Even before Donald Trump takes over as president of the United States of America, one of the centrepieces of his campaign — a tough posture on immigration — is dividing his political movement and fraternity. How the Make America Great Again movement settles this debate could impact thousands of Indians every year. Mr Trump, who will be sworn in on January 20, and some of his most important allies, such as the multibillionaire, Elon Musk, and the entrepreneur-turned-politician, Vivek Ramaswamy, argue that undocumented migrants are the problem and that a tougher border and stricter immigration rules are the solution. But MAGA has always also attracted supporters who lean more openly towards white supremacist sentiments and argue that there is a greater conspiracy afoot to effectively replace white Americans with people of colour. In a climate of intense economic uncertainty and job insecurity, the fear of immigrants — even highly-skilled individuals on legitimate visas — replacing American citizens in the workforce is a potent potion for political rabble-rousers. This divide, between those who support a harsh crackdown on undocumented migrants but support visas for high-skilled foreigners and those who want jobs to mostly be the preserve of Americans, could prove to be a challenging gulf for Mr Trump to bridge.

At the heart of this split is the H1B programme, which allows US employers to hire foreign workers in high-skill occupations where there is a shortage of trained domestic labour. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and other tech-driven industries count on these visas to bring bright young minds in engineering and finance to the US. Indians win a majority of these visas. Yet, the scheme has for long also been plagued with criticism that tech companies and recruitment firms have gamed it to secure the visas they need. American companies have also been accused of replacing American workers with lower-paid Indian employees. So far, Mr Trump has backed the H1B scheme and had said earlier that he would make immigration easier for high-skilled foreign graduates of US universities. But ignoring the harder, anti-immigrant sentiments in his movement would not be easy. Mr Musk, for instance, has already flip-flopped, first insisting that he was a staunch supporter of the visas and, then, saying that the H1B system needed a revamp. None of this should be surprising, however. Mr Trump has for long treated migrants as red meat to throw to his supporters. Now some of them might come to bite him too.