Trump Settles MAGA Movement Feud On Tech Visas

12/29/2024 10:11:19 PM

(MENAFN- Asia Times) A week before Donald Trump fired him in August 2017, then-presidential strategist Steve Bannon blew up at this writer for suggesting that American industry needed to bring in Chinese engineers.

“They're all Chinese spies!” Bannon shouted. We were sitting in Bannon's disheveled cubicle in the West Wing, talking about reviving US manufacturing. America graduates barely 34,000 mechanical engineers and about 17,000 chemical engineers a year, I observed. As much as we want to train American talent, I argued, we can't do that fast enough to keep pace with China.

Math education in the US is a disaster, and the Bannon wing of the MAGA movement is a case in point: Opponents of legal immigration for skilled workers can't understand the numbers that show how badly they are needed. More on that below.

Bannon waded into the debate again last week, lambasting Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for backing the H-1B visa program that allows US companies to hire foreign engineers. The H-1B program“t's about taking American jobs and bringing over essentially what have become indentured servants at lower wages...the thing's a SCAM by the Oligarchs in Silicon Valley,” Bannon tweeted.

Musk responded on X,“The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” the program that brought Musk to America from his native South Africa.

Engineering School	Acceptance Rate (2022)
Iowa State	91%
University of Missouri	85%
South Dakota School of Mines	81%
University of Alabama	74%
Texas Tech	68%
University of Pittsburgh	67%
Texas A&M	64%
University of Wisconsin	60%
Ohio State	57%
Colorado School of Mines	57%
University of Washington	53%

Iowa State, ranked number 46 in the U.S. News rating of engineering schools, accepts 91% of applicants. The University of Missouri, in 99th place, accepts 85%. And Texas A&M, ranked number 10, takes 64%.

The problem starts in grade school. There are slightly less than 250,000 high school math teachers in the US, but US universities in 2021 graduated just 27,000 Bachelor's degrees in math each year-and few of them chose to teach.

In Europe, a bachelor's degree in mathematics is required to teach the subject at the secondary school level. American schools make do with a few courses in“math education.”

To persuade more mathematicians to teach mathematics, high schools would have to pay math teachers more than, say, gym teachers. Presently they earn almost identical salaries. The teachers' unions, founded on the principle that all forms of teaching are equal, would object strenuously.

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