Is America Just an Economic Zone?

The first test of incumbent President Trump’s ability to manage America’s estates may have already emerged. Less than a month out from the inauguration, the MAGA coalition are split between newcomer tech-bros and national conservatives, on the issue of H-1B visas. Thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of X (formerly Twitter), and making it the foremost platform for political conversations and citizen journalism, this was more than a debate about nuts-and-bolts immigration policy. The days-long exchange lifted the veil on both the factions vying for Trump’s favour, and the question which will define his second term: who, and what, makes a nation?

This began when, last week, Musk posted on X, in response to news that the US requires 160,000 semiconductor engineers by 2032 to have a competitive tech sector, that “we need more like double that number yesterday!” When a prominent account suggested that, surely, there must be enough among America’s 330 million citizens to build a competent team, Musk replied:

Your understanding of the situation is upside-down and backwards.

OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process.

HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.

This is not about handing out opportunities from some magical hat. You don’t get it. This is blindingly obvious when looking at NBA teams, as the physical differences are so obvious to see. However, the MENTAL differences between humans are FAR bigger than the physical differences!!

It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE.

If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE.

End of story.

Musk has previously voiced support for “greatly increasing legal immigration for anyone who is hard-working” — specifically issuing H-1B visas for the engineering and tech sector. Some objected on the grounds that H-1B visas have been issued en masse for entry-level jobs that Americans have trained for, at great expense. Even libertarian commentators, who encourage the use of H-1B visas to recruit high-skilled overseas talent, have explained how the lottery system leaves H-1Bs “ripe for abuse [by] third-party placement companies, mainly based in India, [who] sell spots to apply for the lottery.”

Musk, too, has supported reforming the H1B visa system, which has seen its low-wage requirements exploited to undercut American workers with cheap foreign labour. His intent to do what is best for America’s economy is not in question. (Though, as an Englishman, I would dispute the idea that mass immigration from the likes of India is an economic benefit.) Rather, their conception of what America is, and who Americans are, is incompatible with what the national conservatives believe.

Culture then became the fulcrum of the debate. Conjoined with this controversial stance was Musk’s (now deleted) support for a post calling immigration-restrictionists “retarded”, stating “those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem.” He vowed to “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

DOGE partner Vivek Ramaswamy also posted what was read as contempt for American culture: saying America will lose the economic arms-race to China because 90s kids watched too many sitcoms which heroised jocks over nerds; and that children need “More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers.”

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

Vivek’s vision of an 80-hour-work-week America is less a home, and more an insect hive of indentured servants. Trump’s supporters did not vote for that. Neither is citing Whiplash, a film about a musician who is verbally abused into being an exceptional drummer, at the expense of his sanity and intimate relationships, an enticing prospect to offer young people. Most see their careers as an enabling condition of having a home, and supporting family members who love them — rather than something which all must be sacrificed to maintain.

The pushback that ensued objected to more than just the legal technicalities and quantities of immigration. It concerned the characterisation of America as a company or sports-team, rather than a home. Why should comparative economic performance metrics come to define whether or not one’s country is a good place to live? The notion of “America winning” also led to the question being posed: if America only wins through mass importing foreign nationals to sustain its economy, then who are the Americans who it can be said are winning? Is America a nation — a home — or just an economic opportunity zone? How can nations compete, if one nations’ members are just another’s citizens-in-waiting?

Offence was taken to Vivek’s post in particular because a culture is a property of a people. The flaws in American culture are a result of the aggregate actions of Americans — and will therefore be remedied by Americans over time. To blame an entire culture is to blame an entire people for perceived shortcomings; and, although Vivek did not mean to, places the person levelling the criticism as outside the culture, and therefore not one of the people. It feels condescending to those being told that their culture is holding them back, especially by someone positioning themselves as an outsider — and especially when the culture is the enabling condition of the prosperity the critic is appealing to.

What Musk, Vivek, and proponents of mass “high-skilled” migration underestimate is how reliant America’s prosperity is on American culture. Meritocracy, honesty, and hard work are not universal principles, but particular to north-west Europe and North America. Most of the world is not WEIRD — Joseph Henrich’s acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. This mindset is peculiar to the US, UK, and Western Europe. While, yes, the Protestant ethic made America the world’s dominant economy, it remains the property of Protestants. Furthermore, it took the civic associations imported from England, as observed by de Tocqueville on his tour of America, to raise generations to whom the truths of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution remained self-evident. In short, the economy is enabled by the culture, which is practiced by a particular people.

