It’s not always a great idea to cover political stories that exist entirely on social media. You can end up focused on narratives and disputes that unfold largely among the most online subset of political commentators, but that don’t show up anywhere in the real world. More importantly, you run the risk of manipulation by people who are trying to use social media platforms to spread unpopular ideas and will them into gaining broader acceptance.
But, I’ll make an exception here.
Over the past few days, a fight has erupted within the MAGA right over legal immigration, specifically about whether the country should admit more high-skilled immigrants.
On the one side, you have opportunistic tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and David Sacks. These are incredibly wealthy figures who are open about using their newfound influence in government to serve both their ideological and their private business interests. On the other are figures like Laura Loomer, Nick Fuentes, and other nativist (and often openly racist) online personalities who had been vocal Trump supporters long before the Silicon Valley right joined the coalition.
The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.
This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.
To the far-right, nativist influencers that have from the start glommed onto Trumpian scapegoating of immigrants, Krishan’s position crossed a line. Loomer, an anti-immigrant provocateur who traveled with Trump during his campaign, called it “deeply disturbing.” Sacks replied, perhaps not fully understanding his audience, by noting that Indian immigrants face an 11-year wait for green cards.
This was catnip for Loomer, who replied by suggesting that Sacks was in on a new version of the great replacement theory, and spent the next several days making vile statements about immigrants, accusing those who disagree with her on H1-B visas of hating Americans, and demanding that senior Trump officials denounce their Silicon Valley allies. Sacks, whose recent political positions have included strident opposition to American support for Ukraine, denounced the “crude” attacks.
Soon, other Trump-involved tech oligarchs, like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, jumped into the fray. Musk wrote that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low. Think 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.”
Ramaswamy swooped in on Thursday to explain his view that American companies were forced to hire foreign skilled labor due to a deficit in homegrown American culture itself.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote, adding later: “More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers.”
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
As you might imagine, MAGA nativists of various stripes regard this Silicon Valley defense of skilled immigration with a paranoid and often racist eye. Fuentes, the groyper leader, described Ramaswamy’s position as an attempt to get “500 million indians to move here.” Others reacted to Ramaswamy’s premise that there may be something wrong with America. Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the nativist Claremont Institute, pushed back in a gentler fashion while still suggesting that Ramaswamy’s vision would “destroy the things that actually make America great.”
In a very obvious and over-the-top way, this imbroglio illuminates a real divide among the most vocal members of Trump’s coalition: tech oligarchs who want foreign labor for their businesses, and nativists who take Trump’s rhetoric on immigration very seriously and who in many cases want to apply it to nonwhite immigrants.
But there’s another thing that’s taking place here on a deeper level. Ramaswamy explicitly (and Musk implicitly) laid their supposed inability to find engineering talent at the feet of American culture. Ramaswamy was very blunt about this, calling for “fewer Saturday morning cartoons.” Musk complained that the number of “super talented” and “super motivated” engineers in the U.S. is “far too low.”
To the nativists, this may be a betrayal in policy terms. But for the broader Trumpian approach to politics, blaming Americans instead of scapegoating immigrants gives away the whole game. Look at JD Vance: he catapulted himself to fame in 2016 through Hillbilly Elegy, where he wrote the following about the white working class in rural Ohio: “What goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south is about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”
Vance has dropped that line of argument in recent years and replaced it with attacking immigrants, like those in Springfield, Ohio. It’s a reflection of Trump’s entire project from day one: he sells a world in which the country’s (and your) problems are the fault of immigrants, the “enemy within” — whoever. The tech oligarch position on this dramatically undermines that in a rhetorical sense, and reveals the extent to which they are out of step with the people whose votes they just harvested.
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