Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want cheap labor, not multiracial democracy.
Democrats are justifiably excited by the fact that the MAGA team has already started a fierce battle with each other even before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Ultimately, with Republicans aiming for a trifecta (even one that rests on fragile House power), the best hope for Democrats is that GOP infighting sabotages Trump’s ability to implement his agenda. This actually happened during Trump’s previous presidency, when the MAGA king was often hampered by internal conflicts within his coalition (particularly intense battles between GOP institutionalists like Mitch McConnell and anti-establishment provocateurs like Steve Bannon). .
The GOP’s current intramural struggle is a familiar battle between business elites who want cheap immigrant labor and nativist campaigners who believe limiting immigration is central to the MAGA agenda. How New York magazine reports“Last week, while Americans were busy celebrating the holidays with their families, a contentious divide erupted among MAGA fans online after Donald Trump’s allies in the tech world, led by billionaire Elon Musk, began hitting back at high-skilled foreign tech workers. the nativist wing of the movement.”
Trump’s nomination of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born tech entrepreneur, to serve as a senior adviser on artificial intelligence was the initial incitement to the conflict. The battle soon spread to the broader issuance of H-1B visas, which are widely used in Silicon Valley as a way to hire immigrants.
Leading the charge against both Krishnan and the H-1B program was Laura Loomer, a controversial media personality who reportedly has special access to Trump. How New York noted: “Loomer, never one to shy away from overt racism, also attacked Indian immigrants, calling them “Third World invaders,” while honoring the “white Europeans” who, she says, built the country.”
In the fight against Loomer, Musk and his allies pretended to be opponents of racism. musk tweeted that “these despicable fools must be rooted out of the Republican Party,” and added that by “despicable fools” he meant “those in the Republican Party who are hateful, unrepentant racists.”
While it’s true that Loomer and her allies (including former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon and pundit Ann Coulter) are racist, that doesn’t mean Musk and his Silicon Valley cronies (notably former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s party, who works with Musk in advising Trump on subordinating the federal government to the MAGA agenda) are animated in their fight for a truly anti-racist politics.
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Like mine Nation colleague Joan Walsh notedas loathsome as they are, anti-system agitators like Loomer and Bannon are right to deride the H-1B program as exploitative. For decades, progressive prot argued that H-1B is effectively a guest worker program that creates a reserve army of workers who work for lower wages and have fewer rights than US citizens or those with permanent resident status. The H-1B visa is tied to employment, which means workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
January 2 Bernie Sanders expressed this long-standing left-wing position, noting, “The primary function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire the ‘best and brightest,’ but rather to replace high-paying jobs in America with low-paying workers from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
The current GOP civil war is one in which both sides have deeply reactionary and bigoted views of society, albeit with slight variations. MAGA nativists like Loomer and Bannon dream of a return to the predominantly white America of the 1950s, where middle-class jobs are a legacy largely reserved for the country’s dominant ethnic group. Musk and Ramaswamy might want a more multiracial America, but it will still be deeply hierarchical, with immigrants providing the cheap labor that allows the 1 percent to prosper.
Musk’s own history of racism illustrates the fact that both factions in this battle are simply offering different sides of bigotry. I have a mask a long history of promoting racist myths such as the idea of ”white genocide” and “great replacement.” These ideas are there, as Julia Black claims documented in the 2022 article Business Insiderrelated to his eugenic belief that people like him have better genes and are therefore bound to populate the earth. Musk seems to have gotten this belief from his father, Errol Musk.
Like black reports:
Musk, who has fathered 10 famous children with three women, is the most famous pronatalist in the tech world, albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced back to much of the human population. One person who worked directly with Musk, who spoke on condition of anonymity for this article, recalled that Musk had expressed interest as far back as 2005 in “populating the world with his offspring.” In August, Elon’s father… told me that he was concerned about the low birth rate in what he called “productive countries.”
Musk’s ally, Vivek Ramaswamy, has cleverly reframed these arguments in a more politically correct way, based on culture rather than genetics. According to RamaswamySilicon Valley needs to hire immigrants because “American culture has valued mediocrity over excellence for too long.”
One reason not to take Ramaswamy’s claims that he cares about culture is that he, like Musk, the history of racism. Moreover, these “cultural” justifications for hierarchy are often only thinly disguised expressions of the belief that some people are inherently masters and others servants. Indian journalist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, siding with Musk against a nativist critic of the H-1B program, quit the game arguing“Three generations of my ancestors spoke and wrote better English than your blue-collar family. But I’m hiring you to shine my shoes because that’s the only thing you seem capable of.’
Iyer-Mitra’s words show that support for meritocracy in Silicon Valley is entirely compatible with aristocratic arrogance. Musk’s belief in the greatness of his own genes and the need to populate the planet with his own DNA is a particularly absurd manifestation of the same attitude.
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At the same time Musk was denouncing the racism of Loomer and other critics of the H-1B visa, he was speaking openly for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is known to be anti-immigrant. There is no tension between Musk’s two positions. He is an opportunistic anti-racist when he needs workers for his company, but in the long run he wants to maintain a disciplined and divided multiracial working class. The best way to do this is to support nativist political movements, be it MAGA in the United States or the AfD in Germany.
There is no reason for progressives to choose sides between Musk’s cynical racism and the racism of MAGA anti-establishment agitators like Loomer and Bannon. At best, we can hope that internal conflicts will weaken both of these harmful forces. The real way forward involves using the political space opened up by the right’s internal struggle to make a more fundamental case for immigration—an argument based on the goal of creating a multiracial working class with a shared value of cosmopolitan solidarity that can topple the plutocrats and their racist coalitions.
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