Trump Backers Battle Online Over Skilled Immigrants

 

Trump Backers Battle Online Over Skilled Immigrants

 

A fierce dispute erupted in the president-elect’s camp between immigration hard-liners and tech industry leaders including Elon Musk.

 

Ryan MacKen Bensinger

By Ryan Mac and Ken Bensinger

Dec. 27, 2024

Updated 4:00 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/technology/trump-musk-immigration-h1b-visa.html

 

Weeks before President-elect Donald J. Trump is to take office, a major rift has emerged among his supporters over immigration and the place of foreign workers in the U.S. labor market.

 

The debate hinges on how much tolerance, if any, the incoming administration should have for skilled immigrants brought into the country on work visas.

 

The schism pits immigration hard-liners against many of the president-elect’s most prominent backers from the technology industry — among them Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who helped back Mr. Trump’s election efforts with more than a quarter of a billion dollars, and David Sacks, a venture capitalist picked to be czar for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency policy.

 

The tech industry has long relied on foreign skilled workers to help run its companies, a labor supply that critics say undercuts wages for American citizens.

 

The dispute, which late Thursday exploded online into acrimony, finger-pointing and accusations of censorship, frames a policy quandary for Mr. Trump. The president-elect has in the past expressed a willingness to provide more work visas to skilled workers, but has also promised to close the border, deploy tariffs to create more jobs for American citizens and severely restrict immigration.

 

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and fervent Trump loyalist, helped set off the altercation earlier this week by criticizing Mr. Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American venture capitalist, to be an adviser on artificial intelligence policy. In a post, she said she was concerned that Mr. Krishnan, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in India, would have influence on the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and mentioned “third-world invaders.”

 

“It’s alarming to see the number of career leftists who are now being appointed to serve in Trump’s admin when they share views that are in direct opposition to Trump’s America First agenda,” Ms. Loomer wrote on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk.

 

Ms. Loomer’s comments surfaced a simmering tension between longtime supporters of Mr. Trump, who embrace his virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his more recently acquired backers from the tech industry, many of whom have built or financed businesses that rely on the government’s H-1B visa program to hire skilled workers from abroad.

 

In response, Mr. Sacks called Ms. Loomer’s critiques “crude,” while Mr. Musk posted regularly this week about the lack of homegrown talent to fill all the needed positions within American technology companies.

 

The expertise U.S. companies need “simply does not exist in America in sufficient quantity,” Mr. Musk posted on Thursday, drawing a line between what he views as legal immigration and illegal immigration.

 

Throughout the election cycle, Mr. Musk helped amplify the debunked theory that the Democratic Party was encouraging undocumented immigrants to cross the border to vote, thus replacing American voters. A naturalized citizen born in South Africa, Mr. Musk has spoken out frequently against immigration, characterizing it as a threat to national sovereignty and endorsing messages calling noncitizens “invaders.”

 

This week, however, he came out strongly in favor of H-1B visas, which are given to specialized foreign workers. Mr. Musk has said that he held an H-1B before becoming a citizen, and his electric-car company, Tesla, obtained 724 of the visas this year. H-1B visas are typically for three-year periods, though holders can extend them or apply for green cards.

 

Mr. Krishnan, Mr. Sacks and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Ms. Loomer, reached by telephone, said that she took on the visa issue because she didn’t trust the motivations of Mr. Musk and other tech magnates who helped elect Mr. Trump. She is worried, she said, that Mr. Musk in particular would try to use his sway to persuade the incoming president to allow more immigration rather than close the border as she and others on the right would prefer.

 

“He’s not MAGA and he’s a drag on the Trump transition,” said Ms. Loomer, who said she believed that Mr. Musk was using his relationship with Mr. Trump to further enrich himself. “Elon wants everyone to think he’s a hero because he gave $250 million to the Trump campaign. But that’s not much of an investment if it allows him to become a trillionaire.”

 

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Mr. Trump in June said on a podcast co-hosted by Mr. Sacks that any international student who graduates from an American university “should be able to stay in this country.” The taping followed a San Francisco fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s campaign hosted by Mr. Sacks.

 

Since then, the leaders of tech companies who rely on skilled foreign labor, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Sundar Pichai of Google, have wooed Mr. Trump with calls, visits to Mar-a-Lago and donations for his inauguration. That’s a different dynamic from Mr. Trump’s first term, which began with the industry’s sweeping condemnation of the first Trump administration’s travel ban suspending the issuance of visas to applicants from seven countries, all of which had Muslim-majority populations.

 

Tech leaders have also been taking an important role in the presidential transition, proposing associates for high-ranking administration positions and advising the president-elect on potential policies and foreign relations. Mr. Trump also tapped Mr. Musk to serve as co-leader of a new “government efficiency” commission.

 

The rising importance of tech leaders in Mr. Trump’s circle is now drawing scrutiny from his base — and even some past rivals.

 

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who ran for president against Mr. Trump and who in the past has called herself the “proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” slammed the tech industry and its leaders as “lazy” for automatically seeking out foreign workers to fulfill their needs.

 

“If the tech industry needs workers, invest in our education system,” she wrote on X on Friday morning. “Invest in our American workforce. We must invest in Americans first before looking elsewhere.”

 

On Friday, Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime Trump confidant, hosted a series of influencers and researchers on his popular “War Room” podcast who critiqued “big tech oligarchs” for supporting the H-1B program and cast immigration as a threat to Western civilization.

 

Others took a more sympathetic stance toward Silicon Valley’s desire to continue bringing in engineers and other skilled workers from abroad.

 

Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate who last month was tapped to lead the government efficiency initiative alongside Mr. Musk, blamed American culture for creating people ill-suited for skilled tech positions.

 

“The H-1B system is badly broken & should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best,” Mr. Ramaswamy said on X on Friday.

 

The rancorous exchange over immigration soon grew to encompass another flashpoint on the right: online speech.

 

Since acquiring what was then called Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, Mr. Musk has characterized himself as a “free speech absolutist.” Among his first acts atop the company was reinstating accounts banned by the previous management, including Ms. Loomer’s, which had been taken down in 2018 after sharing anti-Muslim posts.

 

But on Thursday, X temporarily blocked Ms. Loomer from posting on the site and removed her verified status, cutting her off from income from paid subscribers. Numerous other accounts reported losing their verified status as well, although only Ms. Loomer seems to have been blocked from posting or monetizing her account.

 

Ms. Loomer said that starting Friday morning she was able to post again, but still had not regained her verified status.

 

An X spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Ms. Loomer, whose account has 1.4 million followers, called it retaliation, pointing out that Mr. Musk on Thursday night endorsed a post from a popular pro-tech influencer stating “play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” in reference to Ms. Loomer.

 

Ms. Loomer called the restriction “censorship.”

 

Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. More about Ryan Mac

 

Ken Bensinger covers right wing media and national political campaigns for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger