The Charlie Kirk Show - Breaking Down the Great H-1B Battle

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 H-1B visa debates have consumed the internet the last 24 hours.

00:00:04.000 We dive into this in a very fair and analytical way of what is an H-1B visa?

00:00:09.000 Should we have more people from foreign countries coming into our tech space?

00:00:13.000 Do we have enough American labor here to be able to fill those jobs? 1.00

00:00:16.000 That and more.

00:00:17.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:19.000 Subscribe to our podcast.

00:00:21.000 Open up your podcast application and type in Charlie Kirk Show and get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com.

00:00:27.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:30.000 Buckle up everybody.

00:00:30.000 Here we go.

00:00:31.000 Charlie what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:33.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:35.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:39.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House folks.

00:00:42.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:43.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:44.000 His 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.

00:01:01.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:21.000 That is noblegoldinvestments.com.

00:01:23.000 It's where I buy all of my gold.

00:01:25.000 Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.

00:01:29.000 Okay everybody, hope you had a wonderful Christmas.

00:01:32.000 We are in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, as we are still trying to recover from AmericaFest.

00:01:38.000 Do you see I have an empty wall behind me?

00:01:40.000 I have nothing to promote.

00:01:42.000 I promote nothing this December 27th.

00:01:45.000 Every day of the year I'm saying go vote now, register to vote, start a chapter, download the app.

00:01:50.000 Today I just have a white wall for you.

00:01:56.000 Everybody, it is wonderful to be with you.

00:01:58.000 I made a point to want to host the program today, even though we're all kind of getting over something from AmFest.

00:02:04.000 And I mean, AmericaFest is one of the hardest things we do at Turning Point USA, and it always just kind of hits us.

00:02:11.000 Sleep deprivation, over-caffeination, bio-blasted from foreigners that may or may not come to our events. 1.00

00:02:19.000 So it just kind of takes a couple days to get over that.

00:02:22.000 But I said, I want to host the program on Friday.

00:02:24.000 We got to get back in the chair.

00:02:25.000 We have to make the arguments, connect with you, the audience, the best audience in talk radio and the best audience in all of broadcasting.

00:02:34.000 Got to stay sharp or else you lose it.

00:02:35.000 You don't work out your muscles atrophy.

00:02:38.000 But I was wondering, hey, what are we going to talk about here?

00:02:40.000 Are we going to kind of do a year in recap episode?

00:02:43.000 Turns out we're going to do that Monday.

00:02:45.000 Monday will be our last episode of this calendar year.

00:02:48.000 And it turns out that our content was made for us the day after Christmas.

00:02:55.000 Now, mind you, I had a wonderful day with my wife yesterday, Erica.

00:02:58.000 We always do this the day after Christmas.

00:02:59.000 We kind of go have breakfast together, plan out the entire year, talk about what went well in 2024, what's going to hopefully happen in 2025. Just a great day.

00:03:09.000 We were overlooking the McDowell Mountains in Scottsdale, and my phone just starts lighting up.

00:03:15.000 And it was...

00:03:16.000 It started...

00:03:18.000 With some rhythm, and it turned into almost MAGA Chernobyl, some could say, where a very spirited discussion turned into a very nasty online dialogue about immigration and H-1B visas.

00:03:36.000 The debate started on Sunday after Trump named venture capitalist Siriam Krishnan as his advisor on AI policy.

00:03:44.000 Entrepreneur David Sachs noted in the response to Krishnan saying advocates for removing country-specific caps on green cards not lifting caps entirely.

00:03:56.000 On Wednesday, the world's richest man who has benefited from the H1 program himself, Elon Musk, wrote in response on social media that in America, there are not enough super talented and super motivated engineers in the United States.

00:04:08.000 Quote, the number of people who are super talented and super motivated in the United States is far too low.

00:04:14.000 Think of this as a pro sports team.

00:04:16.000 If you want your team to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.

00:04:20.000 That enables the whole team to win.

