H-1B clash exposes a tough choice for Trump: MAGA or Musk
H-1B is heavily flawed — and has only grown more so since its inception in 1990. It has also cracked open a major schism in the MAGA movement, which has long been defined by President-elect Donald Trump’s opposition to immigration.
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The split has revealed the fragility of Trump’s coalition, which now straddles anti-immigrant MAGA faithful and Silicon Valley tech globalists. Navigating this terrain will require a deftness seldom seen in his first term.
Trump’s uber-rich, tech-bro bestie, Elon Musk, is a huge proponent of the program, which imports foreign programmers, engineers, accountants and other professionals at lower wages than Americans would expect.
Musk had profane words over the holidays, threatening to “go to war” with opponents of the visa program. (Tesla ranks 16th in the country for H-1B visas.) Vivek Ramaswamy, his partner at the Department of Government Efficiency, went even further, with a sweeping indictment of Middle America culture, posting that industries needed foreign engineers and the like because American culture “venerated mediocrity over excellence.” That prompted a backlash from MAGA supporters so furious that Ramaswamy has not posted on the subject since.
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The resulting rift is not sustainable. For more than a
