MAGAs, it may come as a great surprise to you that white, Christian American citizens who are born here to American citizens are not the only smart, hardworking, honest, taxpaying people in the world.

Yes, really.

There actually are very smart, hardworking, honest, taxpaying, valuable to America, black, brown, yellow, red, South American, Canadian, Mexican, Central American, Australian, European, Asian, African, Caribbean, other island, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, people of other religions, and citizens of all other nations.

If you are a MAGA, you probably didn’t know that, because your unquestioned leader wants to deport all those people from our walled-in, frightened nation. 

Why? Many reasons are given, mostly regarding jobs, taxes, and crime. But those given reasons have been disproven by (gasp) actual data.

No, they are phony, convenient excuses, not the real reason you want those people, and even their children born here, deported.

C’mon, you know the real reason. Fess up now. It’s bigotry, pure and simple, promulgated by your cult leader.

You MAGAs fear and hate them because they are not your kind of people, i.e. not white, Christian, hatemongering, native-born to citizens who look and act just like you.

In other words, you want to limit America to people who don’t threaten you by outthinking you and outworking you, while outdefending our American democracy from bigots, dictators, and others just like you.

That is why you want to hide behind a high wall and toss all those “others” over it.

If you are a MAGA, don’t bother to read the following excerpts from an article in Scientific American, March 2025 issue. First, it’s in a science magazine, which deals in (horrors!) scientific facts.

And second, your God, Donald Trump, hasn’t told you to believe it.

But if you’re not a brain-dead MAGA, you will find the following informative:

Opinion February 18, 2025 Immigration Fuels Innovation in Science to Make the U.S. More Competitive

 U.S. will need more than one million STEM workers in the next 10 years to stay competitive. Immigrants are critical to that future

In late December 2024 a social media storm erupted after entrepreneur Elon Musk blasted out support for the iconic H-1B visa.

The temporary work visa has long served as a ticket to jobs in the U.S. high-tech industry for skilled foreign-born scientists and engineers.

In response, President Donald Trump’s nativist backers pushed back immediately. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon characterized Musk’s position as a ploy by tech oligarchs to take jobs from Americans.

The fact: America is woefully short of scientists and engineers. They are much in demand and have no difficulty finding jobs in America. Bannon is lying.

Headlines proclaimed the outbreak of a MAGA civil war. Musk’s remarks might seem self-serving, but he is right in highlighting the need for more engineering talent from overseas.

Foreign-born tech workers are essential to fuel America’s powerhouse economy, one that captures an outsized percentage of global gross domestic product compared with its population.

And they will be key for hiring the more than one million additional STEM workersthat will be needed in 2033 compared with 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This increase marks a 10 percent growth rate, almost three times what is projected for any non-STEM industry during the same period. Immigrants are a big part of what has made America a global leader in science and technology;if Trump’s nativist faction prevails and restricts the entry of skilled workers, that will have profound effects on this leadership role, as well as on the U.S. economy.

Closing borders is a mistake. The tech elite know this. Musk, who was born in South Africa and now heads an advisory committee for the Trump administration called the Department of Government Efficiency, is one of many tech magnates who rely on the H-1B visa.

Musk’s Tesla company received approvals for 742 H-1B petitions for new hires during the 2024 federal fiscal year, more than double the number from a year earlier. Amazon (owned by Jeff Bezos) applied for nearly 3,900 H-1Bs in 2024.

Most of the 25 companies that made the most H-1B requests in 2024 are technology firms, including Microsoft, Infosys and Meta, the parent company of Facebook (run by Mark Zuckerberg). Cutting off the flow of foreign workers by rejecting H-1B applications can negatively impact local economies and even hurt U.S. workers.

Despite the claims from Bannon and other hard-right MAGA supporters that H-1Bs rob American citizens of skilled jobs, the pipeline for domestic talent alone is unlikely to fill looming employment gaps.

U.S. mathscores have dropped, and the educational infrastructure at the most basic level is often just not there: only half of U.S. high schools offer calculus, and 60 percent provide physics classes. 

Both skills are critical for designing quantum computers and achieving innovations in artificial intelligence. According to study estimates, just 3 percent or so of America’s high school graduates join the ranks of STEM workers.

Prominent legislation to promote STEM education has not met its funding targets. The Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act set out to invest billions of dollars in STEM education, but the funding appropriated for the National Science Foundation has been hundreds of millions less than what was originally requested.

The MAGAs falsely believe our Monetarily Sovereign federal government should spend less. They think this will make the government more efficient and lower their taxes.

The facts: It will make the government less efficient and federal taxes do not fund federal spending. Unlike state and local governments, the federal government is Monetarily Sovereign.

The Federal government does not spend tax dollars. It creates new dollars, ad hoc, to pay all its bills.

(The purpose of federal taxes is to control the economy and to assure demand for the dollar, not to pay for anything.)

Even if the government collected zero dollars in taxes, it could continue spending, forever.

Within the next two years, MAGAs and the rest of us will feel the results of this misguided belief, as federal services decline and the private sector slides into recession.

In addition to industry jobs, the basic and applied research that takes place at the nation’s universities and tech hubs is highly reliant on overseas talent.

An August 2024 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) notes that contributions from the large cadre of international students are critical to sustaining current levels of research in U.S. graduate programs.

Foreign-born employees make up 43 percent of U.S. STEM workers who hold doctoral degrees, and this number rises to nearly 60 percent in computer scienceand certain other fields.

