The One the Wolves Pulled Down

Struggling Amidst the H-1B Debate

By guest contributor Ryan Howard.

What a present we all woke up to this past Christmas. As hot takes poured in responding to assertions from the likes of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Patrick Bet-David, and others that Heritage Americans are not good enough to employ, I couldn’t help but consider my own circumstances and how they reflected the mood and circumstances of many men of my same generation and background.

There are a handful of exceptionally gifted or blessed men of my generation who have found a way to thrive. Some have gone into lucrative family businesses. Some have become entrepreneurs and have skillfully navigated the perilous world of startups. Others have dropped out, content to work menial jobs that allow them to scrape by and feed their addictions to weed, video games, and pornography. I can think of people who fit both categories from my high school class, the Class of 2014. The top of the distribution is comfortable as always, the bottom is comfortably numb, but what about the middle? What lies between the young hotshots rising to the top and the dregs languishing in their self-made squalor? The answer is a large number of men between the ages of 22 and 30 who work 40 hours or more every week just to survive. We come in all forms, we have various individual stories, but there’s a common thread that runs throughout all of us. We did exactly what we were told to do, and then society knocked us to the ground and spat in our faces. We find ourselves saddled with debt, pushed to our limits, stuck in career dead-ends, praying to God Almighty that he’ll see us through one more year, one more month, and even one more day.

I’m reminded of a somewhat obscure country song by an incredibly famous artist. Garth Brooks closes his blockbuster 1990 album No Fences with a spare, stark ballad called “Wolves.” It’s a deep cut that lacks the rowdiness of “Friends in Low Places,” the driving dynamism of “The Thunder Rolls,” or the domestic romanticism of “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House.” Of the familiar singles from the album, it has the most in common with “Unanswered Prayers,” with both being ballads of a religious nature, but the similarities end there. “Unanswered Prayers” is wistful but ultimately accepting of the hand dealt by God. “Wolves” is a cry of desperation which tells the story of a struggling rancher driving his herd into lower ground and losing a few stragglers to wolves. The event haunts the rancher as he witnesses a friend lose his ranch due to financial hardship, and it ends with a sincere plea to God that he not become, as the song often repeats, “the one the wolves pull down.” It’s the kind of song that shows just how powerful and resonant the country genre can be when it digs deep into its roots. It’s just plain good songwriting, as, even though I’ve never herded cattle, I can relate the imagery and the message to my own struggles. In those quiet, desperate moments in my daily life, I often find myself softly singing the chorus:

Lord, please shine a light of hope
On those of us who fall behind
And when we stumble in the snow
Can you help us up while there’s still time?

What is it about this obscure little Garth Brooks song that speaks to me, and what does it have to do with the H-1B discourse? Much like the unnamed rancher in the song, I too find myself struggling to support myself with something that ought to support me. I just turned 29 a few weeks ago, ironically the same age as my father in 1990 when No Fences was released. In 1990, my father was beginning his sales career having spent most of his twenties working in industrial laboratories. He was a newlywed with his first child on the way and made enough to be able to afford a house in a small suburb of Charlotte just a few minutes from his workplace. He made somewhere between $30–40K a year which, according to current inflation calculations, means he would need to make somewhere between $70–95K to have equivalent buying power today. Did my father struggle financially? No, not as far as I can tell. He and my mother were able to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle that included annual vacations. My mom worked full-time until my older sister was born and then became a stay-at-home mom who only worked part-time. By contrast, I make just under $70K before taxes, meaning that I do not have the equivalent buying power to my father 35 years ago. My wife and I do not own our house; we rent it. We have one child, and we both work full-time. If my wife quit her job or lost it, we would be devastated financially overnight. While my father was just beginning his sales career, I am in a management position overseeing a team of 3–4 salespeople and an entire state. To put it bluntly, I am being raped financially. I do not use this word lightly, as this is a violent and deliberate action being taken against me and those like me. The perpetrators of this assault have done this in multiple ways, but the most relevant one to the current discourse is the suppression of wages by the importation of foreign labor.

