In a war between tech bros and core MAGA, the winner is easy to spot
They are a selfish bunch who have shown time and again that what interests them most is themselves.
The spiteful bickering in recent days between Donald Trump’s Silicon Valley enablers and his MAGA acolytes is an unexpected reminder of how quickly the folks around the president-elect can put everything to the side while trying to hurt one another. Apparently preferring to sling insults rather than enjoy Christmas with their families, Trump’s anti-immigrant supporters spent much of the last week battling on X with his new tech-industry pals over the arcane issue of limited-term visas for highly skilled immigrants.
For now, Trump is siding with the Elon Musk camp. But those who think this is just a passing spat are ignoring a fundamental truth about the Silicon Valley plutocrats: They are a selfish bunch who have shown time and again that what interests them most is themselves.
The brouhaha started when Laura Loomer, a member of the MAGA faithful who in any other era would have been an irrelevant gadfly, took issue with the immigration-policy opinions of Sriram Krishnan, a little-known venture capitalist Trump has tapped to advise his administration on artificial intelligence.
An immigrant himself, Krishnan backs more immigration, particularly through H-1B visas, a vehicle that allows U.S. companies to more easily recruit well-credentialed foreigners. H-1Bs are a curio in the immigration bazaar: Compared with the masses of undocumented workers entering the United States, they are almost an afterthought. And though the program has been abused for years by some companies, the tool prevents few, if any, Americans from getting high-tech jobs.
🎤
Follow Opinions on the news
Loomer and her ilk nevertheless alighted on H-1Bs as an example of a permissive immigration regime. She tossed in a bit of racism by highlighting the sanitation challenges of India, Krishnan’s birthplace, prompting Musk, also an immigrant, to weigh in at length in favor of supporting non-U.S. job seekers. Musk also showed his true colors in the debate by advocating a position so uncontroversial in Silicon Valley that it echoes what Apple CEO Tim Cook has been saying for years: Tech companies need to look abroad because of a paucity of qualified talent at home.
For context, it’s important to understand that self-interest is a foundational ethos in Silicon Valley, a place where boys who read science fiction in their bedrooms and then Ayn Rand in their college dorms grew up to be today’s Masters of the Universe. For years, the tech crowd tried its best to ignore Washington, barely acknowledging that their industry was built on government contracts — first to supply electronic componentry for Cold War defense, then to nurture the internet, which began as a government communications initiative.
Musk is a case in point. Little of his success would have been possible without government largesse, from electric-vehicle subsidies for Tesla buyers to NASA and other federal contracts for SpaceX. Musk and his crew aren’t interested in Trump’s MAGA supporters. They care about eliminating regulations that make it difficult for them to do business. They are renegades, sure, but only to the extent it serves their bottom lines. Musk, for example, was outraged about covid work restrictions, but only because he didn’t want to shutter a Tesla factory.
It was just a matter of time before the anti-immigration crowd lost its lunch. The tech crowd, by and large, are people who built their companies on benefits from publicly funded programs and who fly on private jets, eat meals prepared by private chefs, and send their children to private schools. They care about access to the best workers for their companies and about smoothing the way for cryptocurrency, a farcical confection that the Biden administration was standing in the way of their foisting on a gullible public.
Loomer, to her credit, understands this and told off Musk in a few words: “You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago,” she posted on X. “We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi Jinping.” Trump loyalist Stephen K. Bannon went further, calling Musk a “toddler” for his views on H1-Bs.
All this is a reminder that the fight over the visas is the shape of scrapes to come. Trump’s new tech backers harbor decidedly different — and much more establishment-minded — instincts about trade, tariffs and foreign policy than the folks between the coasts who gave Trump his start. The fissure between these two branches of Trump’s coalition is only likely to grow.
But there is little doubt about which side will win. Four of the top founders of what became known as the PayPal Mafia — Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Roelof Botha — are immigrants. Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, hails from Taiwan. The CEOs of Google, Microsoft and IBM are all Indian-born. Musk was born in South Africa and came to the United States from Canada. “The reason I’m in America,” Musk wrote to his critics on X, “is because of H1B. Take a big step back and F--- YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Strap in, America. A fabulously talented crop of rich guys is now very close to the levers of power. As a result, they stand to enrich themselves even further. I never thought I’d say this, but I liked it better when Silicon Valley ignored Washington and focused instead on inventing the things that made them so wealthy in the first place.