A multi-day firestorm has erupted over comments made by two incoming advisers to President-elect Donald Trump about H-1B temporary worker visas, a carve-out for high-skilled workers that some in MAGA world say are taking American jobs.
The fight began brewing on X ahead of Christmas after Trump named venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan to a top AI policy post, triggering a racially charged backlash that surfaced Krishnan’s comments advocating for green cards for skilled workers.
The backlash escalated on Thursday, when Vivek Ramaswamy, in a post on X, criticized an American culture that he said “venerated mediocrity over excellence,” attributing this as one reason for the influx of foreign tech workers. Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, went on to say he hopes Trump’s presidency can start an American culture that prioritizes “hard work over laziness.” Tech executives have called for greater access to the widely used immigration visa, arguing that it is necessary to fill high-skilled tech and other specialized jobs.
Trump adviser Elon Musk, with whom Ramaswamy is a co-leader of Trump’s incoming Department of Government Efficiency, had posted yesterday on X in response to a tweet about a shortage of skilled workers in Silicon Valley that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.” Musk, who was born in South Africa and is a naturalized American citizen, urged people to “[t]hink of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
The posts generated backlash among ardent MAGA supporters who want a hardline approach to all forms of immigration and exposed a chasm in the relationship with a right-wing faction of some of Trump’s closest allies and advisers from the tech sector.
“If we are going to have a throwdown, let’s have it now,” said Steve Bannon on his “War Room” show Friday morning, calling many of the arguments in favor of H-1B a “total scam.”
The Trump transition did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Conservative commentator Mike Cernovich replied to Ramaswamy’s post, writing, “the Woodstock generation managed to build out aerospace, the one before went to the moon, America was doing great. Underlying your post is that we were all living in squalor until being rescued by H-1B’s. Then why did everyone want to come here?”
Some attempted to broker agreement between the factions, with venture capitalist Shaun Maguire defending Krishnan and writing that “the tech community should also hear MAGA’s points,” namely that immigrants “should be skilled AND aligned w/ American values” and fully assimilate.
Later, Cernovich shared an article on Ramaswamy more than a year ago on the campaign trail promising to “gut” the H-1B system if he were elected. Ramaswamy retweeted it.
The backlash sparked a broader conversation about how to revive lagging American industry, with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat responding that the rebirth of at least one example of “sagging” American industry “seems extremely unlikely to emerge from a test-oriented, grindset, no-sleepovers or mall-hangouts mentality.” Retweeting Ramaswamy earlier, Douthat suggested that Trump’s incoming adviser had misidentified the cause and assessed American cultural priorities and strengths inaccurately.
The dispute over high-skilled immigration in Trump world comes as the Biden administration, in its final days, published a new regulation to “modernize” the H‑1B program, set to take effect on Jan. 17, just three days before Trump takes office.
Trump has promised to sign deportation orders on his first day in office, and in the latest indication of the incoming administration’s focus on immigration, his “border czar,” Tom Homan, told NBC on Thursday that “family detention, if we bring it back, it’s like, it’s on the table. We haven’t finished the plans yet.”
Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner contributed.