A lack of theory-of-mind by WEIRD Americans means they fail to understand that most of the world does not think like they do. Many immigrants are not like Musk, or Courage Media’s own Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rather than assimilate, they retain the clan-like collectivist mindset of their home countries. They see nothing wrong with lying, or nepotistic hiring on familial or ethnic lines, to advantage their in-group. Against this, the liberal meritocracy proposed by global market advocates has no defence. Instead, it only demands Americans conform to the inhuman working habits of foreign nations, or be replaced by cheap foreign labour with no loyalties to the host land and culture. As Harrison Pitt wrote, in an essay on the anthropological misconceptions of Musk’s immigration policy:

“Referring back to Indians, it is a testament to their giftedness as a people that they accounted for as many as half of the high-skilled H-1B worker visas issued between 2001 and 2015. On the criteria laid out above, this makes them strong candidates for integration. However, to be a fully assimilated citizen of a new country is not like being a well-fitted widget in a cybernetic collective. Human individuals are more than mere units of variable economic potential.”

Questions of quantity, and legal status, fail to address this cultural conflict. Ultimately, neglecting cultural concerns when setting immigration policy will recreate the same economic privation seen in the third-world. Importing thousands of culturally distant peoples into America will not change the imported people through economics, but rather change the American economy and culture through imported peoples.

This belief that values and culture are the property of a people is that of national conservatives. This movement has spanned the US, UK and Europe, and its members include observant Jews, tweed-wearing Anglicans, Christian nationalists, and traditionalist Catholics. Their proposed international alliance of unapologetic, culturally distinct countries, founded not on liberal values, but on friendships between self-conscious ethno-cultural groups, is alien to advocates of importing “Elite human capital” irrespective of its origin.

For example, Richard Hannania has disparaged nat-cons of the JD Vance variety for not “want[ing] foreigners around no matter how talented they are”, whereas “Tech people know that’s crazy.” (A position Musk rebuked on X.) This is because, for Vice President Vance, America is not an economic zone, but his home. As Vance said in both his Nat Con DC and RNC acceptance speech:

“America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. …

Now when I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, “Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.” …

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.”

The Americans who comprise the country are as irreplaceable as the members of a family. As Siedentop notes, the city states of antiquity were composed of families who intermarried, worshiped the same ancestors and gods, and formed tribes. This does not mean that these families cannot accommodate newcomers — as Vance’s own family shows. But nations are composed of tribes, families, congregations — a people. A transient population of foreign mercenaries, brought together by geographical coincidence and self-interest, is what Aristotle described as the company kept by tyrants. A civilisation comprised of those with hyphenated ethnicities before their national identity, American, is not a family, and therefore cannot be a nation.

This assertion, too, causes consternation among the academics in MAGA’s orbit. Incensed liberal James Lindsay recently accused JD Vance of propagating a simultaneously “fascist” and “Stalinist” definition of the nation:

This definition of the nation:

“A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”

comes from Joseph Stalin.

Stalin’s recognition of what constitutes a nation — usually as a pretext to liquidate its people and subsume its sovereignty in the evil Soviet empire — should not stain those who also accurately define it with guilt-by-association. American founding father John Jay similarly defined a nation as “a people descended from the same ancestors, the same language, professing the same religion.” This does not contaminate the founding fathers with the stench of communist sympathies. Nor can Israel be accused of being “Woke Right” for its response to the collective threat posed to the Jewish people, their faith, and their state by the Islamists of Hamas. (A response which James also supports.) It is unreasonable to accuse all those who recognise a nation as being a people, and not just a landmass or scout’s-pledge of values, of being indistinguishable from the perpetrators of the Holocaust and Holodomor.

All that Musk and Vivek have done to earn Trump a second term must be commended. America owes them, as political allies, and members of its national tribe, a debt of gratitude. But now, what Trump himself must decide, as the man to whom his all-star coalition owes allegiance, is the direction his administration will take. Is America a home, for people distinctly identified as Americans? Or is it an economic way-station for those seeking more prosperity than their place of birth allows to pass through as they please?

The former preserves America’s unique culture, and thereby its prosperity, by ensuring newcomers pass sufficient tests of friendship before they enjoy the riches Americans can offer. This safeguards against Americans, black and white alike, whose ancestors built the country, from being exploited; and also ensures that the truly grateful newcomers are not lumped in with transient mercenaries, and treated as unwanted strangers rather than as members of the national family. The latter will only leave America, over time, a poorer, less familiar, and culturally incoherent place, placing its dream out of reach for natives and immigrants alike.

America must remain a nation; which means that Americans — to whom the culture, and all the benefits it brings, belongs — must feel at home there.