Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy advocate for educated immigrants to boost the tech sector. Trump has just decided that he is too. We’ll see if that continues.
President-elect Donald Trump arrives to watch a SpaceX Starship rocket lift off for a test flight with Elon Musk from Starbase in Boca Chico, Texas on November 19, 2024.
(Brandon Bell/Pool via AP)
It’s disturbing when you find yourself lightly agreeing with white nationalist MAGA maniacs like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer. Their fight over H-1B visas — the kind issued to highly educated immigrants — just goes to show that the top members of the MAGA nation disagree with each other on issues big and small. It will be a rare joy of the Trump era to watch them try to take each other down.
The world’s most pathetic billionaire, Elon Musk, and the most successful Trump-kissing Republican coming out of the 2024 primary, Vivek Ramaswamy, teamed up over the weekend to promote the visa benefits the tech bros love so much. Ramaswamy wrote on X: “A culture that honors the prom queen rather than the Math Olympiad champion, or the athlete rather than the graduate, will not produce the best engineers.”
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On Saturday, the DOGE duo appeared to have won the battle as their lord, master and pawn Donald Trump declared that he loves H-1B visas too! “I always liked visas, I was always in favor of visas. That’s why we have them,” said the president-elect New York Post. He went on to claim, “I have a lot of H-1B visas in my territory.”
Like Timothy Noah wrote in The new republic. “No, it doesn’t. Trump has many holders H-2A visas, which are for lower-wage agricultural workers, and H-2B visas, which are for lower-wage seasonal workers (typically landscape workers).” Trump doesn’t need smart immigrants to do high-level jobs; he has sons Don Jr. and Eric.
Unsurprisingly, Trump once came out strongly against H-1B visas in a 2016 debate. “I know H-1B very well. And that’s what I honestly use and I can’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have that… It’s very bad for our workers and it’s not fair for our workers. And we have to put an end to it.”
Again, readers: he’s almost certainly not using it on his property. It’s hard to decide whether his mistake about which immigrant visa holders he hires is a lie or just another sign of his unmistakable mental decline. That’s a lot of H to keep straight.
What was fascinating, however, was how the issue inflamed MAGA stalwarts like Bannon and Loomer, who attacked visas on social media and on Bannon’s podcast. The war allegedly began when Trump tapped Indian immigrant and venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his senior adviser on artificial intelligence. Krishnan was quick to speak out in favor of H-1B. After several deeply racist forays, Loomer made the semi-legitimate suggestion that skilled foreign labor could displace “American STEM students.” Bannon weighed on Loomer’s side, stating his own War room podcast, “The H-1B visa program is a total and complete fraud from top to bottom.”
Let me say this: If Bannon and Loomer really wanted “American STEM students” to have the opportunities afforded to those who get H-1B visas, they would have called for the Manhattan Project or the “Space Race” or even something similar to Trump . the success of a solitary policy, Operation Warp Speed for a Covid vaccine, to spend money and attention on the promotion of scientific miracles of American origin. They couldn’t care less about American public school students. But this is how the MAGA nation sometimes splits. As Noah points out, “The H-1B program has been grossly abused to displace domestic technical workers, not because those workers are inferior, but because H-1B workers are cheaper and easier to control.” If I believed that Bannon and Loomer were serious about improving the status of home tech workers and protecting their rights, I would be on their side. But they are not.
Meanwhile, Musk has shown a side of himself that makes people doubt he should ever get a security clearance. “Take a big step back and FACE YOURSELF,” he told user X, who opined that H-1Bs shouldn’t exist. “I will go to war over this issue that you cannot understand.”
What does that even mean?
Noah declared victory in the war of the DOGE brothers. But I’m not so sure. For now, Trump has landed with them, but Bannon apparently hasn’t had a chance to listen to either the president-elect or Trump’s deputy chief of staff for domestic policy, Stephen Miller, who is against all these non-white immigrants. I think this has opened a crack that we need to continue to pay attention to. Immigration seemed to be MAGA’s unifier — remember those “Mass Deportation Now” signs at the GOP convention? Maybe it really is “Some Mass Deportations”.
Will corporate America, at least in the service sector, go after the H-2A and 2B workers who harvest our crops, work the most dangerous jobs in the food industry, and turn hotel beds? Do they also think they can outdo Trump on this, as Musk apparently does?
If Trump starts deporting real people, as he has promised, many of us will see them as people with rights. But Trump’s corporate supporters will see them as necessary workers, just as Musk and Ramaswamy see their more educated peers. There are other rifts in the MAGA coalition — who will get which tax cuts, can we do anything about family policy (the VP-elect has routinely singled it out as a bipartisan issue), and will the Trump administration make any moves on abortion? It will be interesting.
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