From my days in the tech industry… H-1B visas were a big help to the employers because they got people who either had to produce on the employer’s terms, i.e., day and night, weekdays and holidays, or find a plane ticket back home in the course of an afternoon. Moreover, H-1B workers were invariably paid less than we were, and they ultimately replaced us.

But the MAGA youth calling for an end to the visa program to obtain more equity for American workers are naïve. Corporations do not want to pay more than they currently pay, and will pay as little as they can get away with. They will restructure their job roles to circumvent labor laws, just as Walmart has done for decades. For computer programmers, a job might be “supervising a programming AI,” which will pay 10 hours a week on-site at minimum wage, schedules determined at random every Sunday night.

There will be no more 40-hour/week salaried jobs with benefits, health insurance, and a living wage. Suggesting that ending the H1-B program will result in such notional jobs falling into the hands of loyal unemployed America-Firsters is wishful thinking. The only ones who can even have a vague approximation will be nepo babies, for whom salary is mere lagniappe.

It is ironic that students leapt to STEM disciplines because they were told these majors would secure their futures and would not be transient, unlike humanities majors. The same lies have been told repeatedly throughout the history of academe. To go to the other extreme, remember that an honors degree in classics from Oxford or Cambridge meant that, in the eyes of the British East India Company, you were qualified to rule India.

Now that universities are self-destructing under external pressure, aided by administrator Quislings, the idea of a “contract” with college students to make them acceptable to employers, once the role of community colleges, is gone. Will students be able to make their lives meaningful through their studies? My Indian colleague is probably the future: students will go to a year-long “coder boot camp” to internalize as much Microsoft as possible so that they can be immediately useful to an American employer. That knowledge will become obsolete in 18 months. The employer will likely take someone from a later boot camp with updated skills rather than retain the original worker.

The H1-B worker who replaced me, Vikram (“Vik”), was one of the sweetest, kindest people I have ever met. Vik knew he was not getting the best deal, but he was determined to make enough in America to let him marry the girl next door and rent an elephant for the wedding. I received a postcard from him several months later, showing that he had secured not one but two elephants for his wedding. I wish I still had that postcard.