00:04:22.000 In another post, he wrote that, quote, Vivek Ramaswamy came out and wrote this very, very long tweet, a controversial tweet, where he said, quote, a reason the top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over Native Americans, Native-born Americans, isn't because of an American IQ deficit.

00:04:47.000 A key part of it comes down to culture.

00:04:49.000 So now this internet firestorm ensued, where effectively the debate was around H-1B visas.

00:04:57.000 Now, this is not something that I thought we'd be talking about on the 27th of December.

00:05:01.000 However, just understand that this was seen 71 million times on Twitter.

00:05:09.000 71 million times.

00:05:11.000 So an H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa category in the United States that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialized occupations.

00:05:22.000 These occupations generally require a bachelor's degree or higher or some equivalent.

00:05:26.000 It's used almost primarily in the tech space.

00:05:30.000 Now, this is used by big tech.

00:05:33.000 It's a subsidy given by the federal government for big tech, where little tech is not always able to capitalize on this type of subsidy.

00:05:41.000 Now, you must understand that when it comes to H-1B visas, The worker for that company cannot leave that job.

00:05:47.000 They cannot go work for another company.

00:05:49.000 It is a form of international tech-driven indentured servitude.

00:05:55.000 But now they're using it for even more entry-level accountants and stuff like that.

00:06:00.000 H-1B visas have been widely abused.

00:06:03.000 It sounds good, by the way.

00:06:05.000 I mean, as its premise...

00:06:07.000 It sounds we want the world's best people.

00:06:10.000 That is a good premise to operate from.

00:06:12.000 But in reality, H-1B visas are a disaster.

00:06:16.000 Here is 60 Minutes of All Places that did a very, very powerful report on how H-1B visas are actually putting American workers first.

00:06:25.000 President Trump just won a landslide victory.

00:06:27.000 A triumphant victory saying, Americans come first. 1.00

00:06:31.000 Cut 54 is the erosion of our sacred social contract.

00:06:35.000 Play Cut 54. It wasn't called training your replacement.

00:06:38.000 It was called knowledge transfer.

00:06:41.000 Craig DeAngelo worked for Northeast Utilities, now called Eversource, and was one of 220 IT workers replaced by H-1B visa employees.

00:06:52.000 DeAngelo says his replacement, a worker from India, told him he was making half DeAngelo's salary with no benefits.

00:07:00.000 I didn't get laid off for lack of work.

00:07:05.000 I got laid off because somebody cheaper could do my job.

00:07:10.000 Now, in its ideal, the H-1B visa is used for people you can't find other Americans to do that job, that it's only for high, high tech, like people with PhDs.

00:07:19.000 In reality, it's being used for entry-level accountants.

00:07:23.000 It's being used for people that are at the entry level of the job ladder.

00:07:28.000 This is another example of Cut 67 of how the H-1B visa has become inherently fraudulent against the American people.

00:07:38.000 Play Cut 67. Leo Pereiro had just received high-performance reviews from Disney.

00:07:44.000 When he was called into a personnel meeting, he expected a raise and a promotion.

00:07:49.000 And instead...

00:07:51.000 I was given the news that in 90 days my job was over and I had to train my replacement.

00:07:56.000 Never in my life did I imagine, until this happened at Disney, that I could be sitting at my desk and somebody would be flown in from another country, sit at my same desk and chair and take over what I was doing.

00:08:11.000 It was the most humiliating and demoralizing thing I've ever gone through in my life.

00:08:16.000 The biggest companies who hate us the most, that have smeared us, slandered us, and transed our kids, are the ones that are pushing for more foreign labor into the top levels of our corporations and our entry levels. 0.98

00:08:31.000 Now, I want to be very clear about where we stand on this.

00:08:33.000 We are opposed to the mass importations of H-1B visas to the United States.

00:08:39.000 Here are the facts.

00:08:40.000 The H-1B visa program is heavily abused by these major multi-trillion dollar companies and software firms generally to bring in workers at lower wages than they would have to pay Americans.

