Can Nations Exist Anymore?

What's at stake in the H1-B debate

Slavoj Žižek recently made the astute observation that Trump has his work cut out for him — Trump has to wrangle a coalition that is deeply inconsistent, trying to hold together the contradictory factions of the tech-right (figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel) and the MAGA movement (exemplified by J. D. Vance).

This division within Trump’s coalition came out in the open over the Christmas holiday with a kerfuffle on X about a proposal to remove the cap on H1-B visas. This dust-up seems to be the first significant example of Elon losing control of the conversation on his own platform, as a number of prominent tech and business leaders found themselves outnumbered and hounded by anon accounts and MAGA posters. While some tech leaders dug in or back pedaled, others fell silent or didn’t engage. In the end, fellow DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempt to enter the fray on the side of Elon and the tech industry majorly backfired, and he found himself the butt of jokes and memes.

I didn’t write this piece as a retrospective on that conversation (partly because it’s still ongoing, with even Bernie decisively throwing his hat into the ring on the side of the main MAGA talking point), but rather to point out a key problem that this entire field of discussion is hitting upon — the question of in-group preference. In fact, I see the question being grappled with on the Right currently, and perhaps one of the most important questions at play, as whether in-group preference is permissible, and under what circumstances it may be permissible.

The idea of ‘America First’ championed by Trump’s MAGA movement brought the question of in-group preference back into the political conversation, albeit it in a muddy way which associated it with the emergence of white identity consciousness. However, I think that the conversation sparked by Trump and MAGA has the opportunity to raise the problem of in-group preference from the level of race to a higher plane of consideration — the question of in-group preference ultimately bears on the question of whether nations can exist or not.

Can nations exist today under the conditions of a globally interconnected capitalist system? How can a nation advocate for its own interests against the interests of capital mobility and corporate profit maximization? What the H1-B conversation raises is whether and to what extent citizens of a country should be competing against the entire global talent pool. Can a nation prioritize the interests and welfare of its citizens against the seemingly impersonal interests of corporate efficiency and international capital?

The raucous debate within the Trump coalition about the H1-B visa program serves as the perfect flashpoint for these questions, because it brings together all of the various strands into a single knot. First, you have the conversation about which groups practice in-group preference. A common theme on the Right is that whites are a uniquely strange group who do not practice in-group preference, despite almost all other racial and ethnic groups practicing it.

This claim harbors something important, and some of its impact derives from the way that it contradicts the dominant narrative from the Left. If you only listened to the Left, you’d think that whites are an irrationally hateful, violent, and exclusionary group, whereas all other ethnic groups just want their fair shake at being included, display high levels of solidarity with people who don’t look like them, and that whites could benefit from these uniquely harmonious group relations of other cultures and racial groups. Žižek mocks this as a Leftist iteration of the myth of the noble savage — extolling the immigrant while ignoring that he beats his wife, conjuring up a plurality without difference.

We know that any amount of time spent in another culture or interacting with non-white groups immediately invalidates the Left’s thesis — people from other cultures are extremely racist and xenophobic. For instance, if you travel to Asia, you will discover an intense animosity between the Chinese and the Koreans towards the Japanese. You’ll find entire ethnic groups in Africa who share a territory and are virtually indistinguishable from each other in the eyes of foreigners but who hate each other enough and are raring to commit genocide at the first opportunity. Predominantly Muslim countries and communities also treat other ethnicities and religious groups with violence and extreme prejudice.

Once we take stock of the actually existing situation with regard to discrimination amongst most ethnic groups, we realize that whites actually exhibit an unusually weak loyalty to people who look like them, and are much more willing to accept and support people who don’t look like them as long as these outsiders exhibit the sort of excellence which white culture values. This is the culture of meritocracy to which tech leaders like Elon appeal with their language of “world-class talent” or “elite human capital.”

However, MAGA proponents point out that this supposedly disinterested perspective with its commitment to meritocracy masks a class interest — under the guise of talent, corporate leaders have used the H1-B program to import droves of foreign labor which suppresses wages, increases labor precarity, and reduces American labor’s ability to serve as a countervailing force.

Critics of the current H1-B program structure have also argued that these foreign workers do not share the culture of meritocracy which management used to justify their hiring, thus creating a feedback loop where foreign workers are free to practice in-group preference once they are here (it’s not racist because they aren’t white), further accelerating the disenfranchisement of native labor. Many X posters came forward with anecdotal evidence attempting to support the thesis that Indian H1-B managers often tended to favor workers of their own race, or would fire entire American divisions only to outsource their functions to a team in India. At the very least, it’s highly suspicious that many large companies which laid off thousands of tech workers added in the very same year more H1-B employees, raising serious questions about the effect that easy access to foreign labor has on economic opportunities for American jobs.

