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Trump backers battle online over skilled immigrants.
Weeks before President-elect Donald 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 billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who helped back Trump’s election efforts with more than a quarter-billion dollars, and Mr 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 Dec 26 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.
Ms Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and fervent Trump loyalist, helped set off the altercation this week by criticising Trump’s selection of Mr Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American venture capitalist, to be an adviser on artificial intelligence policy. In a post, she said she was concerned that Mr Krishnan, a naturalised US citizen who was born in India, would have 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,” Ms Loomer wrote on social media platform X, which is owned by Mr Musk.
Ms Loomer’s comments surfaced a simmering tension between long-time Trump supporters, 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, Mr Sacks called Ms Loomer’s critiques “crude”, while Mr Musk posted regularly this week about a lack of home-grown talent to fill all the needed positions within American technology companies.
The expertise US companies need “simply does not exist in America in sufficient quantity”, Mr Musk posted on Dec 26, drawing a line between what he views as legal immigration and illegal immigration.
Throughout the election cycle, Mr Musk helped amplify the debunked theory that the Democratic Party was encouraging immigrants to illegally cross the border to vote, thus replacing American voters. A naturalised citizen born in South Africa, Mr Musk has spoken out frequently against illegal immigration, characterising it as a threat to national sovereignty and endorsing messages calling non-citizens “invaders”.
This week he came out strongly in favour of H-1B visas, which are given to specialised foreign workers. Mr Musk has said he held an H-1B before becoming a citizen, and his electric-car company, Tesla, obtained 724 of the visas in 2024. H-1B visas are typically for three-year periods, although holders can extend them or apply for green cards.
Mr Krishnan, Mr Sacks and Mr Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms Loomer, reached by telephone, said she took on the visa issue because she did not trust the motivations of Mr Musk and other tech magnates who helped elect Trump. She is worried, she said, that Mr 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.
“He’s not Maga and he’s a drag on the Trump transition,” said Ms Loomer, who said she believed that Mr Musk was using his relationship with Trump to further enrich himself. “Elon wants everyone to think he’s a hero because he gave US$250 million (S$340 million) to the Trump campaign. But that’s not much of an investment if it allows him to become a trillionaire.”
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump said on a podcast co-hosted by Mr Sacks in June that any international student who graduates from an American university “should be able to stay in this country”. The taping followed a San Francisco fund raiser for Trump’s campaign hosted by Mr Sacks.
Since then, the leaders of tech companies who rely on skilled foreign labour, including Mr Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Mr Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mr Sundar Pichai of Google, have wooed Trump with calls, visits to Mar-a-Lago – Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida – and donations for his inauguration. That is a different dynamic from Trump’s first term, which began with the industry’s sweeping condemnation of the first Trump administration’s travel ban suspending the issuance of visas to applicants from seven countries, all of which had Muslim-majority populations.
Tech leaders have also been taking an important role in the presidential transition, proposing associates for high-ranking administration positions and advising the President-elect on potential policies and foreign relations. Trump also tapped Mr Musk to serve as co-leader of a new “government efficiency” commission.
The rising importance of tech leaders in Trump’s circle is now drawing scrutiny from his base – and even some past rivals.
Mrs Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who ran for president against Trump and who in the past has called herself the “proud daughter of Indian immigrants”, slammed the tech industry and its leaders as “lazy” for automatically seeking out foreign workers to fulfil their needs. “If the tech industry needs workers, invest in our education system,” she wrote on X on the morning of Dec 27. “Invest in our American workforce. We must invest in Americans first before looking elsewhere.”
On Dec 27, Mr Steve Bannon, a long-time Trump confidant, hosted a series of influencers and researchers on his popular War Room podcast who critiqued “big tech oligarchs” for supporting the H-1B programme, and cast immigration as a threat to Western civilisation.
Others took a more sympathetic stance towards Silicon Valley’s desire to continue bringing in engineers and other skilled workers from abroad.
Mr Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate who in November was tapped to lead the government efficiency initiative alongside Mr Musk, blamed American culture for creating people ill-suited for skilled tech positions.
“The H-1B system is badly broken & should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best,” Mr Ramaswamy said on X on Dec 27.
The rancorous exchange over immigration soon grew to encompass another flashpoint on the right: online speech.
Since acquiring what was then called Twitter in 2022 for US$44 billion, Mr Musk has characterised himself as a “free speech absolutist”. Among his first acts atop the company was reinstating accounts banned by the previous management, including Ms Loomer’s, which had been taken down in 2018 after sharing anti-Muslim posts.
But on Dec 26, X temporarily blocked Ms Loomer from posting on the site and removed her verified status, cutting her off from income from paid subscribers. Numerous other accounts reported losing their verified status as well, although only Ms Loomer seems to have been blocked from posting or monetising her account.
Ms Loomer said that from the morning of Dec 27, she was able to post again but still had not regained her verified status.
An X spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Ms Loomer, whose account has 1.4 million followers, called it retaliation, pointing out that Mr Musk on the night of Dec 26 endorsed a post from a popular pro-tech influencer stating “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”, in reference to Ms Loomer.
Ms Loomer called the restriction “censorship”.
NYTIMES