Ro Khanna on Crime, Censorship & Congress: Fixing What's Broken in America

**Jason** (0:00)
Bro, how many times have you been on the pod now? Is this number four for you? Three or four?

**Chamath** (0:03)
No, this is my fifth time. Oh, wait, sorry. I'm not Ro Khanna. Sorry, over to Ro Khanna. Sorry.

**Ro Khanna** (0:09)
We all look the same.

**Jason** (0:11)
You're Sri Lankan, he's Indian. I know the difference.

**Chamath** (0:13)
We all look the same, bro. We all look the same.

**Jason** (0:15)
It's like you're saying to the Irish guys.

**Ro Khanna** (0:18)
That's how I won my seat. I just had Indian Americans, every Indian American go knock on doors and say, I'm Ro Khanna. You know, they all thought the candidate came to every door.
I will say one of my appearance, I think this is number four, but one of them was on election night. And it was with Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr. And I actually ran into him in the green room right before we were doing Squawk Box and he brought up the Pod Save interview. So there you go, bringing the sides together.

**Jason** (1:08)
It's been pretty amazing. I think it's a good place to start how successful Indian Americans have become and a really important topic, I think, for us to kick off with maybe this time on your fourth appearance, is immigration, H-1Bs. What's your take broadly on what we're seeing out of the Trump administration on maybe trying to correct the abuse in these systems and maybe monetize them and maybe do you think that's a good strategy for correcting the abuse?

**Ro Khanna** (1:40)
First of all, there's definitely abuse. Second, it definitely needs to be corrected. The reality is that some of the H-1B visa holders are being paid below market wages. Some of them are not going to super talented individuals or in the jobs that actually require a lot of skill. I had a bipartisan bill actually that would have reformed it, requiring paying a prevailing wage, requiring making sure that the categories actually were skilled categories. I don't love the blanket $100,000 fee. I think that that's not the best way to reform it, but if, partly because it puts an unfair burden on startups, it actually may hurt with talent. But if you want it to say, look, there's going to be some prevailing wage standard and we need reforms, I'm open to that.

**Chamath** (2:33)
Do you think that the president is on the right direction then in actually trying to reform the system?

**Ro Khanna** (2:38)
Yeah. I think in terms of reforming the system, he's in the right direction.
I don't agree with the specifics of the way he's doing it, like many things. I think sometimes he identifies the right issue and he has a solution that I don't agree with. But the reality is that it has to be reformed. I mean, and anyone in Silicon Valley, I mean, you guys know this, I mean, it's been abused. It's been abused by some of the mass IT outsourcing firms that just have people coming in.

**Chamath** (3:10)
It's been very difficult to find some of the best young minds to work at our startups, to your point Ro, because it has been gamed and the people that have perfected the application process have won the H1Bs. And I think that that's where these systems go off the rails because it should be, as you said, the really talented young men and women that moved to the United States, supported by an American company trying to do something ambitious. It should not be because you know how to apply multiple times through multiple shell companies.

**Ro Khanna** (3:42)
Yeah, I agree. And as you know, some of the outsourcing consulting companies, I don't want to go through all the names, but you know what they are, TIDAC Consulting or Cognizant or others, they've gamed the system and they get a bulk of those H1Bs. And that needs to stop and there needs to be actual talent. But I want to make a point, I was just in China, we had gone to a bipartisan delegation there, one-third of the AI talent is in China, according to a lot of the reports. And so I want some of those folks to come to the United States, so we can stay ahead of AI. So there are legitimate uses of the H1B program, and what we need to do is fix the program, so you can have the legitimate talent still coming to Silicon Valley and around the nation.

**Chamath** (4:29)
Do you think that for that cream skimming, things like national interest waivers and O1 visas and EB1s and EB5s, do you think that those are sufficient to accomplish the task of that, or it should be factored into the H1B program itself?