Elon Musk has waded into the immigration debate with new posts on 'X' leaning in the direction of Vivek Ramaswamy's controversial remarks, blasting American "mediocrity" in favor of imported workers on H-1B visas.

Both Elon and Vivek have a point, even as those who oppose them also have valid arguments -- and a consensus is building on all sides that the H-1B visa program, which imports workers with specialized skilled, could stand for some reform, given the way it's being gamed, particularly from India, as a means of exporting mediocrities who can supplant American workers for cheaper prices to their employers, all by paying consultants to get them to win U.S. H-1B visa lotteries, as Silicon Valley barons keep these workers in indentured servitude, lowering the wages of all workers. That's a bad system.

America should be importing only the best and brightest -- on merit, meritocratic principles -- to help the economy innovate, excel, and grow, so the consensus thinking goes.

I'm not entirely onboard, actually.

Far from importing just the best and brightest, I think America should be importing immigrants on character grounds -- those who truly love the U.S. and who wish to become actual Americans, not hyphenated Americans, not takers of public benefits  -- ordinary people not all that different from our own ancestors as they came through Ellis Island and many other places to make America what it was during its years of greatness. People who, as Eric Hoffer characterized them, "want to be left alone."

They don't have to be the math champ. Math champs are often math champs abroad because they've had more opportunities than other kids, owing to political connections, cronyism, conformity to a dictatorship, and ill-gotten gains. Some really are math champs, but they had opportunities that shut out others.

It's far better to import patriots-in-waiting who love America and are willing to die for it. They must be willing to work hard, show family values, and refuse welfare, but more than that, show some kind of life-or-death commitment to America. We don't see that from the best-and-brightest class.

But they are the people we should be letting in. We can get math champs anywhere. We can get university grads anywhere. Credentials abound, especially in places that are all about caste and privilege, which incidentally tend to export migrants.

What's valuable, though, is those immigrants who love America -- and who enrich it through their examples to the benefit and inspiration of the entire country.

It comes down to what Eric Hoffer once observed about the differences between common people and the people that he, for want of a better word, characterized as "intellectuals."

The latter are the people we should be keeping out of the country, discriminating against, given what we have seen from this class already imported in as the best and brightest. I am not going to get into how to sort them out, but I am very wary of people who are imported on "merit" grounds with no regard as to what their views of America are. Often those views are communist or something that comes very close to it, and once in the states they vote Democrat.

I've got a copy of his 'The Ordeal of Change,' and its Chapter 6 titled "The Intellectual and the Masses" in my lap, which offers insight as to why, opening with:

The intellectual as a champion of the masses is a relatively recent phenomenon. Education does not waken in us a concern for the uneducated. The distinction conferred by education is more easily maintained by a sharp separation from those below than by a continued excellence of achievement. When Gandhi was asked by an American clergyman what it was that worried him the most, he replied: "The hardness of heart of the educated."

In almost every civilization we know of the intellectuals have been either allied with those in power or members of a governing elite, and consequently indifferent to the fate of the masses. In ancient Egypt and Imperial China the literati were magistrates, overseers, stewards, tax-gatherers, secretaries, and officials of every kind. They were in command, and did not lift a finger to lighten the burden of the lower orders. In India the intellectuals were members of the uppermost caste of the Brahmins. Gautama, who preached love of service for others and the mixing of castes, was by birth not an intellectual but a warrior; and the attempt to translate Buddha's teaching into reality was made by another warrior, Emperor Asoka. The Brahmin intellectuals, far from rallying to the cause, led the opposition to Buddhism, and finally drove it out of India.

V.S. Naipaul, the son of Indian indentured servants on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, boiled with contempt for them, too, and he had their number, marveling at their mediocrity and resentments in his magnificent essays and novels.

Meanwhile, nobody did quite the job of slaying of them as individual people than historian Paul Johnson did in his short masterpiece, "Intellectuals."

Johnson's takedowns of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jean Paul Sartre, and others was devastating, describing from a historian's perspective what a bunch of colossal a-holes they were as people, with vast character flaws and gargantuan egos. My Indian friends and I read it in Singapore years ago, and I recall the amount of fun we had deciding among ourselves which one was "the absolute worst." (Consensus: Marx.)

With this type defined, compare them to this best-and-brightest immigrant pair, who censored President Trump and countless Americans in naked violation of the First Amendment.

Based on their Wikipedia pages, they are Indian immigrant "success stories," the best and brightest who should always be imported in under this new consensus.

Both Vijaya Gadde and Parag Agrawal were the pampered children of the Indian intellectual elites.

India has lots of different kinds of people, but some of the worst of them are in their intellectual class, a bastion of third world mediocrity if there ever was one, fully vested in strangling power over the little guys.

Censoring others, particularly the little guys and more importantly, the leader they elected, would be second nature to them, so not surprisingly was exactly what they did. What third-world intellectual straight out of the pages of V.S. Naipaul's or Eric Hoffer's nonfiction essays, wouldn't do the same? They are intellectuals, and intellectuals hate the common people.

India, of course, gets a lot of attention because nobody has fostered the concept of intellectuals, and bureaucrats like the the Indians have. Plenty of other places, though, have them -- Somalia, Tanzania, Ghana, Zaire, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Columbia, Mexico, Peru -- any country that had a lot of fist-waving against the U.S. during the 1960s.

Most are wildly anti-American, hating the concept of little guys owning their own cars and taking vacations, not to mention, rising upward in status through hard work, which is the American story. They can't stand that as it challenges their own claims to power over others.

Besides the Twitter elites, take a look at Kamala Harris's heritage on the Indian side -- daughter of the Brahmin intellectual class. You can bet they've kicked around a few common people in their day -- and their legacy is Kamala, the former California Attorney General who kept low-level prisoners in jail beyond their terms to fight wildfires and demanded an illegal security detail from the Los Angeles Police Department to show off as a status symbol when she went to parties.

Her Indian-side family members have turned up in Silicon Valley in elite positions -- without being particularly talented.

That's stuff from the people Hoffer called "intellectuals."

Ditto for Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, both children of the intellectual elites in their home countries. Seems anyone who's anti-American is the child of some fourth-world "intellectual" elitist with a grudge against America and by nature comes here with a desire to stick it to the little guy.

Unfortunately, they can often overlap with "the best and the brightest" as a concept, and that then become a reason to prioritize them over other applicants to live in America.

I deeply distrust this idea of importing intellectual elites billed as "achievers" into this country, based on what the record shows.

Hoffer noted that not only do they look for and glom onto power, they crush creativity. That calls to mind that Silicon Valley started going downhill when they started turning up in big numbers.

I'd much rather see a hardworking family from Guatemala be allowed into the U.S. on some kind of vetted proof of their commitment to America than migrants like Rep. Ilhan Omar, the daughter of confused, resentful radical left-wing third-world intellectuals who clearly has a superiority complex over ordinary Americans and a will to power.

As Hoffer wrote in one of his later books, probably "Before the Sabbath":

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

He was talking about the classic immigrants, the little guys, of which he was probably one (he may have been born in Germany), not this intellectual class.

The quote still resonates with me after all these years.

Image: Wikipedia // public domain