While Garth Brooks was reveling in the enormous success of No Fences and people like my father were wearing out their cassette copies driving to and from their jobs, President George H.W. Bush was signing the Immigration Act of 1990 into law. This was the very law that liberalized the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and created the H-1B visa. The Act placed a cap of 65,000 H-1B recipients, but allowed for a total of 700,000 immigrants to be admitted to the US in 1992–1994 with a cap of 675,000 beginning in fiscal year 1995. The irony of these numbers is as delicious as it is depressing, as the Office of Homeland Security Statistics reports a total of 755,020 foreign workers admitted on H-1B visas in FY 2023. Should we be shocked that the number of H-1B recipients in a single year eclipses the entire immigration cap set by the Act 30 years prior, or is that fact not even a little shocking anymore? When you couple the alarming numbers of H-1B admittances with the anti-white, anti-male dogma being preached at the institutional level, something my generation dealt with throughout our education, is it any wonder that I’m now struggling to make an honest living? We’ve all seen lists of the kind of jobs that H-1B recipients are getting and the salaries they’re being paid. These H-1B imports are taking the very jobs that people in my position, 5–10 years out of college trying to create stability for their young families, should be getting, and they are being paid a fraction of what a native worker would be paid. The visa for specialized workers was never that at all. This is a weapon being used against us.

I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs over the past 6–7 months. All of them have been entry- and mid-level sales jobs with a handful of management jobs thrown in there as longshot gambles. Almost every single one asks some kind of question that specifically relates to H-1B sponsorship. Would I get more interviews or even some offers if I were looking for an H-1B? I can’t say for sure, but when I look at the lists of jobs being filled by H-1B workers posted on X, I can’t help but think that I would be more desirable to employers if I were seeking to loot this country. It’s a brutal reality that people who actively hate this country and its people, as evidenced by their behavior online (especially since Christmas), are being actively brought in so that the tech elite can maximize profits with their legions of brown slaves and the Heritage American can be swept away to make room for a new economic zone.

The song “Wolves” is informed by something that has largely passed out of cultural memory, namely the farm crisis that ravaged the 1980s. The basics of this crisis were that at the beginning of the 1970s, there was a push for increased productivity from U.S. farms to provide food for struggling European countries, including the Soviet Union. Grain prices skyrocketed, land value increased, and farmers borrowed heavily to increase their productivity. This bubble popped quickly. By the end of the decade, the Carter administration had placed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union due to the invasion of Afghanistan, interest rates were being aggressively increased by the Volcker-led Federal Reserve, and the following decade would be devastating for farmers, agricultural banks, and rural communities. It was in this environment that Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young devised the Farm Aid charity concert. The topic of farmers losing their land to the banks is one that can be found throughout country music of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Songs like “Wolves” speak to a rural populace who have seen their friends, family members, and loved ones victimized by predatory lending and then hung out to dry. The farm crisis drove many to the militia movement, in fact, which would soon put them in the literal and figurative crosshairs of the U.S. government all over again. Despite all of that background, though, “Wolves” is not a political anthem, a protest song, or a sermon. It’s a plea and, at times, a prayer for mercy. It’s a cry of anguish, but one not devoid of hope for deliverance. My favorite part of the song comes in the last verse and refrain where the narrator prays for deliverance:

Well, I don’t mean to be complainin’, Lord
You’ve always seen me through
And I know You got Your reasons
For each and every thing You do

But tonight outside my window
There’s a lonesome, mournful sound
And I just can’t keep from thinkin’
About the ones the wolves pulled down

Oh, Lord, keep me from bein’
The one the wolves pulled down

Even though there is palpable contempt being shown for us by our elites and our prospects look grim right now, I urge every single man like me to cling to this hope. It’s hard for us right now. We’ve seen the wolves pull our friends down left and right. We see our rulers advocating on behalf of the wolves, arguing that to oppose them would be evil. They strike at us in our homes and on our holidays. They’ve been surrounding us and pulling us down for years and years, for our entire lifetimes. Still, we must look for hope. We can find it in our communities where people can help us find our way into careers that help us support our families. We find it in our friends who comfort us in times of turmoil. We find it in the closeness of our families, enduring the hardship alongside us. Lastly, we find it in God and His promise to care for us. I remain just as bitterly disappointed with my job prospects as I did when I sat down to write this article. I remain just as angry with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for their short-sighted and hateful screeds against the people who won Trump his mandate. However, this is not a black pill, but a cry of frustration for myself, my family, and the men like me who struggle under the weight of this burden. Lord, keep me from being the one the wolves pull down.