“People Are Not Fungible Commodities” – MAGA Spars With Peter Schiff On Immigration

Tyler Durden 2025.10.10 3 min read

The battle lines are drawn between MAGA protectionism and libertarian free-market orthodoxy, as economist Spencer Morrison (author of Reshore) squares off against Austrian-leaning Peter Schiff in a no-holds-barred debate over tariffs, labor policy, and the future of American sovereignty.

Morrison contends that economic policy must “serve the American people” and reverse decades of deindustrialization by prioritizing domestic production. Schiff, by contrast, warns that imposing barriers and picking “winners and losers” — and governments have a penchant for choosing the latter — invites inflation, inefficiency, and misallocation of resources.

Below, we distill the sharpest exchanges of what defines the ideological economic showdown of today’s right wing:

The H1B frustration

Spencer Morrison argues that “America should be prioritizing American workers over foreign workers,” warning that bringing in “about half a million H-1B visa workers” causes unemployment and wage stagnation because “that’s a job an American would otherwise need to do, but the H-1B workers will do it cheaper.”

He calls for an executive order that is “annual and applies retroactively,” saying otherwise “it’s pointless.” Morrison likens the program to offshoring, “except worse,” because “we’re bringing the people here,” which “drives up housing and resource costs.”

In his view, companies like Google “train people in India” rather than invest in Americans, and the same neglect appears in medicine, where “the number of physicians trained in America has barely changed since the 1970s” as the country instead “invests in foreign education institutions,” ultimately “kicking out the ladder from young Americans.”

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— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) October 10, 2025

Freedom or betraying your countrymen?

Schiff, the capitalist, wonders why he cannot simply hire the best person for the job. As he puts it, “If I run a business, you can’t tell me who I can hire and who I can’t… I took all the risk. I put up the capital. It’s my business. Then I can hire who I want. And if I can get a better deal on hiring someone in India, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

For this, MAGA Morrison accuses Schiff of “selling out his fellow countrymen for some silver”, passing up an American for a foreigner who is willing to work for less.

A hardworking foreigner who wants to help improve the country is more admirable than the lazy American complaining about being passed up, Schiff says. “Nobody deserves a job. You have to earn a job… You act like we should be upset if somebody comes here from another country and works hard, right? I’m upset of Americans who are born here who don’t work at all.”

Morrison’s reply: “This whole ideology is rather immoral.”