The U.S. government should help make high-tech careers attractive and exciting for young Americans, not just import foreign experts, says Pat Gelsinger, the new CEO of Intel Corp., which was once the world’s leading designer and builder of computer chips.
Gelsinger is a skilled engineer who got his start at Intel by helping design the 80386 chip in 1982. On July 12, he told the Washington Post’s Ignatius that Intel’s board realized it had hired too many finance-oriented executives during the prior 15 years:
Intel lost its way. We had nontechnical [business-trained] leadership of the most important technology company in America for a decade and a half. Some of that [responsibility] …. clearly goes to the board of directors and the [hiring] choices that they made. Some of it was, “Hey, we tried certain [technical] things, we stumbled and we failed on different programs as well.” But the confluence of those board decisions, management decisions, technology stumbles, has taken [down] one of the great technology icons of America and we’re not leading anymore.
Intel’s self-inflicted decline matches the experience of other companies that elevated the C-Suite’s stock-market priorities over professional merit.
Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft, for example, crashed after stock-price executives sidelined American professionals in favor of cheap outsourced workers, including Indian graduates.
Intel’s corporate reports, as well as federal data, show that the company has imported thousand of foreign experts for jobs sought by American professionals.
Gelsinger emphasized the future hiring of American graduates would be vital for Intel:
Are we making this an exciting domain for young talented individuals to enter into? Since we’ve announced our Ohio project [to build chip-fabrication factories in], for instance … our top universities ‑‑Arizona State, Ohio State University, Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue‑‑ … are excited to build the semiconductor manufacturing [education] curriculum to build us that long‑term workforce.
Gelsinger’s focus on training Americans was cheered by Kevin Lynn, the founder of the U.S. Tech Workers, a group that opposes the large-scale use of imported workers.
He understands [the importance of American professionals] because he knows Intel lost its way when nontechnical leadership was put into important management roles. For decades now, American elites have prioritized [economic] efficiencies and earnings per share over innovation and productivity. That’s why people like Ignatius — one of those Beltway crapweasels — see immigration as a solution to everything. What people like Gelsinger know — someone who’s a long-term veteran of the industry — it’s about investing in America’s human capital.
But congressional efforts to help Gelsinger rejuvenate Intel are being delayed by investor demands for more foreign workers.
The House and Senate have drafted legislation that grants roughly $50 billion bill to jump-start technology development and domestic production by Intel and other companies. The technology funding is the CHIPS Act.
But the House added the CHIPS Act to the America COMPETES Act, which includes many additional and diverse agendas. One of those agendas is in Section 80303, which would allow Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors to import all of their skilled workers from China and India.
That legislation doubles down on current federal policy that rewards executives who increase corporate stock prices instead of executives who increase industry-wide productivity and innovation.
Since 1990, the federal government has allowed pr0fit-minded CEOs and investors to import multiple generations of visa workers and immigrants for skilled work. That wave of cheaper foreign workers has subordinated and sidelined many American professionals and many new graduates, according to a 2021 federal report.
Many CEOs have used the federal government’s pipeline of H-1B, OPT, L-1, and B-1/B-2 workers to replace outspoken American professionals with cheap, compliant, and subordinate foreign graduates, he said. Those foreign workers are cheap and compliant because the visa law allows the CEOs complete authority over whether they can be fired and sent back to their poor countries.
Lynn continued:
I know, from my conversation with managers in America’s Fortune 500 companies, particularly our Fortune 500 technology companies, that a reliance on foreign workers and foreign managers only leads to [workplace] tribalism and politics … When we see a preponderance of people from one country — let’s just use India as an example — career movement throughout the company becomes political and not merit-based.
It becomes tribal because we also import their caste system, their regional [rivalries], their [crony] politics, and their misogyny … They know that’s how they’re got the job, that’s how they’re going to stay in a [U.S.] job with Indian managers and get green cards.
These [workplace pressures] drive out [American] technical workers because they’re typically ill-equipped to deal with that level of office politics. They understand merit. They understand how to solve a technical problem. They can’t overcome caste and country-of-origin discrimination.
The Indian office politics are used by CEOs to suppress complaints from foreign workers about pay, hours, and workplace abuse.
The foreign office politics also minimize pushback from American professionals who oppose the C-Suite executives’ skimping on safety, security, reliability, quality, and long-term research.
