Biden Is Caught Between Big Tech and Black Voters
Analysis by Rachel Rosenthal | BloombergMay 30, 2022 at 1:44 a.m. EDT
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President Joseph Biden couldn’t have beaten Donald Trump in 2020 without the support of Big Tech and Black voters. Donations from Silicon Valley employees and political action committees gave the former vice president a critical cash advantage in the final scramble to election day, while Black voter turnout tipped the balance in key states such as Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. “When this campaign was at its lowest — the African-American community stood up again for me,” Biden said in his acceptance speech. “They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”
Now, facing a host of intractable domestic and foreign crises, from rising inflation and a persisting pandemic to escalating Russian aggression and Chinese strategic competition, Biden risks seeing his falling poll numbers translate into the loss of the Democratic Party’s tenuous control of Congress.
But rather than rushing to Biden’s aid, Black Americans and Big Tech are pulling back. Although still high, the president’s approval rating among Black voters has fallen precipitously. Before his inauguration, two-thirds of Black Americans said Biden’s policies would favor their interests. More than a year later, the largest proportion of respondents felt his agenda had no impact on their lives. “I feel like Biden is basically doing the bare minimum in terms of being attentive to the needs and issues facing the Black community,” one prominent civil rights advocate told the Hill.
Big Tech, for its part, has faced growing scrutiny and pressure from the industry critics that Biden has named to prominent roles in his administration. The president’s progressive agenda, from retaining trade barriers to raising corporate tax rates, also came as a disappointment to executives seeking a centrist foil to Trump. And while rolling back some Trump-era restrictions has made it easier to hire the foreign students Silicon Valley covets — as well as programmers and engineers on temporary visas — companies highly reliant on this skilled workforce continue to voice frustration about labor shortages, warning that a dearth of candidates could force them to ship jobs overseas.
Efforts by the Biden administration to woo back these two critical constituencies face a growing problem: Although their respective interests have little direct overlap, they increasingly conflict in a key area — the hunt for tech talent. Prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus want more high-paying tech jobs to go to graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other underrepresented minorities; tech wants more workers, period.
Theoretically, these two goals can coexist. Tech companies often say there’s no limit to the number of engineers they can hire. But the data say otherwise: Over the past thirty years, a rising flow of visa holders has created a pool of tens of thousands of candidates beyond the available openings; meanwhile, in the decade through 2020, the representation of Black workers in tech has stagnated.
For the US to remain a “talent powerhouse,” it shouldn’t have to make a choice between a domestic or foreign-born pipeline, as the National Science Board has noted. It needs both. Yet companies’ growing dependency on temporary workers is having a profound if unintended consequence on diversity hiring. There’s little incentive to recruit when a long line of candidates is waiting at the doorstep. “Why not invest as much time, effort, money and resources into developing overlooked, underserved home-grown talent as you are to lobbying for an increase in the number of H-1B visas?” asked Allison Scott, the CEO of the Kapor Center and co-author of a recent joint report with the NAACP lamenting the state of tech diversity. “We don’t want to close our doors to fantastic international talent, but we can’t import our way out of our tech talent shortage, and our rampant inequality, if we want to remain competitive.”
That tech, one of the highest-paid sectors, is unrepresentative of the country at large poses a crisis not only of wealth and income inequality, staggering as that may be. It also means the people developing technology don’t look like the people who use it. Powerful algorithms, for example, help determine who gets a job, a home loan, access to health care — or even a speeding ticket. In other words, the systemic exclusion facing Silicon Valley aspirants has the potential to affect every Black and Brown person in America. “The people whose hands are making those products that so increasingly govern our lives, our personal lives, our professional lives, the lives of citizens, are not actually made by diverse hands,” said Lisa Lewin, chief executive officer of General Assembly, a large provider of coding bootcamps. “That, to me, is hugely problematic.”
Traditionally, tech companies seeking to fill richly compensated, entry-level openings culled the most promising recruits from a clutch of elite campuses; for less glamorous but well-enough paid IT work, they resorted to a much broader pool from lower-tier schools. HBCUs, community colleges and other minority-serving institutions have been ignored at both ends. As a result, many Black computer science and engineering graduates have ended up working everywhere but Silicon Valley, the lucrative epicenter of tech innovation — even as industry giants there say they can’t find any Black workers to hire.
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