Op-ed: Can the Dems Outflank Trump on Immigration?

The governor’s race in the red state of Ohio is a toss-up, according to the latest polls. The primaries aren’t until May, but the presumptive nominees for the November general election are Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.

I don’t know enough about the state’s politics to place Acton on a spectrum, but she led the state’s COVID response, and her website hits the usual Democratic messages: “reproductive freedom”, unions, education, and health care.

But starting last week, she’s been alluding to a less predictable issue: the H-1B visa program.

The H-1B visa is an increasingly unpopular foreign-worker scheme, ostensibly intended to bring in high-skilled workers, but in fact providing cheap, controllable white-collar foreign workers, mostly to IT.

Acton hasn’t specifically come out and said she’s against the H-1B racket, but she’s been hitting Ramaswamy for his defense of importing foreign workers, which he justified back in December by saying American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long”, as exemplified by the fact that young people didn’t root for the nerdy characters in 1990s sitcoms.

Acton has naturally turned that into a message that Ramaswamy thinks “Ohioans aren’t succeeding because they’re lazy and mediocre and watching too much TV.”

The reason she only launched this implicit (and almost certainly insincere) critique of the H-1B program last week is that President Trump teed it up for her. During last Tuesday’s interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, he strongly defended the H-1B program (though the examples he cited, like the Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, which ICE raided, aren’t apropos). Even as Ingraham pushed back, Trump insisted Americans “don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles.’”

(I don’t know about making missiles, but in the tech industry, H-1Bs not only aren’t training anyone, they frequently have to be trained by the Americans they’re hired to replace.)

This week, Trump again argued for importing foreign workers, saying this time that they’re needed to teach Americans how to make computer chips.

These statements — combined with the president’s recent comment that he wants to bring in 600,000 students from Communist China — have understandably upset Trump supporters, with some catastrophizing about the death of MAGA and the president’s surrender to the Swamp. . . .

[Read the whole thing at National Review.]