DEI for dummies

James Fishback

It's not “DEI” to want American jobs for qualified Americans.

My generation and younger are staring down an existential threat. The entry-level jobs that were once a starting point for young Americans are disappearing, not just to artificial intelligence, but a different kind of A.I.: arrogant immigration. The arrogance of companies like Amazon, which last year got approval for 10,044 H-1B foreign workers, and fired 30,000 of its own workers.

Americans can accept losing their job to a recession or to an American who is more qualified. What Americans cannot (and should not) accept is losing opportunities to a system that elevates foreign nationals who share neither a role in our history nor a stake in our future.

At its core, a nation exists to serve, protect, and defend its citizens, and so long as a system allows 1.3 million H-1B workers and their dependents and 1.2 million foreign students to compete for the same opportunities as American citizens, our nation is not living up to its commitments.

It is time for America to become what I call a “nationalist meritocracy.”

A nationalist meritocracy is a system in which a nation's opportunities go to its most qualified citizens. It’s different from today's system, in which a nation’s opportunities are open to the entire globe. I call today’s system a “globalist meritocracy.”

Under a globalist meritocracy, an American citizen and foreign national are treated the same.

An American who has worked at the same company for 20 years can be fired in an instant solely because the company got an H-1B visa to hire someone in Mumbai who can do the job "better," and by "better," they almost always mean cheaper. In fact, 83% of H-1B petitions sit in the two lowest wage tiers, according to a 2025 Department of Homeland Security analysis.

Even if a foreign worker were the same price but 10% more qualified, it would still be unacceptable.

Think of it this way: If a charter elementary school in New York began admitting top test takers in India or China, and denied your child, who had the best score in town but scored 10 points lower than an admitted foreign student, you'd be livid, and rightly so.

Even staunch proponents of “pure meritocracy” would admit it's messed up to pass up qualified kids from down the street only to admit slightly more qualified kids halfway across the world.

It’s not “DEI” to believe that every meritocracy should have a border drawn around it. The charter school’s border should be at city or state lines, and our admissions pool or labor market should be at our national border.

In a nationalist meritocracy, we don't care whether a foreign student scores 50 points better on the SAT. We proudly deny them and admit the American instead.

Why? It’s our nation, we helped build it, and we pay for the very opportunities that we (or our posterity) seek. Public universities are funded by taxpayers; private universities receive research grants from taxpayers; and American companies’ customers are predominantly American and they too receive taxpayer dollars via government contracts.

The moral case for a nationalist meritocracy is obvious: put Americans first because it’s our country and we paid for it. But the economic case is just as important.

The limited gains of our present globalist meritocracy are privatized: companies pocket the labor cost savings between American and cheaper foreign workers and universities make more on foreign vs. domestic tuition. But the losses are socialized, and they are enormous.

A nation that allows opportunities to go to foreign nationals instead of qualified citizens will find citizens without work and reliant on government.

Taxpayers must foot the bill for unemployment benefits, food stamps, and healthcare for the unemployed, and as unemployment persists, the unemployed become increasingly unemployable because they’ve been out of the labor market too long and their skills have atrophied. They will be out of work, with little savings or stability. If they have kids, they too will suffer. If they haven’t started a family yet, they may never.

They will be susceptible to the loneliness, depression, and addiction that often afflicts those who struggle to secure meaningful, gainful employment.

A nationalist meritocracy can fix this by fighting to make sure opportunities almost exclusively go to American citizens, with narrow exceptions like the O-1 visa, reserved for people of extraordinary ability at the very top of a field.

If an American company is building a new kind of nuclear reactor and only 30 people in the world can do it, then obviously let them in.

Opposition to foreign workers is often straw-manned into opposition to technological progress. But how can that be when 8 out of 10 H-1B petitions sit in the two lowest wage tiers?

Half of Walmart’s H-1B positions are below the local median wage. Nearly half of Uber’s software engineer H-1B positions are at the second-lowest wage tier.

Companies pushing the frontiers technological progress don’t important cheap programmers from India.

A nationalist meritocracy is a brutal competition that should be race-blind and class-blind. The most qualified American should get picked, regardless of what they look like or how they pray. The key difference is that in a nationalist meritocracy the competition is exclusively among American citizens.

There can and should still be international cooperation: exchange students from allied nations for a semester, so long as it's reciprocated, along with bilateral research projects and regional partnerships. Global cooperation is possible without surrendering your sovereignty.

At its core, a meritocracy is a competition, but who gets to compete in the first place is a question we must urgently answer: a meritocracy for our nation, or for the entire globe? A sovereign nation has an obligation to answer it in favor of its own citizens.

James T. Fishback is the Founder of Azoria, an American investment firm.