00:08:52.000 Another reason companies use them is that H-1B visas, like I say, is indentured servitude.

00:08:57.000 They can't leave that job.

00:08:59.000 Now, there's a really good argument, and I sympathize with this, to be honest.

00:09:02.000 An argument for letting in talented people to the United States.

00:09:05.000 I think that's a great argument.

00:09:07.000 No issue on that.

00:09:08.000 But H-1B system is not that.

00:09:10.000 It is a way to depress wages and replace American workers. 0.91

00:09:14.000 If you want to let in an ultra-talented genius, we have actually a different visa for that.

00:09:20.000 It's called O-1 Visa.

00:09:23.000 We could also change our system, but right now, America lets in 55,000 immigrants a year through the diversity lottery.

00:09:30.000 Imagine if we got rid of that, and instead of letting 10,000 people a year who score the highest on a difficult test of IQ plus English language proficiency with strict controls to prevent cheating and to keep out anybody with a criminal record, that would let in a lot of talented people who would make America a better country.

00:09:46.000 America is a rich country that hundreds of millions of people want to move to.

00:09:50.000 There's no excuse for not exploiting that to let in the only ones we want to let in the absolute most.

00:09:58.000 This is a violation of our social contract.

00:10:02.000 And it sounds good.

00:10:03.000 Let's just let more H-1B workers in. 1.00

00:10:05.000 But what about the 23-year-old that went to University of Washington and studied computer science at the UW Computer Science Department?

00:10:14.000 Shouldn't he be given preference above someone who could do the work for far less?

00:10:19.000 It is about priorities.

00:10:20.000 And it's not about what Charlie Kirk wants.

00:10:22.000 It's not about what other people want out there.

00:10:24.000 And I have friends on both sides of this debate.

00:10:26.000 It's very simple.

00:10:27.000 It's what the American people wanted.

00:10:29.000 And the American people overwhelmingly voted for less immigration and the prioritization of the American children and the American worker, not the American oligarch.

00:10:42.000 Folks, your halls are decked with holly and the sound of Andy Williams on the radio tells us to be of good cheer.

00:10:48.000 But often the joy of the season is lost in the hustle and bustle.

00:10:52.000 That's why my friends at Hillsdale College produced a free online course on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

00:10:58.000 You're likely familiar with the story of old miser Ebenezer Scrooge and his three ghostly visitors.

00:11:04.000 Scrooge famously refuses to be charitable in order to decrease the surplus population.

00:11:09.000 But there's more to Scrooge, which is why we cheer for him year after year.

00:11:13.000 In this free online course, you'll learn how Scrooge's frightening and enlightening encounters reveal the joy of Christmas.

00:11:20.000 You can register today at charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:11:23.000 That is charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:11:25.000 Charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:11:26.000 My friends, do treat yourself to Hillsdale's new free online course on A Christmas Carol.

00:11:31.000 Sign up today by visiting Charlie4Hillsdale.com.

00:11:34.000 That's Charlie4Hillsdale.com.

00:11:36.000 And on behalf of my friends at Hillsdale College, have a Merry Christmas.

00:11:43.000 Brooke writes us from Payson, Arizona.

00:11:45.000 Great spot.

00:11:45.000 Love Payson, by the way.

00:11:46.000 It's one of the crown jewels of Arizona.

00:11:49.000 That is not talked about enough.

00:11:51.000 Charlie, I'm a retired IT professional, and this subject is a thorn in my side.

00:11:55.000 I've seen this in place, and it makes me sick.

00:11:58.000 This has been going on for 20 years, however.

00:12:00.000 I worked at a Southern California Edison, and we had rooms full of H-1B workers.

00:12:05.000 I'm happy this subject is finally getting talked about.

00:12:08.000 Yes, you are correct.

00:12:09.000 These jobs are going to entry-level workers and that in many cases they're paid one-third of what their American counterparts are paid.

00:12:15.000 This practice must stop.

