David P Goldman
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.
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