Nonetheless, it’s the first accusation which bears the greatest importance (and it’s the one with which Bernie also agrees) — tech oligarchs who claim to have no in-group preference (they only value elite talent, no matter the race) clearly have economic interests in importing a foreign workforce at lower rates to replace American workers who have higher expectations for pay and fair treatment. The meme of “working 80 hours a week” bubbled up in the discourse, with MAGA proponents arguing that Americans won’t accept such ridiculous working demands from corporations, while workers on visas from less prosperous countries are much more likely to go along with those terms (the cost of non-compliance is so much higher for them).

This rhetoric of importing top global talent to bolster American dominance and prosperity employed by business leaders outwardly sounds ‘America First,’ but it crucially misunderstands what ‘America First’ actually means for the MAGA movement. It’s becoming a rallying cry on some parts of the Right that America is a nation, not an economic zone. J. D. Vance has put it succinctly, in opposition to a dominant orthodoxy on both the Left and Right, by publicly questioning the talking point of America as “an idea” Instead, he says, “America is a nation. It is a group of people with a common history and a common future.” He asserts that the only way to “preserve the continuity of this project” is to allow newcomers only on the terms of American citizens.

Elon, Vivek, and other leaders on the tech Right prefer the idea of America as an idea, rather than Vance’s definition of a nation, because they continue to parrot the trickle-down economics which conservatives been pushing since the Reagan era. However, enough time has passed for people to realize that this trickle-down fable simply isn’t true. If it was, it would have delivered its benefits by now, but all we’ve gotten instead has been stagnant wages, offshored manufacturing, declining life expectancies, greater wealth inequality, and rising prices. In fact, the MAGA movement is a reaction to precisely this type of globalist thinking which tries to pass off the interest of corporations as the interest of the nation as a whole.

Corporate leaders insisting that we should import foreign workers because we need the best and brightest to beat our global competitors is just the reverse of off-shoring — instead of exporting manufacturing and labor to other countries with lower wages and worse living conditions, they import foreign workers into our labor market to compete with American workers, thereby suppressing wages and diluting labor’s bargaining power.

The tech leaders are complaining — we supported Trump because we thought you were against illegal immigration, but now you’re opposing legal immigration too? (Of course, any call for reform to current immigration frameworks is construed ipso facto as opposition to immigration tout court.) But this is naive; just because something is done legally does not mean that it’s above criticism — the hollowing out of the Rust Belt was done legally (and profitably) but we are all impoverished by our country’s diminished production capacity and the proliferation of dying rural towns. Laws are created and laws can be changed. But this complaint from the tech Right just reveals how they misunderstood the nature of the energy they were harnessing themselves to.

The question should be put back to American business leaders — if America doesn’t have the talent to keep up with other countries, why don’t we invest in the 340,000,000 people here already? Why are we accepting foreign students into our top science and technology doctoral programs without locking them into an arrangement to use their education for our nation’s benefit? Why aren’t we expanding the training programs for the expertise which tech leaders say that we so desperately need? Why aren’t we re-training people away from the menial service jobs which dominate local economies? And who was it that exported these industries to other countries, wiping out the experience and technical know-how which we previously possessed and now have to re-gain?

To put it succinctly, the MAGA movement wants American to develop an in-group preference for its own citizens rather than viewing the country as an economic zone competing with other economic zones to attract Capital investment from profit-seeking and globalists with no national loyalties. This leads us back to the question of whether a nation can exercise in-group preference — prioritize its own citizens and their interests over those of global capital — by enforcing the imperative to improve the lives of citizens first rather than allowing shareholders to enrich themselves with business decisions which are good for their bottom line but bad for the nation they supposedly call home.

Much like a micro-organism, a nation cannot survive if it does not develop and maintain a membrane. A membrane optimally regulates the internal functions of an organism by controlling what enters and exits its body. This membrane allows the organism to differentiate from its environment, otherwise its constituent parts would simply diffuse into its surroundings, virtually eliminating its existence. This is precisely the dilemma which countries face today — can a nation come to exist which could effectively regulate its membrane to defend its health against the opportunism of global Capital?

The Trump presidencies and the MAGA movement have brought this question back into the political conversation in our country after it was largely absent for decades. While I can’t say that I’m necessarily optimistic or confident that Trump will be able to deliver on all his rhetoric of resisting corporate interests and advocating for policies which benefit ordinary citizens, his presidency nonetheless represents an opening of a new horizon of possibilities. With this monetary suspension of the uninhibited advance of the interests of the global elite and their institutions, the opportunity to foster prosperity in our country stands before us today in a way that it hasn’t for a very long time — but it requires that we lean into the tough conversation about how we might decide to be a nation once again.