The visa workers “are very subservient to higher managers,” said Mary from central New Jersey, an immigrant software expert who works alongside H-1Bs. She told Breitbart News in 2020
I would tell [the executive] professionally what the issue was, and she didn’t like that. You can’t oppose her in any way. If she tells you “It is black,” it has to be black even if it is white. [The Indian workers] will feed her what she wants to hear… When the information given to that manager is wrong, and that manager does not care, the professionalism of the field is gone.
Gelsinger has been forced through this cultural shift.
In 2009, Gelsinger was forced out of Intel after 3o years of service, which had begun with a professional interview at a community college when he was just 18. He was forced out because Intel’s board put business-school graduates in the top jobs. The New York Times reported:
[CEO Paul] Otellini and his successors prioritized Intel’s profit margins while failing to take risks to move into new markets and outflank rivals, former company insiders now acknowledge.
Intel’s stock-focused executives recruited many foreign visa workers instead of American professionals.
A 2013 report at Dice.com, a job site used by many migrant workers, reported that “when it’s seeking to fill a position, [Intel] basically doesn’t care whether it’s a U.S. citizen or H-1B worker who fills it.”
For example, from 2017 to 2019, the company asked the federal government for roughly 4,300 H-1B visa work permits. It asked for 1,000 permits in 2020, and 3,000 in 2022.
Intel also hired many foreign graduates via U.S. universities’ Practical Training programs. In 2018, for example, they hired 1,348 foreign graduates, including 368 on one-year work permits and 1,111 on three-year work permits.
Once Intel sponsored them for green cards, the foreign temporary workers were allowed to stay in the United States indefinitely. But the nominated workers usually cannot leave their employers until they can get their green cards, often decades later. From 2017 to 2022, Intel nominated roughly 6,400 foreign workers for green cards.
Most of the visa workers are inexperienced and often are less skilled than American professionals. The company sought green cards for fewer than people who arrived with O-1 “genius visas” which are given to people with a record of “Extraordinary Ability or Achievement.”
The company’s 2021 diversity report shows that “Asians” — including many Indian and Chinese visa workers — now comprise almost 40 percent of the technical staff, up five points from 35 percent in 2014. “Whites” — mostly Americans — comprise less than 42 percent of the technical staff.
This population replacement has reshaped the company and damaged the quality of research and production.
“Intel has also got a big H-1B problem, and that’s why they’re behind,” another software professional told Breitbart News.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” a U.S. professional who worked at Intel told Breitbart in 2020. But the rules are very different in departments run by Indian managers, he said:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
One of the things that got me in the biggest trouble with the Indians was when I found a bug,” he said. “It was clearly our device causing the problem,” he said. But when he revealed the problem via a department email, the Indian manager “became unglued … screamed at me in a conference room and called me the worst engineer.
“Now, most of the managers are Indian so it is very hard for an American to get hired over there … I’d go into a room of 30 people and 15 to 17 of them are from India,” he said, adding:
They all come from the same area [in India], they all know each other, they all hang out together. The other half room is all Americans … The Indians are a very, very tight group. They automatically know the caste system … The guys at the bottom, they know to suck up to the caste guys above them. They will never suck up to an American.
Indian managers can quietly trade company jobs to junior Indians in return for bribes, so they have a hidden incentive to force open jobs by firing U.S. professionals, multiple Indian visa workers have told Breitbart News.
While working for one Indian manager, “I was the senior guy and I was given the shittiest tasks,” the American said, adding:
She hated me, she would tell me I was the worst engineer she’d ever seen. She’d berate the shit out of me, and she would talk about her friend down in the Bay Area who was looking for a job. So she was gonna fire me and hire her best friend in the Bay Area. I left — it was the best thing I ever did … Within about a month, I looked back and said “What in the hell?” “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”
Intel’s management was more focused on merit when a 23-year-old Gelsinger — by then, a born-again Christian — criticized his Intel bosses in 1985, said a February 2022 report by the New York Times:
A few days later, he got a surprise call from [Intel CEO Andy] Grove. The Hungarian-born executive, then Intel’s president who later wrote the management book “Only the Paranoid Survive,” had built a culture where lower-level employees were encouraged to challenge superiors if they could back up their positions. Mr. Grove began mentoring Mr. Gelsinger, a relationship that lasted three decades.
[The next year, Grove] made him, at age 24, the leader of a 100-person team designing Intel’s [flagship] 80486 microprocessor.
Corporate outsourcing is forcing generations of Americans out of the technology sector, said one tech professional who followed her father, mother, and grandfather into the business. She told Breitbart News in 2020:
I told all my kids ‘Be good with computers but major in something else.” My youngest son is a biomechanical engineer with a Master’s. My middle son is a credentialed professional in environmental health and safety. My oldest son works in the defense industry. We can’t talk about what he does, but he probably makes more than the other two put together. My daughter married well.