00:12:17.000 By the way, we are getting hundreds of emails about this, just like the floodgates are open, of people that have lost their jobs and they had to train their replacements.

00:12:26.000 Mind you, this is not illegal immigration.

00:12:28.000 That is a completely separate issue.

00:12:30.000 That is an invasion.

00:12:31.000 Everyone must go.

00:12:32.000 Mass deportation.

00:12:33.000 Close the border now.

00:12:34.000 This is voluntarily letting people in when our graduates, our children, and our people could otherwise do their jobs.

00:12:43.000 And I want to also just extend the best possible platforming to those that are proponents of H-1B. I don't think people that are pushing for H-1Bs or people that were saying this these last couple days, like Elon, who I think is a hero, or Vivek, who's a dear friend, or David Sachs, they love this country.

00:13:03.000 Their belief system, though, is this, is that we want to scoop up all the world's talent and bring it in.

00:13:10.000 What could possibly be wrong with that?

00:13:13.000 And of course, in practice, there's a lot wrong with it.

00:13:16.000 It's highly, highly complicated.

00:13:20.000 Right now, America lets in 55,000 people per year through our diversity lottery.

00:13:24.000 That is insane.

00:13:25.000 Get rid of it.

00:13:26.000 So here is my common ground.

00:13:27.000 Because I have friends on both sides of this debate.

00:13:30.000 On the pro-H1B and the anti-H1B. You guys know where we stand. 0.56

00:13:34.000 We stand with American workers 100%.

00:13:35.000 Figure it out.

00:13:36.000 Hire America.

00:13:37.000 That's our belief.

00:13:38.000 However, I totally sympathize with the pro-H1B lobby. 1.00

00:13:42.000 So here is my solution.

00:13:45.000 We should have a once per year test of your IQ, your mathematic ability, and your English language ability.

00:13:55.000 Let the top 10,000 people who score on that test into America a year.

00:14:01.000 Ban anybody with a criminal record, and that would be vastly different than what we do now.

00:14:06.000 So I totally see the idea of we want the world's super geniuses coming to America.

00:14:12.000 Agree, agree, agree, agree.

00:14:15.000 What I'm not cool with is just saying, oh, we need another accountant.

00:14:20.000 Let's bring someone in from a foreign country like India and we pay them $45,000 a year instead of $65,000 a year.

00:14:28.000 No.

00:14:28.000 Or, hey, I'm Salesforce.

00:14:30.000 Or, hey, I'm Dropbox.

00:14:32.000 Or, I'm Google.

00:14:34.000 Right?

00:14:35.000 And I want to have more people that are coding.

00:14:38.000 I don't want to pay $95,000 a year to somebody that just went to Caltech.

00:14:45.000 Instead, I want to pay $65,000 a year.

00:14:48.000 H1B visas have been abused and gamed to lower pay in the technology field.

00:14:54.000 Meanwhile, profits are at record highs.

00:14:56.000 Apple, how much is Apple worth today?

00:14:58.000 $3 trillion.

00:15:00.000 How much is Alphabet worth today?

00:15:02.000 $1.8 trillion.

00:15:03.000 How much is Meta worth today?

00:15:05.000 $1.6 trillion.

00:15:07.000 How much is Amazon worth today?

00:15:09.000 Nearly $2 trillion.

00:15:10.000 Can you guys get the actual market caps?

00:15:12.000 NVIDIA, $3.3 trillion.

00:15:14.000 These companies have plenty of value and plenty of profits.

00:15:19.000 To increase pay.

00:15:20.000 Plenty.

00:15:21.000 They're dealing with plenty of cash flow.

00:15:23.000 So this idea that these companies won't be able to make profit because they'll have to go pay 20% more for their workers.

00:15:31.000 Yeah, Apple is now at $3.8 trillion.

00:15:34.000 Think they can afford someone coding at $95,000 a year versus $60,000 a year.

00:15:42.000 American students deserve priority.

00:15:45.000 Either we are a country or we are a colony.

00:15:47.000 And that's fine.

