Elon Musk greets U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as he arrives to attend a viewing of the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., on Nov. 19.Brandon Bell/Reuters
Can big changes to U.S. immigration Make America Great Again?
Immigration has always been one of Donald Trump’s key hot-button issues. But aside from promising to stop illegal immigration and start “mass deportations,” the president-elect has been vague or silent on what he intends for the rest of the immigration system.
Since Mr. Trump never spelled it out, two branches of his MAGA coalition are fighting it out. On one side, it’s Silicon Valley MAGA. On the other, a core of long-time Trump supporters I’ll call Nativist MAGA.
One side wants to Make American Great Again by making American immigration a lot more like Canadian immigration – or at least Canadian immigration before the Trudeau era, with a focus on skilled economic immigrants. And the other side of MAGA wants less immigration, period.
Is stopping immigration, illegal or legal, the only way to MAGA? Or is reforming and refocusing the immigration system also MAGA-approved?
All parts of Mr. Trump’s movement agree on the need for more border security and less unauthorized immigration. But for Nativist MAGA, immigration itself is a problem. They hope to see fewer foreigners becoming Americans, and possibly none.
That is not, however, how Silicon Valley MAGA sees things. On Nov. 14, venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan posted on X that he hoped there would be reforms to “unlock skilled immigration.” It’s a boringly standard position for a tech bro.
But just before Christmas, Mr. Trump named Mr. Krishnan to the position of White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence – and an online fight started.
“The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave labourers from India and China who never assimilate,” Nativist MAGAite Laura Loomer tweeted to her 1.4 million followers. “I don’t care about being called ‘racist’ by people who don’t have the best interest of the American worker in mind.”
She also said she wanted “the original MAGA policies I voted for.” In her view, that means Mr. Trump ensuring that a lot fewer non-Americans come to America, full stop.
On the other side of the debate is Elon Musk, the tech centi-billionaire who Mr. Trump named to co-head a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” He has very different ideas about what MAGA immigration policy should be.
On X, the platform he owns, Mr. Musk wrote that “the fundamental limiting factor” in the American tech industry is “a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent.” Arguing for more visas and immigration places for highly-educated workers, the immigrant from South Africa via Canada later added that “it comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.”
The intra-MAGA debate focused narrowly on a type of temporary work permit used mostly by the tech industry, known as the H1-B visa. Only 85,000 are available each year, each valid for up to six years, and demand widely exceeds supply. In 2023, the average salary of for an H1-B visa holder was US$118,000, or double the income of the average U.S. household.
Silicon Valley MAGA wants more H1-B visas, and more highly-skilled immigration generally, for economic reasons. Nativist MAGA wants less immigration, of all types, for cultural reasons.
Which side is going to win? Silicon Valley, probably. Last week, Mr. Trump came out and took Mr. Musk’s side – sort of.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” the president-elect told The New York Post. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
Over the years, Mr. Trump has often praised immigration programs that bring in skilled and educated immigrants. Early in his first term, he repeatedly called for the U.S. to move to a Canadian-inspired points system to choose economic immigrants.
However, as is par for the course with Mr. Trump, his words and his actions tend to work different sides of the street. According to an analysis by The New York Times, his businesses have rarely used the high-wage H1-B program. Instead, over the last 20 years, he has employed more than 1,000 foreign workers through the low-wage H-2 program, which brings temporary workers such as gardeners and housekeepers.
Mr. Trump’s business practices may be the opposite of what most voters want, but his words, and those of Mr. Musk, are closer to what Americans of all stripes say they would prefer.
Democratic and Republican voters are far apart on immigration, except on two crucial questions. A Pew Research Center poll released during the election found that 96 per cent of Trump voters were in favour of “improving security along the country’s borders,” but so were a whopping 80 per cent of Kamala Harris voters. The poll also found that 87 per cent of Harris voters favoured “admitting more high-skilled immigrants” – as did 71 per cent of Trump voters.
The Musk position – less illegal immigration, less immigration by people with high-school educations, but more immigration by the world’s brightest engineers, computer scientists and other skilled workers – is popular with voters. It also makes a lot of economic sense.