Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy champion the educated immigrants who fuel tech-sector growth. Trump just decided he does, too. We’ll see if that lasts.
President-elect Donald Trump arrives to watch SpaceX’s rocket Starship lift off for a test flight with Elon Musk from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on November 19, 2024.(Brandon Bell / Pool via AP)
It’s unsettling when you find yourself slightly agreeing with white-nationalist MAGA maniacs like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer. Their battle over the issue of H-1B visas—the kind provided to highly educated immigrants—just shows that top members of MAGA nation disagree with one another, on matters big and small. It will be a rare joy of the Trump era to watch them try to bring one another down.
The world’s most pathetic billionaire, Elon Musk, and the most successful Trump-kissing Republican to emerge from the 2024 primary, Vivek Ramaswamy, tag-teamed over the weekend to promote the benefits of the visa so beloved by tech bros. Ramaswamy wrote on X, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
On Saturday, the DOGE duo seemed to win the battle, as their lord, master, and pawn Donald Trump declared that he loves H-1B visas too! “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” the president-elect told the New York Post. He went on to claim, “I have many H-1B visas on my properties.”
As Timothy Noah wrote in The New Republic. “No, he doesn’t. Trump has many holders of H-2A visas, which are for lower-wage agricultural workers, and of H-2B visas, which are for lower-wage seasonal workers (typically landscape workers).” Trump doesn’t need brainiac immigrants to do high-level work; he’s got his failsons Don Jr. and Eric.
Not surprisingly, Trump once firmly declared himself against H-1B visas, in a 2016 debate. “I know the H-1B very well. And it’s something that I frankly use and I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have it.… It’s very bad for our workers, and it’s unfair for our workers. And we should end it.”
Again, readers: He almost certainly doesn’t use it on his properties. It’s hard to decide if his mistake about which immigrant visa holders he employs is a lie or just another sign of his unmistakable mental decline. It’s a lot of H’s to keep straight.
What was fascinating, though, was the way the issue inflamed MAGA faithful like Bannon and Loomer, who attacked the visas on social media and Bannon’s podcast. Ostensibly the war began when Trump chose Indian immigrant and venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence. Krishnan quickly came out in favor of the H-1B. After a few deeply racist forays, Loomer made the semi-legitimate point that skilled foreign labor might displace “American STEM students.” Bannon weighed in on Loomer’s side by declaring on his War Room podcast, “The H-1B visa program is a total and complete scam from its top to the bottom.”
Let me say this: If Bannon and Loomer truly wanted “American STEM students” to get the opportunities afforded to those who receive H-1B visas, they’d call for a Manhattan Project or a “space race” or even something akin to Trump’s lone policy success, Operation Warp Speed for a Covid vaccine, to spend money and attention on advancing American-born science marvels. They couldn’t care less about American public school students. But this is the way MAGA nation sometimes splits. As Noah notes: “The H-1B program has been grossly abused to displace domestic tech workers, not because these workers are inferior but because H-1B workers are cheaper and easier to control.” If I believed Bannon and Loomer were serious about elevating domestic tech workers and protecting their rights, I’d be on their side. But they’re not.
Meanwhile, Musk showed that side of his that makes people doubt he should ever get a security clearance. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he said to an X user who opined that H-1Bs shouldn’t exist. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
What does that even mean?
Noah declared the war won by the DOGE bros. But I’m not so sure. Trump landed with them for now, but Bannon seemingly hasn’t had a chance to bend the president-elect’s ear, nor has Trump’s deputy chief of staff for domestic policy, Stephen Miller, who opposes all of these non-white immigrants. I think this opened a fissure that we should keep paying attention to. Immigration has seemed to be the MAGA unifier—remember those “Mass Deportation Now” signs at the GOP convention? Maybe it’s really “Some Mass Deportations Now.”
Will corporate America, at least in the service sector, go to bat for the H-2A and 2B workers that pick our crops, work our most dangerous food-processing jobs, and change our hotel beds? Do they, too, think they can best Trump on the issue like Musk apparently has?
If Trump starts deporting actual people, as he has promised, many of us will see them as individuals with rights. But Trump’s corporate backers will see them as needed workers, just as Musk and Ramaswamy do with their better-educated peers. There are other fractures in the MAGA coalition—who gets what tax cuts, can we maybe do something about family policy (the VP-elect used to single that out as a bipartisan issue), and will the Trump administration pull any punches on abortion? It’s going to get interesting.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.