Bill Kristol’s NeverTrump group is leading the backlash against a Silicon Valley investor who says gifted Americans are being shut out of top-flight careers by elite support for migrants and diversity.
“Geez, that sounds a little bit like weird racialist thinking,” wrote Kristol’s deputy, Jonathan Last.
“If you’re a family… where I grew up [Wisconsin], and you’ve got a smart kid, and you think you’re going to get them into a top university in this country… there is no chance,” investor Marc Andreessen told his rapt audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation in May. He added:
Breitbart News posted Andreessen’s criticism on July 9, and his critics first replied via a Washington Post article on July 12, which said:
Last headlined his article, “Marc Andreesen and the Billionaire Victims Club: The gripes of this bigwig of the tech right don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
Last ignored the evidence behind Andreessen’s charge that universities and companies have closed off the career path for gifted Americans, and then threw the racism charge at him, saying:
If Andreesen cared about fairness, he’d be talking about how lucky his generation was and agitating for more government spending on education in order to bring down college costs. That he cares more about racial demographics than cost is a tell.
“He got his. Now he wants to burn down the machinery that made him rich. Because it’s so hurtful to him,’ Last wrote.
Andreessen’s pro-migration critics also used the Washington Post to attack him.
The newspaper posted leaked clips from Andreessen’s comments in a group chat between White House officials and technology leaders. The group was created by Indian-born Sriram Krishnan, who is a White House senior policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence.
Marc Andreessen – group chat
The newspaper spotlighted subsequent complaints from Andreessen’s critics:
Some members of the group chat found Andreessen’s comments discussing immigration and attacks on universities extreme and out of character with the chat’s usual tone, the two members of the chat said.
AI insiders have often used the chat to impress on Trump officials that alienating immigrants and attacking universities will undermine the ability of the U.S. to maintain its lead in technology by attracting and training top talent, the two members said.
Andreessen ceased participating in the group soon after his messages in early May, the two members said.
Marc Andreessen – group chat
There is much evidence that many ordinary and gifted American graduates are being shouldered out of white-collar careers — and into low-wage careers — by employers’ preferences for cheap and compliant visa workers.
Roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates now hold U.S. jobs that would otherwise have gone to young Americans — and federal programs allow roughly 300,000 more foreign graduates to enter each year. The programs include the well-known H-1B program and the little-known Optional Practical Training program which annually allows more than 300,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges to get hired for jobs, often via ethnic hiring networks at Fortune 500 companies.
The Washington Post article did not mention the visa programs, perhaps because it is owned by Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon company is a primary user of the H-1B and OPT programs.
But The Washington Post has already published several articles — including Associated Press articles — about ordinary U.S. graduates getting sidelined in an economy where Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors prefer to import Indian and Chinese graduates.
Graduates [are] facing a bumpy transition to professional life as they contend with one of the toughest job markets in years for people in their 20s. The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 jumped to 5.3 percent in the past six months ending in May, up from 4.4 percent for the same period a year earlier,
A June 26 AP article said:
“Nobody was taking interviews or responding back to any applications that I filled out,” Lindo, who is from Auburn, Georgia, said. “My resume is full, there’s no gaps or anything. Every summer I’m doing something. It’s just, ‘OK, so what else are you looking for?’”
She has returned to Clark for a master’s program in supply chain studies and has an internship this summer at a Fortune 500 company in Austin, Texas. She’s hopeful it will lead to a job next year.
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Cory Stahle, an economist at the job-listings website Indeed, says postings for software development jobs, for example, have fallen 40% compared with four years ago. It’s a sharp shift for students who began studying computer science when hiring was near its peak.
Despite the jeering from Kristol’s group, a growing number of GOP-affiliated elites are calling for less legalized migration to help promote prosperity, innovation, and fairness.
“Marc nails it,” said a July 12 much-commented tweet from Silicon Valley investor Chamath Palihapitiya, who was born in Sri Lanka, an island just off the coast of India. He added:
In my opinion, if you get federal funding, you should be capped at how many foreign students you admit to 5-10% at the undergraduate level and 30-40% at the graduate level. The clear preference should be merit-based admissions of kids from America.
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It’s stupid and is hollowing out our ability to be long term competitive. Overall, whether it’s this issue, free speech, antisemitism, overgrowth of administrators or limits on academic freedom, there is an immense amount of rot in the Ivy League.
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