Billionaires and Visas

Of all things, the recent debate about the H-1B visa program has illustrated a division in attitudes in what is vaguely known as the conservative movement.

The program is supposedly to allow visas to qualified technical workers for the good of the development of business and technology. The three billionaires associated with the so-called populist right, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and President Trump, have surprised that part of the conservative movement which seems prejudiced against immigration by favoring the program. All three are businessmen, and their perspective is based on practicality. They are aware of how the creeping incompetence evident in our society hampers business. Part of that incompetence involves what used to be called the work ethic but which Ramaswamy calls “culture.” 

Many people who are not entrepreneurs agree that the quality of work seems to have suffered a decline in our country. Sometimes this is blamed on education. Other times it is related to generational attitudes (“millennials,” etc.). It also can be argued that it can be connected in some ways to the racial tensions that are so acute among us. 

This is related to inherent contradictions in our economic system. There are many unemployed, but there are also surpluses of jobs that are not filled. Restaurants close for lack of workers, nursing homes and hospitals are understaffed, inefficiency seems to be a common experience, shortages and backlogs are related to staffing problems.

Immigration is part of this story because the immigrants who come to the country undocumented seem able to find work in a vast underground or parallel economy. Home repair, landscaping, small construction projects, painting, and other areas of the economy are porous for under the table enterprises. This is not just for immigrants with document problems. I know many in recovery from addiction who find work “without benefits, cash only.” People working in two different jobs sometime have one in the formal economy and one in the informal. 

Within that picture, men like the three billionaires find it frustrating that some of the people hired for jobs are not what you would call worker bees. Ramaswamy invokes a kind of new Horatio Alger mentality of working to succeed when he says some employers would rather have immigrants or first-generation Americans in their jobs than citizens who don’t seem to be willing to work with discipline or show extra effort in the pursuit of job excellence. I’m amused that he recommends the movie Whiplash to inspire young people—it shows a musician who responds to a demanding formation by a person whose instincts seem very negative. I knew an employer who recommended his workers watch The Devil Wears Prada—not to criticize the ambitions and injustices of superiors who demand more than what can be expected of those hired to help them, but to inspire his employees to almost impossible standards of productivity.

For the billionaires, practicality and efficiency mean that foreign workers often are more productive. It also means that they tend to reduce “culture” to what is good business. Capitalism has always tried to procure workers that promote capital formation. In Cleveland, the steel mills sent agents to Europe when the more or less assimilated Irish workers tried to demand better conditions, hours, and pay in the steel factories. Steamships of new workers from Eastern Europe were imported to take the place of the “difficult” workers, and the Irish went into organized labor in other fields—into the police force and politics.

“Culture” includes the work ethic but is much greater than its practical and temporal advantages. The values of culture are independent of mere technological and economic goals. Bernard Lonergan, the Jesuit philosopher and theologian, said that culture should be a moral force and by being reduced to what pays or is more practical “culture renounces its one essential function.” Culture is about spiritual values and moral meaning. It therefore creates boundaries for human activity that is in essence dehumanizing (e.g., abortion, IVF, gender “transitioning,” institutionalized oppression and injustice). Some things are technically and politically possible which are not moral. 

But the issue of the H-1B is complicated. In some cases, some companies are like employment agencies, providing industry with foreign workers who might be considered more reliable, even for nontechnical jobs. I heard on a podcast that the cashiers at 7-Elevens and truck drivers are sometimes given visas to work under the program. Something cast as a search for elite talent has become the tool of employers who are weary of worker instability and inefficiency. Sometimes it seems that “things fall apart,” that functionality is declining in processes that are ordinary and necessary. Anyone who has wondered about cashiers, or people in retail, or office employees who are not very hardworking can sympathize with the practical approach. There is a tolerance in our economy of what really looks like incompetence.  

There is a spiritual aspect to this that can be related to the value of all work as human vocation. One can point out that a spirituality of work, like that promoted by Blessed Cardinal Wyszynski, St. John Paul II, and St. Josemaria Escriva is sorely lacking in parts of the workforce. This involves practicality but also man’s search for meaning in his life and activity. If work was seen generally as a means of sanctification, many of the contradictions of our economy could be resolved.

Of course, the billionaires are worried about the bottom line. Mr. Ramaswamy is perhaps deliberately provocative in describing American workers as deficient in energy and motivation. It recalls all the “Why Johnny can’t read” stuff that came about after the Russians shocked the West with Sputnik. “Why Johnny is a lousy worker” is a real problem, but it is something beyond just the practical. There are philosophical and historical dimensions to this question.

Is there a cohesive American culture with the values that would guarantee a better quality of life across the board in our country? That is a question freighted with epistemological considerations. Who decides the values we live by? A common attitude is to say nothing is either right or wrong till thinking make it so, but all is relative. Modernity carries within it a toxic loss of faith in human activity and relationships. It is every man for himself with a vengeance. That is why we are reaping the whirlwind of confusion.

Lonergan saw a steady tendency to decline in the multitude of changes in society. He saw this as a conflict of practicality versus transcendent values, which he termed, infelicitously in my view, as “cosmopolis.” His “cosmopolis” is not a world government but a “culture” that would combat “the rationalization of sin” that contributes to the longer cycle of decline.” My translation: a communal understanding of the transcendent values which will not permit humankind to institutionalize individual and collective egoism and begin a Gadarene descent into a chaos of meaninglessness and self-destructive activity. 

Is there such a common “culture” in the United States? American political culture has always been hybrid, containing elements of Judeo-Christian tradition with Enlightment notions. Popular culture has been more religious, but the force of faith is waning as institutional religion declines and religious ignorance explodes. In this crisis, language is only a minor aspect of a much greater problem. There are many English-only speakers who have little grasp of traditional culture and for whom value concepts are like a foreign language. How do we go about creating such a culture using the best elements of the fragments of consensus that remain? Your guess is as good as mine. American political culture has always been hybrid, containing elements of Judeo-Christian tradition with Enlightment notions.Tweet This

This might seem far away from a debate about immigration, which for me sometimes seems to be a hostility to any newcomer—“Hospes, hostis,” in the Latin expression: “the stranger the enemy.” It is ironic that only a few generations separate many of the most hostile to immigration from their immigrant ancestors. (There’s a joke about an Irishman who lands on the dock and looks over his shoulder at immigrants from other countries and says, “Look at the foreigners.”)

Which leads me to another point about visas and temporary residence leading to permanent residence in our country that involves our Church. Our dioceses, more and more, are dependent on foreign priests and religious for ordinary structural commitments. In my diocese, there are a good number of African and Filipino priests, for instance. The bishops should provoke a national awareness about how it is getting harder to bring priests to our country to serve pastoral needs. 

Some priests come to the country for five years and then must return for two years to their native countries before reapplying to renew their residency. We just lost a pastor locally, in part due to residency issues. The issue of the number of foreign priests serving in our country is an index of the vocation crisis we live but also a reality that implies hardship when their visas are delayed or impeded. The Biden administration’s inclusion of religious workers in a category with other types of residency or visa applications is causing a strain on resources that many Catholics are not aware of. It is another indication of why more humility and calm are required about immigration problems and radically exclusionary proposals.

All of the above might seem far afield as a comment on a specific issue like H-1B visas. But the complexity of immigration demands complicated responses and an intellectual finesse that seems quite scarce in our milieu. Simple solutions work for simple problems and have a charmed life in simplistic mottos and scenarios on the internet. Sorry, friends. This is just not so for immigration.