The federal outsourcing policy is “basically shutting the citizens out” of the tech sector, she added.
Washington’s legislators, staffers, and journalists have ignored the deep economic damage caused by the donor-driven policy of allowing investors to import their own subordinate white-collar workforce.
For example, beltway insider Ignatius pushed Gelsinger on July 12 to endorse greater reliance on foreign graduates:
I need to ask you, frankly, whether you think the American semiconductor industry has the talent pool to be able to make this competitive leap forward or whether we need to think about changes in our immigration policies that allow more high‑quality engineers to come here from other countries. What do you think?
Gelsinger answered with 157 words on the need to train Americans:
We have to be rebuilding those areas of our colleges, universities, also community colleges as well. So, clearly, that’s a priority. We’ve committed funding to that. We’ve committed, for instance, in the Ohio [fabrication] project, $50 million of funding, which is complemented by $50 million from NSF [National Science Foundation] funding specifically on talent development.
Gelsinger’s industry peers want those foreign workers, his company is now dependent on them, and there is no easy or quick fix. So Gelsinger added 136 words of waffled, partially garbled, and skeptical comments on migration before ending the interview:
At the same time, you know, I do believe our immigration policies‑‑anybody who receives a master’s or a Ph.D. from a U.S. school can get a green card stapled to it, right? We want the best talent in the world coming here, staying here, and, you know, some of the different versions of USICA and COMPETES, you know, in the House and the Senate version specifically, you know, also include provisions around immigration.
You know, I doubt that those will pass in this current form, given some of the earlier political comments, David, you know, but this is a hot button for me. You know, I want to have the best talent on the planet coming here, staying here, being trained here. We just have to make it much easier for that to be the case.
In August 2021, Gelsinger gave a far more animated answer to the Washington Post on w he described his company’s plans to work with 18 community colleges to train the next generation of Americans:
I’m a farm boy from Pennsylvania, sort of stumbled into technology, went to community college, and really just the great American Cinderella story, so it’s something close to my personal heart as well, that, you know, many bright, capable–you know, they don’t have the opportunity to be MIT or Stanford entry … with 18 community colleges … we’re building on a success model that we already had in place to start this AI [Artificial Intelligence] program that enable us to have this workforce development with the basics of AI. We do believe that it becomes basic for everybody, but we also expect that this will [create] some of the Pat Gelsingers of the future, that this will be the starting point, and they go on to university and that they progress with their career and their employers.
…
We do hope that sometime soon [that] we’re on a conversation where we’re saying, okay, we’ve launched our next 50, next 100 community colleges.
Gelsinger is also deflating the investors’ profit expectations that were set by his business-degree predecessors at Intel. The New York Times reported:
Last March, Mr. Gelsinger announced Intel’s manufacturing expansion, including the foundry plan and the $20 billion Arizona project. When he detailed the long-term financial impact in October, Wall Street was stunned. Intel shed nearly $25 billion in market value in one day.
Congress is now trying to help Gelsinger rejuvenate Intel.
But Congress has been slow to pass its draft bill offering $52 billion to companies that design and build computer chips in the United States.
The bill has been delayed by congressional horse-trading — including the investor plan to let Fortune 500 companies import an unlimited number of foreign workers for the careers needed by skilled American graduates. That giveaway is opposed by Midwest GOP opposition, principally Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) who want their young people and communities to get the new high-tech jobs.
The giveaway has also been opposed by President Joe Biden’s deputies, especially Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. She is part of Biden’s East Coast network, which often clashes with the party’s West Coast faction.
Intel is promising to build a $20 billion production facility in Ohio, but that project may be canceled if Congress cannot get the funding approved with a “skinny bill,” Gelsinger told Ignatius:
If I was building a new fab in Asia, you know‑‑and a new fab module is about a $10 billion investment per fab module, you know, enormous capital investment‑‑it’s about 30 to 40 percent cheaper to do it in Asia. Strong incentives, ecosystem, and other factors are associated with it, but by far, the biggest is the capital incentives that are in place in those Asian companies‑‑countries. And what the CHIPS Act does, it levels the playing field. It simply gives us the incentives to build those factories in the U.S.
“Where the fabs [chip factories] are for the next several decades is more important than where the oil reserves have been for the last several decades in defining geopolitics, economic, and national security,” he said, adding, “It’s that important to our future.”