00:15:48.000 If you think we are a colony...

00:15:50.000 Just be honest.

00:15:51.000 Just say we're a colony.

00:15:52.000 It's about making money, GDP growth, maximization, profit utilization.

00:15:55.000 Fine.

00:15:56.000 I think we're a country, which is a completely different thing.

00:15:58.000 A colony is a place where a bunch of people come in.

00:16:01.000 They trade goods and products and services.

00:16:03.000 No one speaks the same language.

00:16:04.000 You've got a barter system, a bunch of pirates, and you leave.

00:16:07.000 It is the difference between a subject-based government and a citizen-based government.

00:16:14.000 And we want a citizen-based government.

00:16:17.000 So I want the world's super geniuses.

00:16:19.000 IQ, math, English, top 10,000 a year, coming to America, you are welcome.

00:16:26.000 But the H-1B system is 80 to 100,000 people a year, and they tend to go into the industries and the roles of our best and brightest.

00:16:35.000 They are undercutting our best.

00:16:38.000 And so, right now, you have a superstar from Idaho who's studying computer science.

00:16:45.000 And he's going to have to compete against somebody from a foreign country that will undercut his wages?

00:16:51.000 And he did nothing wrong, and yet we're subsidizing that through our immigration policies.

00:16:56.000 We did not vote for that in November.

00:16:57.000 In fact, we voted for the opposite.

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00:17:59.000 Joining us now is Jonathan Kieperman, founder of Passage Press, otherwise known as Lomez.

00:18:06.000 He founded Passage Press, a book company, and was a professor at UC Irvine for 10 years and left because it's academia and obviously terrible.

00:18:15.000 They tried to dox him and cancel him last year, which we don't take very kindly here in the Charlie Kirk Show, of which we try to give him the biggest possible platform imaginable.

00:18:24.000 Mr. Lomez slash Jonathan, welcome to the program.

00:18:27.000 Charlie, it is great to be here.

00:18:29.000 Thanks so much for having me on.

00:18:30.000 It's an honor to be here.

00:18:32.000 I've been watching your show for a long time.

00:18:35.000 I think you've done some amazing work helping to build this America First Trump coalition, and you deserve a lot of credit for what you've done.

00:18:42.000 So this is great to be here and share this audience with you.

00:18:46.000 Thank you.

00:18:47.000 So, Jonathan, you're incredibly smart, obviously a professor.

00:18:51.000 I'd love to have you on just talk about what it was like being a professor at UC Irvine as a white male conservative in the English department.

00:18:59.000 I'm sure that you were fighting for the classics while your counterparts were not.

00:19:04.000 Jonathan, I want to talk to you about, because we were going to have Steve Salier on, but he was unavailable.

00:19:08.000 I know you published his book.

00:19:10.000 This raging and spirited and passionate dialogue and conversation that has been happening on X the last day around H-1B visas, high tech, and mass migration.

00:19:22.000 How should we think about this issue from an America First perspective?

00:19:26.000 Yeah, so, you know, this is a very healthy debate and I'm glad we're having it.

00:19:30.000 I've seen, you know, a lot of hot air on Twitter and certainly some feelings have gotten hurt and people have said some things that I'm sure they regret or wish they could take back.

00:19:38.000 But it's good to get this all out in the open.

00:19:40.000 You know, one thing we saw over the last six months to a year with Trump getting elected was bringing on these new coalition partners from Silicon Valley in the tech world.

00:19:51.000 This includes Elon Musk.

00:19:52.000 This includes the guys in the All In podcast.

00:19:55.000 This includes Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, of course.

00:19:59.000 And I think to some extent this new, you know, coalitional partner underestimated or didn't really understand the salience of immigration.

00:20:10.000 An American first policy with regards to labor policy for the Trump coalition.

00:20:18.000 And they got out over their skis a little bit over the weekend supporting H-1Bs. 0.99

00:20:23.000 And now, you know, you're seeing a lot of pushback from people on the right instructing them about why this is a bad idea, about how there are actually better workarounds than just Importing an infinite amount of H-1Bs from places around the world,

00:20:38.000 primarily India but elsewhere too, that we can actually build out our own labor supply for high-tech, high-skilled jobs that doesn't require importing people at lower wages to do that for us.

00:20:55.000 And it's a fairly simple fix.

00:20:57.000 And I think these guys are starting to figure that out and retreat a little bit from that position.

00:21:02.000 And we're going to reform this coalition based on this new understanding.

00:21:06.000 So that's the broad overview.

00:21:08.000 I love that.

00:21:09.000 So you and I are in harmony and the audience is in agreement around American workers first.

00:21:14.000 We're not going to pander to oligarch multi-trillion dollar companies.

00:21:18.000 No exaggeration, worth trillions of dollars just because they don't want to pay American workers first.

00:21:21.000 But let me steel man the pro-H1B visa argument and then I want to have you respond.

00:21:28.000 They will say, if we don't import these 80,000 to 100,000 people a year, America will lose.

00:21:35.000 It's about America winning.

00:21:36.000 Our companies will not be able to complete the modern equivalent of the Manhattan Project when it comes to artificial intelligence.

00:21:45.000 Therefore, for America to win, which you and I both want, for us to be able to win the AI arms race, which I imagine you and I both want, therefore, we must open up the H-1B visa process. 0.92

00:21:57.000 What do you make of that argument?

00:21:59.000 Yeah, so it's a worthwhile argument to take seriously and I think it starts with a bit of disagreement over the premise and what it means for America to quote-unquote win.

00:22:10.000 From an American first perspective, America winning means the flourishing of the American people inside of America.

00:22:20.000 And that takes precedent over the people of the rest of the world.

00:22:24.000 That doesn't mean we have to neglect or be hostile to the rest of the world, but America winning means American people flourishing.

00:22:32.000 And the difference between Trump and the MAGA right and all that has come before, at least in my adult lifetime, is the priority on American people.

00:22:44.000 So I want to emphasize that first.

00:22:46.000 That's what comes first.

00:22:47.000 Now, winning the AI race, winning the tech race is super important.

00:22:53.000 And I don't want to make that subservient to all other concerns.

00:22:58.000 But it is very important.

00:23:00.000 The way we do that is by bringing in absolutely necessary world-class talent.

00:23:07.000 I don't think there's anybody on the MAGA right who wants to prevent people like Elon Musk from coming into the country.

00:23:15.000 People like, you know, Wernher von Braun, Einstein, John von Neumann.

00:23:20.000 You know, the people from Operation Paperclip, the people who helped to get us to the moon, for example.

00:23:25.000 We want to bring in that world-class talent.

00:23:28.000 But there is a huge difference here between that world-class talent that can't be replaced by your average worker And then a guy working some entry-level job for $70,000, that can be an American job for Americans.

00:23:45.000 So I think something that's happening here is this conflation between this extreme level of talent that Elon Musk and others, including people on the MAGA right, want to bring into the country, and then just the flood of, you know, replacement-level, mediocre talent, engineering talent, that can easily Be replaced and be done by American workers and we want to preserve those jobs for Americans.

00:24:13.000 Yeah, and so I agree on the premise.

00:24:15.000 It's just there is this cataclysmic undertone that if we don't do this, we will fail.

00:24:20.000 Can you talk about the brainpower that we actually have been able to train and unleash domestically?

00:24:28.000 We have 330 million people here.

00:24:30.000 Is there untapped capacity amongst the American body politic to be able to accomplish some of these goals without having to go to Hyderabad?

00:24:40.000 Absolutely.

00:24:41.000 And this is the other thing.

00:24:42.000 There is nothing the American people cannot out-compete the rest of the world on, given a truly level playing field for the American worker and for American talent to rise to the top.

