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Pro-Trump tech leaders and MAGA loyalists are feuding over how to overhaul U.S. immigration.
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The debate over high-skilled immigration between the two groups has intensified in recent days.
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The debate came after Trump’s appointment of an Indian-born technology leader as a senior policy adviser.
Newly elected President Donald Trump’s supporters in Silicon Valley are at odds with his MAGA loyalists on an important issue: immigration.
In recent days, Elon Musk and others in the tech sector have increasingly shared their support for visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled workers from abroad. The move has galvanized Trump’s supporters in favor of stricter immigration rules in the process.
The recent debate came after Trump offered Sriram Krishnan, a Chennai-born, Indian-American investor, a role as a senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence — a move that sparked heated criticism online.
Krishnan, who was recently in London leading an expansion of venture capital firm A16z, previously lived in the US, where he held roles at Microsoft, Twitter and Meta from 2005.
The criticism came largely from anonymous accounts online — one X post asked if anyone had voted “for this Indian to run America,” prompting a defense of Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks.
They also sparked a broader debate about the merits of the H-1B visa commonly used to hire skilled workers from other countries.
Technology leaders like Musk, who have been highly critical of illegal immigration, have used the saga to defend immigration that prioritizes the transfer of highly skilled foreign workers to U.S. companies.
On Thursday, Musk said his priority is legally bringing in top tech talent. He said it is “essential for America to keep winning.”
“Viewing America as a professional sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct,” he wrote on X.
Musk’s co-leader at the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, also went to has honored mediocrity over excellence’.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champion, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote in a nearly 400-word post.
In a later post, he said immigration rules need to be reformed more effectively to channel talent to the US. The H-1B system was ineffective, he said, and “must be replaced by a system that focuses on selecting the very best of the best.”
Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce, also weighed in, offering a solution to keep the “best and brightest” foreign students in the US after graduation: “Can we staple a US green card for every degree awarded from a US university is achieved?’
The pro-immigration messages have not been well received by everyone in the Trump group.
Former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who Trump briefly put forward as his attorney general, wrote an X-post on Thursday saying the technical numbers should hold out.
When Republicans embraced them, he said, “We didn’t ask them to develop an immigration policy.”
Meanwhile, far-right activist and Trump supporter Laura Loomer used several posts to express her strong opposition to H-1B visas and her concerns about the “replacement of American technology workers with Indian immigrants.”
Where Trump will end up on this issue remains to be seen. Immigration lawyers have warned tech workers that a “storm is coming” with the arrival of a second Trump term, and have urged those who have left to return before it is too late.
The debate signals a deep divide between different groups of Trump supporters as he prepared to take office.
Read the original article on Business Insider
