Glenn Loury: We Need Asian Migrants to Offset Loser Americans

Neil MunroJanuary 4, 2022

The U.S. government should import more Asian workers because Americans are mediocre laggards, says Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown University.

“I think we need these [Asian] people,” Loury said in a December 20 conversation with Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Loury continued:

Let them come. I mean, in fact, that’s the only way we’re going to survive the challenge of the Chinese behemoth going forward another generation or two, because if I look at what’s going on in the legacy population — white and black — of the United States of America, I see a lot of mediocrity, I see a lot of laggardliness, I see a lot of decay and corruption and so forth, of people not realizing the full human potential … I don’t know what the alternative is.

“Think about what you’re saying,” Wax responded:

Glenn, we’ve got the whole heartland! We can’t just kind of give up … [on] this whole heartland population, okay? This is the population, the descendants of people that built this country, that conceived this country, that thought of the basic compact and the basic paradigm and the fundamental ideas of this country for a couple of centuries. And now you’re basically saying, they’re spent, it’s over for them. They’ve sunk into mediocrity and indifference.

Well, I agree those [problematic] things are happening. But why are they happening? What can we do to revitalize? Can we revitalize this — let’s just say it — this mainly white population?

Loury’s claim that Americans cannot keep pace with Asian workers echoes multiple claims by investors who demand more visa workers instead of domestic political reform.

Ex-Google chief Eric Schmidt wrote in a 2020 op-ed:

The ability to attract and retain top-tier talent from around the world is the backbone of a trifecta where the best talent comes to the U.S., to work at the best institutions on the most cutting-edge intellectual property. Our nation’s own National Security Strategy says it best: ‘The United States must continue to attract the innovative and the inventive, the brilliant and the bold.’

The Loury-Waxman conversation has prompted claims by progressive reporters that Waxman is “racist” for defending Americans of all races from companies’ self-serving importation of Asian workers.

In a January 2 reply to the suggestion of racism, Wax wrote:

As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration. There needs to be more focus on people who are already here, and especially the core (and neglected) “legacy” population, and a push to return to traditional concepts and institutions and Charles Murray’s “American Creed.”

In the December 20 conversation, Loury backpedaled when Wax questioned him:

What’s your theory for why Americans are not going into these fields, not getting the PhDs in science, even in economics or fields like that? What’s your theory for the pall of despair, of lassitude, that’s settled over people who are not at the very tippy top, who are not part of the elite?

Loury replied:

I heard this argument against the visas — what do they call them? H-1B or something like that? The special visas that they give companies the right to use, to bring talent in, say software engineers from South Asia, whatever.

This guy, I don’t want to name him, but he’s a relatively prominent defender of the American nationalist interest against the immigration of talent. He says, “I’ll tell you what: When Google and Microsoft can tell me who is the smartest kid coming out of the black ghetto of Oakland, or East Palo Alto … [and] they tell me he’s not up to snuff, I’ll give them a visa to bring somebody in from South Asia. … He meant “I know the talent is there, there are diamonds in the rough, and they’re not looking for him and they don’t have any incentive to look for him because they’ve got an easy safety valve [with the visa workers].”

“Exactly,” Wax responded.

Loury said:

Maybe if the private sector didn’t have that safety valve of being able to go offshore for their talent, they’d be involved in school committee elections, they’d be involved in developing curricula, they’d be involved in innovative supplements to the K-to-12 education that people are not getting in the classroom and find ways of bringing that that human potential out in our domestic population. I would be for that.

But Loury knows little about the damaging impact of the visa workers programs on American competitiveness and American professionals. He said:

What’s the danger? What would be wrong with having a lot of Chinese or Indian or Korean engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and whatnot, running around here creating value, enlivening the society? I don’t see how we lose from that.

Under current subsidy rules set in 1990 and expanded in 2000, Fortune 500 companies can recruit foreign graduates with the dangled prize of government-provided green cards and then citizenship. That prize is so valuable that roughly one million mid-skill foreign graduates are now working in U.S. jobs for many years to get their valuable green cards, often in lower-wage, gig-work jobs for Fortune 500 subcontractors.

This cheap, disposable, and compliant “green card workforce” is excellent for investors — but it profoundly distorts the white-collar labor market and the regional economics n the United States.

For example, the skewed labor market makes it extremely difficult for U.S. graduates to compete for jobs against visa workers who can be paid with the alternative currency of free, government-delivered citizenship. The imported foreign workers will work for lower wages and long hours — and without complaint — because they carry little college debt and are eager to leave China or India to take any job in the United States.

“Corporations make extraordinary efforts to not hire Americans, and they can do this … by attracting vast numbers of employment-visa [foreign] workers with [offers of] a pathway to citizenship,” said Kevin Lynn, who is the founder of U.S. Tech Workers group which campaigns against the visa programs.

The programs exclude young Americans from many white-collar careers, and they concentrate technological and economic power in a few coastal investors. The programs also force down professionals’ wages and help to slow U.S. technological innovation, especially at Boeing, Theranos, and Intel.

The programs’ most insidious damage inflicted on U.S.-style professionalism. When U.S. executives appoint foreign managers, U.S. professionals are subordinated to foreign workers’ visa priorities and to foreign workplace cultures. The Indian workplace culture is so ruthless that Indian managers often fire accomplished U.S. professionals so they can sell their jobs to unskilled Indian workers, according to numerous Indians who hope to become U.S. professionals. This hidden process strips U.S. professionals of their power to promote quality and innovation in the face of profit-maximizing executives.

The programs also help shift heartland wealth to coastal states, and they also pump foreign visa-workers into the leftover heartland state jobs. This transfer of many categories of jobs from Americans to visa workers helps to suck wealth and people from heartland states and from smaller towns in Iowa, Kentucky, West Virginia, Michigan, upstate New York, and many other places.

However, the two academics spotlighted familiar problems in U.S. education programs.

“Maybe there’s something to the fact that education policy — which must have something to do with this malaise that you’re describing — the failure to excite kids about mathematics,” said Loury, adding:

The main obstacle is, our kids are very poorly trained in K-12 and in the first four years of college at the technical curriculum. They don’t pay enough attention to it, they don’t get their skills developed in it.

Waxman suggested that woke educators undercut Americans’ ability to learn:

We now have this dominance of an educational establishment that is affirmatively anti-excellence, affirmatively anti-meritocratic. What’s happening to the mathematics curriculum in California is emblematic — you’re not going to get anyplace when you say, “Nobody needs to learn calculus, calculus is racist, calculus is a token of white supremacy.”

“That is an abomination, that is just horrible,” Lourey replied.

“The politicization of this gives [teachers] a free hand to inculcate this oppressor-oppressee wokeness paradigm into students, which I actually think saps their ambition,” said Waxman.

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