In 2022 more than half of U.S. start-ups with valuations greater than $1 billion had at least one immigrant at their helm—and the value of foreign-born professionals in this country can be witnessed on the global stage at the highest levels of human achievement: 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics in the past two decades have been immigrants.

And yet, America does everything it can to make immigration difficult and time-consuming. Unless you’re rich enough to pay for entry, you might wait years to become a citizen.

Under a Trump proposal, foreign investors would pay $5 million to the U.S. government in exchange for permanent residency (green card privileges) and a pathway to citizenship.

This is not the government’s EB-5 program which requires a $1.05 million investment in a U.S. business, or $800,000 if investing in a Targeted Employment Area (TEA) — a rural area or one with high unemployment and a Job Creation Requirement to create or preserve at least 10 full-time jobs for U.S. workers within two years.

Why the $5 million payment? To keep the riff-raff out. (The “riff-raff” are the people at both ends of the labor spectrum– the people with advanced science degrees and the people who labor in the fields, in short, the people who will do the work America needs.)

Uncertainties about immigration for tech jobs—reflected by the internal strife in the Trump team and among its supporters—could result in fractured policymaking, with foreign-born STEM workers getting placed under the same anti-immigrant policymaking umbrella as undocumented immigrants.

In the fusillades of the MAGA civil war, Trump took Musk’s side, saying he has always been a big backer of H-1Bs, although the president has previously said the opposite.

He once called the visas “very, very bad for workers.”

In fact, during Trump’s first term, his administration set up a partial H-1B blockade.

The denial rate for the already short supply of the visas reached 24 percent in fiscal year 2018. It fell back to 2 percent in fiscal year 2022 after courts found his administration’s handling of these visas to be unlawful. 

In one 2014 study, researchers looking at this issue found that cities across the nation with high H-1B denial rates experienced a drop in computer-related jobs, and this decline was accompanied by lower wageb- growth for native-born citizens who lived there.

The U.S. remains a prime destination for foreign-born students and professionals, but the status quo may not hold. Talent-recruitment programs began to emerge in many countries in the 2010s.

One prime example is Canada’s Tech Talent Strategy, which afforded three-year work permits to as many as 10,000 people in the U.S. who have H-1B visas.

Apparently, Canadians are less frightened of immigrants than are Americans.

The ultimate fix for the U.S.’s chronically broken immigration system would be to implement a long-sought massive overhaul through congressional legislation.

Such comprehensive immigration reform would rationalize the competing demands of border security and the need to equitably regulate both legal and illegal immigration. But this kind of all-encompassing measure has little chance of being adopted during the next four years.

“The next four years” is a euphemism for “during the xenophobic, hatemongering Trump administration.

In bringing wider attention to the role of legal immigration, the wrangling over H-1Bs may have an upside. On a podcast last year, Trump remarked that international college students, once they graduate, should be eligible for green cards, which confer permanent residency.

Waiting for them to graduate confers no advantages on America. Those who are students here are more likely to work and live here, giving America the educated people we need.

His administration could make good on some variation of this idea. Other steps might raise the caps on H-1B visas granted annually (currently 85,000 in total) and institute much needed reforms to the visa program—especially to ensure that visa holders are not exploited.

Employers could do their part by seeking out underutilized programs such as the 0-1A temporary work visa for individuals with “extraordinary ability.” If nothing is done on H-1Bs and other legal-immigration measures, the desirability of the U.S. as a destination for STEM students and tech workers will fade.

That already has happened. The door-kicking, Nazi-like harshness of (ICE) Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump has scared away many potential immigrants. 

The 2024 NAS report notes that between 2019 and 2023, the U.S. fell from first to eighth worldwide in scores for attractiveness to highly educated workers. It will probably slip further.

The anti-immigrant atmosphere ushered in by the Trump administration’s promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is also likely to sour foreign students and engineers on coming to the U.S. And this outcome will benefit no one.

U.S. population growth has not been unmanageable. In fact, many experts argue the opposite: the U.S. now faces dangerously low population growth, and immigration is one of the few forces keeping it from shrinking.

SUMMARY

1. Birth rates in the U.S. have fallen steadily for decades and are now below replacement level (about 1.6 children per woman as of 2023).
2. Aging population: Millions of Baby Boomers are retiring, putting pressure on healthcare, Social Security, and the labor force.
3. Without immigration, the U.S. would already be in demographic decline, like Japan, South Korea, or some European countries.
4. Today, America has labor shortages (especially in caregiving, farming, construction, and tech)
5. If workers are deported, we will have a slowdown in GDP growth due to fewer workers

Today’s challenge isn’t too much growth — it’s too little. Immigration is increasingly seen by economists and demographers as essential to sustaining the U.S. economy and workforce.

Even Trump’s buddy, Elon Musk, and most economists warn of a looming population collapse and say we need more people, especially working-age individuals, to support aging societies and sustain innovation and economic growth.

Politically, immigrants are falsely scapegoated for job competition, crime, or cultural change, though those fears are unsupported by data.

Following the economic growth successes of the Biden administration, Trump has chosen a guaranteed-to-fail hate-promulgating, populist, bigotry-based program of applying leeches to cure anemia.

If the GOP remains cowardly and the Supreme Court continues to give Trump “get-out-of-jail-free” cards, the U.S. will endure a recession, followed by a depression, along with a fascist dictatorship, devoid of legal protections for the populace.

We, as a nation, cannot claim moral leadership — Trump destroyed that — and we soon will lose economic, financial, and military leadership.

Trump is elderly and growing senile, so we can only hope nature takes its course, sooner rather than later.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

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MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY