Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk recently identified a pressure point within the MAGA movement in their calls to admit more foreign-born STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers into the United States through the H-1B visa program. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be,” Musk said. “That enables the whole TEAM to win.”

Ramaswamy voiced a similar affinity for skilled immigrants.

This sentiment coming from a South African immigrant and the son of Indian immigrants should come as no surprise. Both Musk and Ramaswamy have made enormous contributions to the United States that would not have been possible without legal immigration. However, their personal experience should not serve as a guide to devising immigration policy.

To Musk and Ramaswamy, America should recruit talent in the same way athletic teams do: pick the best of the best individuals abroad to obtain a competitive advantage over our economic and political rivals. While there is merit to this argument, it is overly simplistic, viewing America as just an economic unit and groups of people as interchangeable parts.

To illustrate this, I want to consider the experience of a close friend of mine, who, for this article, I will call Eduardo. An international student from Paraguay studying Computer Science at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, it is safe to say that Eduardo is among “the top ~ 0.1% of engineering talent” in the world that Musk and Ramaswamy advocate recruiting into the United States economy. However, what Musk and Ramaswamy leave missing in their argument for immigration policy is something that Eduardo knows much better than them: culture.

Currently a senior looking for jobs, Eduardo would benefit from more open immigration laws toward highly skilled workers. However, Eduardo strongly prefers that the number of highly skilled immigrants admitted to the U.S. decrease rather than increase, even though, in the short term, such a policy would benefit him. To Eduardo, the short-term gain of a more lax immigration policy is trounced by the long-term detriment that such a policy would have at a time when the foreign-born share of the U.S. population is at record highs. Eduardo has told me that increasing the number of high-skilled foreign-born workers in the United States would only increase the likelihood that Eduardo would leave America in the future.

Why? Because Eduardo knows firsthand that bringing in more people from abroad also brings their culture. Ramaswamy sees this as a plus, arguing that we need a culture focused on producing “math olympiad champs” rather than celebrating a “prom queen.” He’s not wrong that Indian or East Asian immigrants often value academic achievement above superficial accolades. However, he also ignores the other elements of East Asian and Indian cultures that may help explain why neither region has created a civilization on par with the United States. Eduardo worries that even exceptionally skilled immigrants from these parts of the world would carry traits less compatible with American values.

This concern leads me into delicate territory: Which values of Indians and East Asians might weaken American culture? To tackle this, I have to rely on stereotypes that could get me in trouble — yet there is truth to them. Ann Coulter, in her characteristically blunt fashion, satirically highlighted the near-certain pitfalls of importing more high-skilled workers in her column titled “New Year’s Resolutions for Indian Immigrants.” She claims that Indian culture’s intense focus on wealth and status can breed corruption, cheating, and indifference to labor conditions reminiscent of indentured servitude. Coulter also questions the oft-repeated notion that Indians are “America’s innovators,” suggesting it’s exaggerated. Meanwhile, a simple Google search of “East Asian” and “conformity” reveals a trove of reputable research indicating that East Asian cultures differ from Western ones in their heightened social pressures and willingness to conform.

These cultural differences between Western and Eastern societies have real implications for what an Indian or East Asian elite might look like in America if high-skilled immigration from these regions continues. The point isn’t that Indians or East Asians are inferior to Americans. In fact, as Ramaswamy and Musk have noted, their cultures often surpass America’s in certain respects. Instead, the key is that the cultures are different. In some ways, America can learn from Indian tech leaders like Ramaswamy, while in others, Indians could benefit from the waning yet still dominant Anglo-Protestant tradition that underpins American society.

We do not yet know how much high-skilled immigrants will shed the orientations, views, desires, and lifestyles they bring from their native lands. Culture is transmitted across generations in complex ways that lie beyond public policy. And because the United States does not have a long history with Indian or East Asian immigrants — as it does with Latin Americans, whose assimilation patterns are better understood — it would be arrogant to predict with certainty how these groups will integrate.

One possibility is that, after several generations, the descendants of these immigrants adopt the “lazy culture” that plagues parts of America, creating a perpetual need for new foreign talent to sustain innovation. Another possibility is that they retain certain less desirable cultural attributes from their homelands while preserving their hard work ethic — an outcome that may boost GDP yet steer America away from its Anglo-Protestant roots. The best possibility is that these immigrants adopt our Anglo-Protestant culture while retaining their strong work ethic and academic zeal.

Interestingly, backlash to Musk and Ramaswamy’s proposals can be found in the most surprising of places. On MSNBC, left-wing automaton Symone Sanders strayed from the politically correct, globalist view of Musk, Ramaswamy, and Corporate Democrats, saying, “America is the land of the free, home of the brave — all that Elon Musk was tweetin’ about. However, please don’t come for Americans. … I would like white Americans to stand up. This is your callin’ card, honey. Where have you been, cuz they comin’ for you. They say y'all white and lazy. That’s crazy. And if I said, y'all would be comin’ for me. And I would never say that because that’s insane.”

An African American, Symone knows firsthand why this condescending attitude should unsettle white Americans. Black Americans, many of whom trace their ancestry to our Founding, were replaced as the dominant minority by Hispanics due to mass low-skilled immigration from Latin America. As Sanders alluded, this brand of rhetoric toward white communities should be rejected, just as we reject stereotypes of black Americans being “too lazy,” supposedly requiring “harder-working” Hispanics to replace them.

Having reflected on the cultural consequences of immigration, conservatives should do what they do best: be conservative. That means rejecting utopian views of human nature and recognizing our limits in predicting policy outcomes. If there’s one lesson from conservative giants like Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman, it’s that the law of unintended consequences always holds. Thus, we must view any push for expanded high-skilled immigration with the healthy skepticism that conservatives uniquely bring to the table — or risk paving our own road to ruin.