The Brooklyn Rail

Who knew that the nastiest family squabble around the Christmas table this year would erupt within Trumpworld, between the MAGA and DOGE factions? The flashpoint was Trump’s announcement on December 22nd of his choice of Elon Musk associate Sriram Krishnan, who was born in India and wants to remove the cap on green cards for workers from selected countries, to be Trump’s Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence. Trump insider and white nationalist Laura Loomer was appalled by this choice on racist and xenophobic grounds, proclaiming, “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India.” Loomer then sounded off against all H-1B visas (temporary worker visas for highly skilled technology workers).

On Christmas Day, Musk went up against Loomer on X, citing the lack of homegrown (American or white European) talent to fill all the needed positions in Big Tech companies. “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he said. “Investing in Americans is actually hard. Really hard. It costs money and time and effort to make a person productive. It’s a short term net loss [sic]. It’s much easier to bring in skilled workers who might not do quite a good job [sic], but will work for a fraction of the cost and be happy just to be here.”¹ And if they come on an H1-B visa, the corporation that hires them has almost total control over them.

Musk’s DOGE lieutenant Vivek Ramaswamy, whose parents immigrated to America from India, went one step further in arguing for the need for foreign workers. “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” he posted. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Nikki Haley, another child of Indian immigrants (like Kamala Harris), replied to Ramaswamy: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing Americans, not foreign workers.”

And finally the MAGA consigliere, Steve Bannon, weighed in, castigating the MAGA newcomers and casting all immigration as a threat to Western civilization. In an interview on December 28th, Bannon said he opposes both H-1B and H-2 visas because they drive down wages for American workers while increasing profits for billionaires. H-1B visas are currently capped at 85,000 a year, but tech companies are always trying to increase that number. H-2B visas, for nonagricultural unskilled laborers, are capped at 66,000, and H-2A visas, for agricultural workers, have no cap.

In the WWE, this would be just another family fight, with different factions maneuvering to establish dominance, but it reveals a schism in Trumpworld that may turn out to be significant, between loyal Dark MAGA racists and nativists like Loomer and the newly minted Tech Billionaire wing of Trumpism. These magatech elites (Musk, Thiel, Ramaswamy, JD Vance, David Sacks, et al.) have been willing to go along with the Culture War absolutism of the MAGA base so far, but it’s not really in their blood.

For hardliners like Bannon and Loomer, the Musk/Ramaswamy response is just not “America First” enough. When it comes to their balance sheets, the tech billionaires think globally, and this is heresy in Magadom. It’s a doctrinal split that could tear the coalition apart.

As is often the case, when Trump weighed in on the dispute, he misunderstood the facts entirely. He claimed he’s used the H-1B visa program many times at Mar-a-Lago and supported it, but he misspoke. The H-1B visa allows skilled technology workers like software engineers to work in the US for three to six years. In 2016, Trump said the H-1B program was “very bad for workers” and “we should end it.”

In his latest statements, Trump was actually defending the H-2B visa program that allows unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers to stay in the country for 10 months at a time. Trump has used the H-2 programs to hire over 1000 foreign workers to work on his estates, mansions, and golf clubs over the past 20 years as cooks, housekeepers, and waiters.² On the other hand, when Elon Musk laid off a lot of Tesla workers earlier this year, he replaced over 2000 of them with foreign workers using H-1B visas.

Even so, Trump’s statement was taken as an endorsement of Elon Musk’s advocacy of H-1B visas. Musk, who was born in South Africa, came into this country on an H-1B visa.

The MAGA v. DOGE dispute over immigration also boiled over into the fake “free speech” battle that Musk’s X has promoted. In response to Loomer’s reluctance to go along with the Tech Billionaires’ stance on immigration-for-some, Musk blocked her from posting on X and removed her “verified” status, thus cutting her off from monetizing her account by collecting fees from paid subscribers. Loomer, who has 1.4 million followers on X, called Musk’s actions “censorship.” “I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.”

The racist, xenophobic conspiracy theorist has a point. For his part, on December 27^th, Musk warned Loomer and Bannon and the other MAGA loyalists of what is to come with this post: “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”