Musk vs. MAGA: Trump supporters battle over role of immigrant labor and American workers
WASHINGTON - Call it a very uncivil war, a food fight or even a pig pile.
An argument pitting some of President-elect Donald Trump’s biggest supporters against each other has rocked MAGA world in recent days over whether his incoming administration should allow more highly skilled immigrant labor to come to the United States at the expense of American workers.
What makes the beef especially awkward - or delicious, depending on who you ask – is that Trump’s D.O.G.E. duo of tech billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are at the center of it. And the brawl is taking place almost entirely on Musk’s X platform, the informal public square for Trump’s whole Make America Great Again movement.
On one side are Musk, the world's richest man, and Ramaswamy, who is worth an estimated $1 billion from his Roivant Sciences pharmaceuticalcompany. The two, and other venture capitalists, say in recent posts that America needs more highly-skilled workers to come to the United States under what’s known as the H-1B program.
They argue an expansion of the temporary work visa program is desperately needed to attract global talent for innovation and competitiveness in technology sectors.
On the other side are some of Trump’s more traditional hardline conservative backers, who say such a reliance on bringing in foreign workers to the country is a slap in the face to American citizens after immigration served as a critical campaign plank that helped Trump win the White House in November.
It also goes against Trump’s “America First” agenda and proposed crackdown on immigration, they argue, for billionaires like Musk and Ramaswamy to argue for bringing in more workers through H-1B instead of investing in training and developing Americans for those coveted jobs.
It's one of the first riffs between factions of Trump's MAGA constituency since the 2024 election's conclusion, with Musk, Ramaswamy and other participants trending on X in the days since the dispute began.
At issue is the H-1B program, which applies to employers seeking to hire “nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations” that require “highly specialized knowledge” and at least a college bachelor’s degree, according to the Department of Labor. The federal agency says H-1B is specifically designed to help employers “who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals” from outside the U.S.
Trump’s transition team had no comment when asked whether the president-elect was taking sides in the H-1B battle. But it referred USA TODAY to anX post sent Thursday from Trump’s longtime immigration policy czar Stephen Miller, which cited a 2020 Trump speech praising the “miraculous story” of all of the homegrown American heroes who built the country from scratch.
What sparked the contretemps?
The conflict came to a head Sunday when Trump named Silicon Valley veteran Sriram Krishnan to serve as his senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence inside the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Born and educated in India, Krishnan came to the U.S. in 2007. More recently he's been an associate of Musk’s who reportedly assisted in his revamp of X, formerly Twitter, after Musk bought it for $44 billion in 2022.
Krishnan began taking heavy fire on X after MAGA hardliners resurfaced two recent X posts in which he appeared to argue for expanding H-1B and even ditching a current 7% cap that has created huge backlogs in countries like India and China with big pools of highly-skilled workers vying for U.S. jobs.
“Anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge,” Krishnan posted on Nov. 14.
Asked by an X user that same day whether “country caps … might backfire,” Krishnan doubled down, saying, “simple logic - we need the best, regardless of where they happen to be born.”
Fast forward to Christmas Day: Musk made himself a lightning rod for the MAGA critics, saying tech companies need to double the number of the visa to attract “super talented engineers AND super motivated” workers.
“It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE,” Musk wrote in one of many X posts on the topic, this one seen by 9.1 million people. “If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.”
Ramaswamy, a first-generation American citizenwhose parents immigrated from India, also drew the wrath of some MAGA hardliners when he argued that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” beginning in grade school and carrying over into the professional world.
That, he posted on X, is the “reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans.”
Critics quickly shifted their anger from Krishnan to Musk and Ramaswamy, who Trump tapped six weeks ago to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency that will work to slash federal government spending, waste and regulations.
Some charged that Musk and Ramaswamy, a former 2024 Republican presidential candidate and Trump rival, had a financial interest, given that their own companies depend on foreign workers to operate.
“This is code for: ‘I don’t want to shrink my current piece of the pie to invest in the engines needed to cultivate Americans who can do the job, develop the American human capital here for intangible long-term impacts, and instead import it for at a lower cost and higher return now,” one X poster replied to Musk.
Replying to a critic, Musk defended his position by saying, “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.”
That prompted critics to attack Musk for implying that Americans not only lacked the requisite talent to work for people like him, but that they were lazy as well.
“Open a school,” one retorted. “We have brains.”
MAGA heavyweight and The Federalist CEO Sean Davis described the H-1B program as a kind of cheap pool of indentured servants.
“Corporations love H-1B visas,” Davis tweeted, “because they allow the company to pay below market wages AND control the foreigners they hire, because the employers, not the workers, own the visas—if a newly imported foreigner leaves the sponsoring company, he has to leave the country.”
On his WarRoom show, former Trump chief White House strategist Steve Bannon on Friday weighed in against Musk and Ramaswamy. "We’re not going to be some anarcho-libertarian (state) run by Big Tech oligarchs—that’s not going to happen," Bannon said. "We haven't fought all these wars and haven't gotten here to give it over to a bunch of geeks that you would stuff ... in the locker in high school."
MAGA ally and provocateur Laura Loomer also stepped in, saying Musk’s massive business presence in China made him something of an agent of the Communist regime who couldn’t be trusted on immigration issues. “We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing (sic),” the Chinese leader.
On Friday, as Musk continued to parry with critics, longtime Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene – noting the “MAGA split over this issue” - appeared to criticize “some big MAGA voices with large social media platforms throwing down their opinions.”
Greene, a Georgia Republican, didn’t name Musk or Ramaswamy by name. But she told H-1B supporters to instead invest “here in the U.S. to educate, build, and facilitate a solid foundation of knowledgeable, highly skilled, talented, well paid, AMERICAN workers.”
What does Trump say?
While Trump campaigned in 2024 as a hardliner on illegal immigration, his stance on the legal pipeline for entry is less well-formed, especially when it comes to green cards as a gateway to permanent residency in the U.S.
Trump has targeted the H-1B program in past remarks and restricted some access to foreign worker visas during his first term. More recently, though, he has suggested he might be more open to more foreign-born workers.
So far, Trump appears to be staying out of the current fight.
But in a cryptic twist on Friday morning, the president-elect sent out a tweet left open to interpretation, with some musing it was meant as a direct message to Musk instead.
The post quickly went viral, which much speculation that Trump was asking his biggest campaign donor and his son X, short for X AE A-XII, to come back to his Palm Beach estate and club. The two have spent much time there as Musk helps Trump with his transition moves since his Nov. 5 election victory.
“Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago,” Trump asks in the X post. “Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.”
Trump’s transition team had no comment as to whether the message was meant for Musk.
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