that's sort of my home intellectually.
00:27:20.000But we do need to keep these guys together.
00:27:22.000We obviously need to keep our voters in mind because that's the people who put us in office and we do need to put Americans first, period.
00:27:31.000At the same time, The folks in tech who have supported us, and in the cases like Elon Musk, just played an enormous role in helping get Trump elected.
00:27:42.000They have real needs and interests, and we need to figure out how we can work together to meet some of those needs consistent with the national interest.
00:27:50.000And once all the kind of shouting died down a little bit about H-1Bs, we begin to see some more productive I think if they're willing to help us on the illegal immigration question, on the mass deportation question,
00:28:05.000on getting rid of diversity visas, I think they're going to find that if big tech folks help us there, we can have a much more pleasant discussion about what we can do about real top 0.1% tech folks who they feel like they may need For their business.
00:28:23.000So I actually think the good news is we've had this conversation before we were even getting into office with our coalition.
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00:29:57.000This is a primary political policy issue that requires some deep thinking.
00:30:01.000Previously, I was always about ban TikTok, ban TikTok.
00:30:04.000I got away from that as I read the bill and realized it could be used to potentially ban Telegram and ban Rumble and obviously extrapolated towards the anti-speech regime.
00:30:13.000However, core to one of the anti-TikTok arguments, something that I once held, was that TikTok is turning all the kids' libs, right?
00:30:24.000And so, to Ryan's credit and to the whole team and Andrew, this last March, we sent out a tweet saying, hey, TikTok, you guys are scheduled to be banned.
00:30:32.000If you treat us fairly, we're going to post on there and we'll see what happens.
00:30:36.000Well, 1.8 billion views later, turns out that actually TikTok can turn people to be more conservative and more Trumpy.
00:30:48.000I mean, actually, I live in Montana, and our Republican governor was the first with our legislature, our governor, who's a former technology entrepreneur and understands tech.
00:30:56.000We were sort of the first to ban TikTok.
00:30:58.000And it's been interesting to kind of watch that get walked back a little bit nationally.
00:31:06.000I understand why Trump is weighed in against it, because I think there's a feeling that, A, we don't necessarily want to give the government always that type of power.
00:31:14.000B, I think Trump, who's obviously very savvy about public opinion, can see that a lot of Gen Z voters are going to be very angry if we lose TikTok.
00:31:22.000At the same time, I think that the Chinese Communist Party ownership and potential misuse of Americans' data is something that we need to be concerned about.
00:31:31.000And I think realistically, we probably are going to need to engage with a little bit of brinksmanship, where we get as much separation as we can between the Chinese Communist Party and Americans' data.
00:31:42.000And you continue to have TikTok in the But I think we should be able to have, I mean, if there are true national security violations, We should have the power to ban TikTok.
00:31:55.000But I think whether we use that power is a separate question.
00:31:58.000And on that, I think like President Trump, perhaps I'm a little more skeptical.
00:32:02.000Yep, and I mean, President Trump, he actually fired, this is an incredible development, he filed an amicus brief this last weekend, or amicus or amicus, I can't remember, at the Supreme Court, basically arguing that the Supreme Court should stay its decision to allow him to sort this out in his incoming term.
00:32:24.000In closing here, Jeremy, what specific executive orders or action do you want to see more broadly from the administration, creative ideas that you want to see entertained that have not been yet pushed forward or yet implemented in the transition team?
00:32:38.000Well, I think maybe the number one thing I'd love to see is some updating of what was the Schedule F idea at the end of the last administration.
00:32:47.000I'm not going to get too deep in the weeds, or there are folks who say, well, you actually need to do it slightly differently.
00:32:52.000But the basic idea behind Schedule F is that we were going to make it so that...
00:32:58.000The truly senior policymaking civil servants in the government became like political appointees, and I was a political appointee in the last Trump administration, at will employees.
00:33:10.000And so that if they were basically defying the administration, which they're not allowed to do, they shouldn't be allowed to do that as part of their policy.
00:33:36.000There are also going to be a lot of bureaucrats who are going to try to stop you, even though their job is to help implement the policies of the administration.
00:33:44.000So I think putting some teeth into something that would really give us the power to hire and fire the true policy-making folks at the top would do a tremendous amount to restore democratic accountability to the system, to go after the deep state, and I would love to see us move very aggressively in that lane.