In the last few days, the online Right has been engulfed in a heated debate about skilled immigration into the United States.
The debate began earlier this month after President-Elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his new White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence. Many of Trump’s most influential supporters quickly criticized Krishnan’s nomination on X, citing Krishnan support for removing country caps on green cards, which would greatly expand legal immigration into the United States at a time when Trump was elected with a mandate to lower immigration into the country.
Then, on Christmas day, billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk weighed in. In a series of his own posts on X, Musk claimed there is a shortage of engineers and other skilled workers in the United States. He argued that the U.S. should be viewed as a sports team and, that if Americans want their team to win, they should support attracting the world’s so-called best and brightest to the country.
MAGA influencers and other conservatives responded in uproar and in near unison. They argued, as I do, that America has the STEM talent we need right here at home, and that skilled immigration visas, primarily the H-1B, are rife with abuse.
The apparent MAGA rift expanded even further a day later, when Musk’s colleague and cochair of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Vivek Ramaswamy sided with Musk in a lengthy screed against American culture.
Many in MAGA rightly did not take kindly to Ramaswamy’s criticisms of American culture. America is much more than a sports team. We are a country and a people that liberated Europe twice in two world wars. We are the country that invented the atom bomb, that put a man on the moon, and that built some of the greatest cities in the world. We became the world’s leading economy and superpower, and have been the envy of the world for nearly a century. Yes, that was done with the help of both native Americans and newcomers alike. But it all happened before the H-1B. We didn’t need to open the floodgates to cheaper, third-world labor because Americans weren’t good enough. America, her people, and her culture have always been great.
I made these points in a recent appearance on Newsmax where I was asked to weigh in on this new MAGA divide. I hope to have more to come on this issue in the coming days, as there is much to explain and dissect about high-skilled immigration in the United States. In the meantime, I hope you watch my clip and let me know what you think.
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