Ro Khanna on Crime, Censorship & Congress: Fixing What's Broken in America

After some opening banter about earlier appearances on the show, including one on election night alongside Donald Trump Jr., the conversation turns to immigration and the H-1B program. The question put on the table is whether the Trump administration's push to correct abuse in the system, and in part to monetize it, is the right strategy.

First of all, there's definitely abuse. Second, it definitely needs to be corrected.

The abuse is described concretely: some H-1B holders are paid below market wages, and some visas go to people who are not especially talented or to jobs that do not require much skill. The response cites a bipartisan bill that would have required a prevailing wage and made sure the visa categories were actually skilled ones. The administration's approach gets a mixed verdict. The reform direction is called right, while the specific mechanism is rejected.

I don't love the blanket 100,000 fee.

The stated objection is that a flat $100,000 fee puts an unfair burden on startups and may end up hurting the flow of talent. A prevailing-wage standard is offered as an acceptable alternative. The pattern is summed up this way: the president sometimes identifies the right issue but proposes a solution the speaker does not agree with.

On the Silicon Valley side, the discussion agrees that mass IT outsourcing firms have gamed the system. People who have perfected the application process, sometimes by applying multiple times through multiple shell companies, win the visas, while startups struggle to hire the best young talent. Cognizant is named among the outsourcing and consulting companies said to receive a bulk of H-1Bs.

The case for keeping the program rests on competition over AI. Reporting from a bipartisan congressional delegation to China, the speaker says that, "according to a lot of the reports," one third of AI talent is in China, and that the U.S. should want some of those people to come here. Asked whether national interest waivers, O-1 visas, EB-1s and EB-5s are enough to recruit top talent, the answer is no. A dedicated H-1B program is still needed, and the example given is the leaders now running Google and Microsoft, who studied in the U.S. and then got H-1Bs.

The proposed fix is that people should not stay on an H-1B indefinitely and should instead move toward a green card. The speaker notes that President Trump said on this show that he would move people quickly to green cards. The argument is that this would end the exploitation of indebted workers, since they would be paid market wages and could change jobs, and it would keep them in the U.S. instead of sending them back to China or India. One more warning follows: many large companies have overseas headquarters, so simply limiting H-1Bs could push them to offshore the jobs rather than create them in the U.S.

The hosts argue that fixing immigration starts with rebuilding trust in the system. They credit the administration with effectively sealing the border, citing a statistic, attributed to the president and given with hedging ("I think the stat that he said"), that there have been no illegal crossings at the southern border since January. They add that they are "presuming" the northern border looks similar.

The response accepts the premise. Too many people were let in under the Biden administration without proper security, and Democrats need to acknowledge and own that. Two limits are drawn. The speaker disagrees with shutting down essentially all asylum claims and taking them to zero, which is described as making asylum nearly impossible.

The more forward-looking question is whether Trump will spend the goodwill earned on the border on two reforms described as potentially bipartisan:

A path to legalization for long-term undocumented workers in industries such as agriculture, food production and construction, conditioned on their having no criminal record and having paid taxes. The speaker frames this partly as a way to bring food prices down and notes that Trump has suggested looking at it. Green cards for foreign students who earn degrees in the U.S. The figures given are 600,000 students coming to the U.S., 300,000 of them from China. Because universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard and state colleges receive federal subsidies, the argument goes, the U.S. is partly financing these students' education and should want them to stay and create jobs instead of doing so in Shanghai or Beijing.