Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want cheap labor—not a multiracial democracy.
Elon Musk, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Vivek Ramaswamy arrive for a meeting on Capitol Hill on December 5, 2024.(Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Democrats are rightly excited by the fact that the MAGA crew have already started viciously fighting among themselves even before Donald Trump’s inauguration. After all, with the Republicans set to enjoy a trifecta (even one that rests on a fragile hold of the House of Representatives), the best hope for Democrats is that internal GOP strife will sabotage Trump’s ability to enact his agenda. This is, in fact, what happened in Trump’s previous go-round as president, when the MAGA king was often thwarted by internal strife in his coalition (particularly the intense battles between GOP institutionalists such as Mitch McConnell and anti-system provocateurs such as Steve Bannon).
The current intramural GOP strife is a familiar battle between a business elite that wants cheap immigrant labor and nativist agitators who believe restriction of immigration is central to the MAGA agenda. As New York magazine reports, “Last week, while Americans were busy celebrating the holidays with their families, a contentious online rift emerged among the MAGA faithful after Donald Trump’s tech-world allies, led by billionaire Elon Musk, began pushing back on attacks on highly skilled foreign tech workers by the movement’s nativist wing.”
The initial instigation for the conflict was Trump’s nomination of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born tech entrepreneur, as senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence. The battle soon spread to the larger issue of H-1B visas, which are widely used in Silicon Valley as a way of hiring 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. As New York noted, “Loomer, who has never been one to shy away from outright racism, also launched attacks on Indian immigrants, calling them ‘third world invaders’ while celebrating the ‘white Europeans’ who she claimed built the country.”
In battling Loomer, Musk and his allies presented themselves as opponents of racism. Musk tweeted that “those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem” and added that by “contemptible fools” he meant “those in the Republican Party who are hateful, unrepentant racists.”
While it is true that Loomer and her allies (including former Trump adviser Steven Bannon and pundit Ann Coulter) are racists, that does not mean that Musk and his fellow Silicon Valley allies (notably former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is working with Musk in advising Trump on subduing the federal government to the MAGA agenda) are animated by truly anti-racist politics in their struggle.
As my Nation colleague Joan Walsh noted, as repugnant as they are, anti-system agitators such as Loomer and Bannon have a point when they deride the H-1B program as exploitative. For decades, progressive pro-labor activists have argued that the H-1B is in effect a guest worker program, creating a reserve army of employees who work for lower wages and have fewer rights than American citizens or those with permanent residency status. The H-1B visa is tied to employment, which means employees are especially vulnerable to exploitation.
On January 2, Bernie Sanders expressed this long-standing leftist position, noting, “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
The current GOP civil war is one where both sides have profoundly reactionary and bigoted views of society, although with slight variations. MAGA nativists such as Loomer and Bannon are dreaming of a return to the overwhelmingly white America of the 1950s, with middle-class jobs a patrimony reserved largely for the nation’s dominant ethnic group. Musk and Ramaswamy might want a more multiracial America, but it would still be a profoundly hierarchical one, with immigrants providing the cheap labor that allows the 1 percent to flourish.
Musk’s own history of racism clarifies the fact that both factions in this battle are just offering different strands of bigotry. Musk has a long history of promoting racist myths such as the idea of “white genocide” and the “Great Replacement.” These ideas are, as Julia Black documented in a 2022 article for Business Insider, tied up with his eugenicist belief that people such as himself have superior genes and thus a duty to populate the earth. This is a belief that Musk seems to have acquired from his father, Errol Musk.
As Black reports:
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Musk, who has fathered 10 known children with three women, is the tech world’s highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a significant portion of the human population. One person who has worked directly with Musk and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article recalled Musk expressing his interest as early as 2005 in “populating the world with his offspring. In August, Elon’s father…told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called ‘productive nations.’”
Musk’s ally Ramaswamy has cagily recast these arguments in a more politically correct form, as a matter of culture rather than genetics. According to Ramaswamy, Silicon Valley needs to hire immigrants because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”
One reason not to take Ramaswamy’s claim to care about culture seriously is that he himself, like Musk, has a history of racism. Moreover, these “cultural” justifications for hierarchy are often just barely disguised manifestations of the belief that some people are inherently masters and others inherently servants. The Indian journalist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, in taking sides with Musk against a nativist critic of the H-1B program, gave the game away by arguing, “Three generations of my ancestors have spoken & written, better English than your blue collar labourer family. I’ll hire you to polish my shoes though, because that’s the only thing you seem to be qualified for.”
Iyer-Mitra’s words show that support of Silicon Valley’s version of meritocracy is perfectly compatible with aristocratic hauteur. Musk’s belief in the greatness of his own genes and the necessary to populate the planet with his DNA is a particularly ludicrous manifestation of the same attitude.
At the very same time that Musk was decrying the racism of Loomer and other critics of the H-1B visa, he was expressing suport for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which is notoriously anti-immigrant. There’s no tension between Musk’s two positions. He is opportunistically anti-racist when he needs workers for his company, but in the long run he wants to keep the multiracial working class disciplined and divided. The best way to do that is to support nativist political movements, whether MAGA in the United States or AfD in Germany.
For progressives, there’s little reason to choose sides between Musk’s cynical racism and the racism of MAGA anti-system agitators like Loomer and Bannon. At best, we can hope that the internal strife will weaken both these noxious forces. The true path forward involves using the political space opened up by right-wing infighting to make a more principled argument for immigration—one based on the goal of creating a multiracial working class with a shared value of cosmopolitan solidarity that can overthrow the plutocrats and their racist coalition.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.