The Benefits of "Flooding the Zone"
How the right wears us down with their constant criminality
Last week, The Trump Administration issued a memo that formalized a number of new rules regarding US visas, specifically pertaining to who can and can’t receive the coveted H1-B visas. These visas are used to help US companies get the employees they need by allowing some immigrants with specific and needed skills to come to the US and use those skills for our benefit. Traditionally, it has always been a good trade; we get the benefits of skilled labor, and the workers get to work and build lives here in the United States. Everybody wins.
Or at least that’s how it used to be.
While these visas have always been scrutinized heavily since they give American jobs to people who are not citizens, but as a former recruiter myself, I can tell you that they are absolutely necessary simply because our companies need far more skilled workers than we have available. And the more specific the skill set, the more common the practice is. Almost every professional field has skill gaps and jobs that greatly outnumber the available workers. And now, thanks to this most recent change by the Trump administration, it’s about to get a lot harder for some American companies to get the skilled workers they desperately need.
Now, tracking every new outrage that comes out of the Trump administration is a lot like trying to drink from a firehose - for every drop of water you swallow, gallons are lost. And the GOP knows this, so they just keep the firehose turned all the way up, all the time. For every bad decision we make public, dozens go unseen. So when Trump changed the H1-B visa guidelines to make sure some very specific skillsets were no longer eligible, it almost went unnoticed.
The order, which state department officials have not denied, requires enhanced vetting of applicants “to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others”, Reuters reported.
That’s right - if your skill set involves countering disinformation, Trump wants to keep you out of the country. This change is no accident, and it is certainly motivated by Trump’s desire to continue lying constantly, and with impunity. Long story short - he wants to keep truth tellers away because they might decide to tell Americans the truth, and in the age of Trump, we simply can’t have that.
Now, the Trump administration is defending this move by saying they are actually only denying access to those who deal in “censorship” but by now we all know better. If Trump was at all interested in transparency, this article would be about the release of the Epstein Files and not about how Trump wants to keep truth tellers out of America. Or maybe it would be about why the Russians are now writing most of our foreign policy documents.
Simply put, it is far more difficult today to tell the difference between what is true and what is false than it has ever been before. Once trusted institutions now lie incessantly and without shame, and Americans are left to determine their own truth, a process that often ends with ideology replacing objective truth. It’s a great climate for hucksters and fascists, but for the rest of us who just want to live in a world we can believe, it kinda sucks.
This is the world Trump wants us to live in, so the last thing he’s going to do is allow some foreigner to come here and teach us the lessons they learned fighting Russian and other right-wing propaganda overseas.
Here, the lies are too important, and their power must be preserved.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.