00:24:56.000 Something we've seen over the last decades with affirmative action, with disparate impact hiring, with the absolute degradation and breakdown of our higher ed system, with hiring practices, with caps on white men in management, 0.64

00:25:13.000 white men on boards, We have actively suppressed our talent over the course of several decades, and all we need to do is take the knee off the neck of the white American worker and the American worker broadly, and we will see all the talent we need. 0.77

00:25:29.000 Now, again, there may be some room to bring in other world-class talent from elsewhere, but the American people, if nothing else, have proven over the decades that we can do anything we set our mind to and anything we set our talent to.

00:25:45.000 Let's now do the opposite.

00:25:48.000 Try to explain to the tech world, if they're listening, why this is such a passionate issue for the MAGA base.

00:25:55.000 I was put on a group text last night with a lot of the tech bros and some of the MAGA people, and the premise of the group text was, MAGA people, explain to us why you do not agree with us.

00:26:06.000 Because this particular issue, I have to say, has some of the most fervent zeal I think you would agree with that, Jonathan, that if you are in favor of mass H-1B, you do not even understand the counterargument. 0.79

00:26:20.000 And to their credit, they wanted to hear it.

00:26:22.000 A couple things.

00:26:23.000 Number one, big tech has censored us and smeared us and treated us terribly.

00:26:28.000 Why would we then accommodate their policy wishes to That also is against and contradictory to the core element of the ascendant political majority in this country.

00:26:39.000 Makes no sense, right?

00:26:40.000 I mean, this entire world has been very hostile to us.

00:26:43.000 Is there something you'd like to add that to explain the sentiment of the average Trump voter and how they view this to somebody who does not see it?

00:26:52.000 They don't get it at all.

00:26:53.000 A CEO of a multi-trillion dollar company.

00:26:56.000 Yeah, and I have to say it's been very heartening the fact that these tech guys who put forward these H-1B positions want to hear what we have to say.

00:27:06.000 They understand on some level that they don't get it and are willing to listen, and I give them a lot of credit for that.

00:27:12.000 And I do actually trust that there's a lot of mutual interest here and that this coalition can stay together despite some disagreements over this H-1B question.

00:27:21.000 And what I'd say is simply, from the time that Trump came down the escalator in 2016, when he announced his run initially, the thing he was running on was immigration.

00:27:32.000 And it was preserving America and its inheritance and its largesse For the American people.

00:27:40.000 That is what MAGA-ism at bottom is based on.

00:27:44.000 It's based on preserving an America that we know and understand and is the greatest country in the world, preserving its country and preserving its people and its wealth for its people.

00:27:55.000 What this H-1B issue does is cut directly against that fundamental position that gave rise to MAGA in the first place.

00:28:07.000 Now, we can haggle over some of the details and how we negotiate around identifying talent.

00:28:13.000 But what the tech right needs to understand is this coalition exists, MAGA exists, Trump exists.

00:28:20.000 Because of this question over immigration, we fought for decades on this issue.

00:28:26.000 We have finally won a resounding victory here in 2024, and we don't intend to relent On this issue now, just because these tech guys need a couple of engineers in their department.

00:28:39.000 This is going to be something we fight on.

00:28:41.000 It's something we care about.

00:28:42.000 And it's something they need to understand as a fundamental issue for the MAGA right.

00:28:48.000 Jonathan, can you please plug Passage Press or anything that you have that you want?

00:28:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:53.000 I would love to.

00:28:54.000 Yeah, please go to Passage.press.

00:28:56.000 In the spirit of this show, we have a promo code PATRIOT. For free shipping on all our books, there you'll find Steve Saylor, who's written a ton about immigration, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and others.

00:29:09.000 Please go buy some books.

00:29:10.000 Ooh, you have all the verboten people.

00:29:12.000 That's what it should be called.

00:29:13.000 call.

00:29:14.000 That's right.

00:29:14.000 - That's right. - Verboten Press.

00:29:16.000 - Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:30:22.000 Jonathan, so I want to ask the other element of this, which makes it even more difficult, which is how foreigners are able to come to our universities and our schools.

