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 US labour 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 hardliners 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 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 labour supply that critics say undercuts wages for American citizens.
The dispute, which late on Thursday exploded online into acrimony, finger-pointing and accusations of censorship, frames a policy quandary for 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 criticising 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 Krishnan, a naturalised US citizen who was born in India, would have an 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," Loomer wrote on X, the social media platform owned by Musk.
Loomer's comments surfaced a simmering tension between longtime supporters of 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 programme to hire skilled workers from abroad.
In response, Sacks called Loomer’s critiques "crude", while Musk posted regularly this week about the lack of homegrown talent to fill all the needed positions within American technology companies.
The expertise the US companies need "simply does not exist in America in sufficient quantity," Musk posted on Thursday, drawing a line between what he views as legal immigration and illegal immigration.
Throughout the election cycle, 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, Musk has spoken out frequently against immigration, characterising it as a threat to national sovereignty and endorsing messages calling noncitizens "invaders".
This week, however, he came out strongly in favour of H-1B visas, which are given to specialised foreign workers. 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.
Krishnan, Sacks and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Loomer, reached by telephone, said that she took on the visa issue because she didn’t trust the motivations of Musk and other tech magnates who helped elect Trump. She is worried, she said, that 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.
New York Times News Service
