Mark Krikorian - Executive Director, Center For Immigration Studies Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
He's not talking about the charge card, is it? No,
because I don't really understand stand language you're speaking, but
I'm pretty sure he's talking about passports and visas. Mark
RACCRNY is with us, the executive director Bartney at the
Center for Immigration Studies. All right, let's get into this
H one B visa thing. Elon musk as I mentioned,
I think told President Trump, you know, I wouldn't be

(00:21):
here if not for the H one B visa. It's
kind of an important program.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Yeah, I mean, it's a supposedly temporary visa usually used
by tech companies. The thing is, there's kind of two
groups of people, if you want to think about it
this way, that take advantage of it. Some of them,
a handful, are people who really are best and brightest,

(00:46):
top people in the planet, you know, in their fields.
The problem is that most of the visas go to
kind of mid level average at best, you know, tech
people who are used as white collar, cheap labor. And
so the question is, and that's where the abuses all

(01:08):
come in. For instance, a number of years back, some
of your listeners may remember this was a big deal.
Disney fired all of its IT staff and replaced them
with H one b's from India. And to make it
even worse, it forced the Americans they hired to train

(01:28):
their replacements as a condition of receiving severance pay and
their replacements frankly didn't know what they were doing and
had to be trained. So where's the best and brightest thing?
So people talking about this are conflating two things. The
tech industry people like Elon Musk and others are saying, look,

(01:51):
pointing to the real top people who get in with
this visa, the sort of maga people complaining about it
are pointing to the other majority of the people who
get this visa, who frankly aren't best and brightest and
are the reason abuses. So the question is, how do
you fix this without getting rid of it? Yeah, and

(02:13):
you fix it. You fix it by not by not
giving them the way distributing the way it's done. Now,
believe it or not, they actually give this out by lottery. Lottery,
millions of millions of come one, hundreds of thousands of
companies applied and they picked randomly from them. That's no

(02:35):
way to get the best and brightest. No, if they
just changed it, and the Trump administration the first time
tried to change it by giving the visas out based
on the highest salary first, you would satisfy both groups
of people's concerns. And that's something I tried to push
for last week in a piece.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I wrote some of this is. Some of this though
kind of mark kind of subjective. In other way words,
you may be hiring somebody who on paper looks, you know,
middling or mediocre, but turns out to be great, you know,
after a period of time, turns out to be one
of the best investments your company ever made. Can you

(03:15):
make it an objective decision about people just based on
the salary that the job is going to pay.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
It's look, it's a rough yardstick, there's no question about it.
But we're talking a not about how companies in this
country are going to sort of take a chance on
a job applicant or something that you know that you're right,
that happens somebody you thought wasn't going to turn out
all that great surprises you. That's fantastic. But we're talking

(03:44):
about letting foreigners into the country to compete in the
American labor market, and we're going to have to use
some kind of objective you know, measurement, and it seems
to me the way to do that is to let
businesses tell you who they think is really going to

(04:05):
be the best, who they value based on how much
they're willing to pay that person. It's not going to
be perfect, but this is government we're talking about, and
it's good enough for.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Government work, and certainly better than what's being done now.
Mark is always good to talk to you, sir. Thank you.
Mark gregoryan executive director of Center for Immigration Studies. It
is six twenty six here on news radio seven forty
KTRH