00:30:33.000 And so, in some ways, that is a step one to H-1B. So someone goes to Caltech from a foreign country, they get a bachelor's degree, and then they apply for an H-1B visa to stay here more permanently.

00:30:48.000 And then, intentionally, unintentionally, then disenfranchises American workers.

00:30:53.000 The UC system, for example, basically underwrites their bills with foreigners, and they charge a ton to foreigners. 0.99

00:31:00.000 Explain to our audience our immigration policy when it comes to higher education, how that plays into the broader discussion.

00:31:05.000 Yeah, this is such an important component to this because you're talking about the talent development pipeline here and ultimately what gets manifest at the level of hiring decisions is determined by that talent development pipeline that should be our higher education system.

00:31:22.000 I worked in the UC system at UC Irvine and R1 University.

00:31:27.000 That's a main research university.

00:31:29.000 We develop a ton of STEM talent.

00:31:32.000 Here's a few facts for the people listening.

00:31:34.000 When I was there through 2012 to 2022, we had over 20% of our undergraduate population were foreign-born nationals.

00:31:48.000 By the time I left in 2022, and anybody can go look this up, there were more foreign-born nationals at UC Irvine than there were white males, okay, or whites generally, okay?

00:32:02.000 Now, there has been a massive displacement of the population that these universities are intended to serve by these foreign nationals.

00:32:13.000 There's a bunch of complicated cultural and economic reasons why that's the case.

00:32:19.000 These foreign nationals, for example, pay sometimes two, even three times much in terms of tuition than native-born students, and so the universities are incentivized to bring them in. 0.99

00:32:32.000 But whatever the explanation, this obviously has to change.

00:32:38.000 We need to recommit our higher ed institutions to developing our own native-born talent We're good to go.

00:33:08.000 Years in which this talent development pipeline needs to be reconfigured.

00:33:13.000 But that doesn't mean we don't do it.

00:33:15.000 That doesn't mean we take a shortcut and instead just throw up our hands and say this can't be done.

00:33:21.000 We're going to take in all these foreign H1Bs instead. 1.00

00:33:24.000 Last point here, and again, I say this as a simpleton when it comes to these matters, but at least my operating assumption is that artificial intelligence allows us to be more efficient, allows us to get rid of duplicative work.

00:33:38.000 Why is it that we're pushing for mass migration while we are seeing the integration of artificial intelligence technology?

00:33:46.000 Those things seem incompatible with one another, actually.

00:33:49.000 Yeah, I mean, we're told two competing things here.

00:33:52.000 On the one hand, AI is going to make all of these low-skill tech engineering jobs obsolete.

00:34:00.000 The computers are going to do it themselves.

00:34:02.000 We're told that, but then on the other hand, we're told we need to bring in All of these H-1Bs to fill those low skill or modestly skilled engineering coding jobs. 1.00

00:34:13.000 Those things don't add up.

00:34:14.000 Now, I'm not a tech expert.

00:34:16.000 I'm not an AI. So I can't tell you how real this is, how much of this is just sort of a rhetorical window dressing in order to justify why we need to bring in this cheap labor.

00:34:29.000 I'm willing to take these guys at their word But something doesn't add up here and they need to explain this.

00:34:35.000 And I just want to end on this final point.

00:34:37.000 This is not about bringing in better talent.

00:34:40.000 This is about bringing in cheaper talent.

00:34:43.000 And if we're going to have this conversation, I want us to be honest about that fact.

00:34:47.000 Jonathan, thank you so much.

00:34:48.000 Again, at least from my perspective, as we become more efficient, more automated, and more robotic, for better or for worse, that then would probably weaken the argument that we need to bring in tens of millions of people from the foreign lands. 0.58

00:35:01.000 Thank you so much, Jonathan.

00:35:02.000 You're welcome anytime to check out Passage Press.

00:35:04.000 Thank you so much.

00:35:05.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:35:06.000 Really appreciate it.

00:35:07.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:08.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:10.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 27, 2024

Breaking Down the Great H-1B Battle

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