“A Foreign Class of Servants” — JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia

Vice President JD Vance recently declared that America doesn’t need to “import a foreign class of servants” to remain competitive. “We did it in the ’50s and ’60s,” he said. “We put a man on the moon with American talent. Some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War two, but mostly by American citizens.”

The line is memorable—not for its nationalism, but for its breathtaking amnesia.

The moon landing was not the product of some closed, white-bread meritocracy. It was powered by German engineers, Jewish refugees, and immigrant scientists—many quite literally “imported.” Wernher von Braun, the face of NASA’s rocket program, was a former Nazi, repurposed by America for its Cold War dreams.

Today, the immigrant pipeline Vance sneers at includes his own in-laws—his wife’s parents, Indian-born academics. I’ve highlighted this problematic tendency before. They weren’t servants. They were scholars. Like hundreds of thousands who have powered this country’s universities, tech firms, hospitals, and labs. America doesn’t run on pedigree. It runs on brains. And yes, those brains often have accents.

America First doesn’t mean America stays first

To reduce global talent to a “servant class” is not just demeaning. It’s dangerous. It rewrites the very story that made America great: a nation that won the 20th century not by shutting doors, but by opening them—selectively, yes, but decisively.

The postwar genius of the United States wasn’t its insularity. It was its ability to absorb the world’s best and make them American. That was “America First”—not as a slogan, but as strategy.

What Vance proposes isn’t America First but rather America Last—but louder. An America that no longer wants to lead, only to posture. A nation that forgets it takes both janitors and jet propulsion labs to stay great.

The world’s top talent doesn’t want to be condescended to. And in the race for brains, insults are disqualifying. The U.S. risks becoming the country that talks big, hires small, and learns late.

You can’t be a superpower with a shrinking imagination.

Decline by Design?

This isn’t just a rhetorical shift—it’s an infrastructural one. When the language of immigration shifts from “talent” to “servants,” the policy soon follows. And once skilled migrants become suspect, merit itself becomes undesirable.

This is the groundwork for a soft national retreat: an America that quietly concedes primacy in exchange for cultural purity and domestic order. It doesn’t want to compete. It wants to control. And in that mood, dynasties prosper. Insecure nations are easier to rule.

Meanwhile, China, Singapore, and the Gulf States are running talent acquisition campaigns. Dubai doesn’t insult its engineers. It recruits them. And increasingly, it wins.

Vance may dismiss the idea of a “brain drain,” but the world’s brightest already have alternatives. If the U.S. won’t invest in its future, others will.

And here’s the final irony: much of what sustains the American edge—scientific grit, procedural obsession, institutional loyalty—has long come from cultures America barely understands. Cultures that produce not charisma, but code. Not rhetoric, but results.

What happens when those cultures stop coming?

The question isn’t whether America will still have workers. It will. But will it still have builders?