Tech titan Elon Musk — who has quickly become President-elect Donald Trump’s right-hand man — got into a fiery spat Thursday with MAGA allies over foreign worker visas, arguing along with Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy that the program is key for American innovation.
The billionaire DOGE bosses lashed out the day after Christmas Day at some of Trump’s staunchest supporters and other immigration hawks for opposing the H-1B program, which lets highly skilled foreign workers enter the US for companies who sponsor them.
“I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote on X, comparing the US to a sports team bringing in athletes to boost their game.
The richest man in the world had been agreeing with his DOGE counterpart Ramaswamy, who went to argue that American “culture” was celebrating “mediocrity” — sparking the initial rift with members of MAGA world who want to restrict even legal immigration into the US.
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture,” Ramaswamy wrote in a lengthy post on X.
“Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH.”
Ramaswamy then laid out how popular American culture, since at least the 1990s, has favored “the prom queen over the math olympiad champ” and “the jock over the valedictorian,” allowing other countries like China to retain talented engineers — while the US lost top recruits.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he explained.
“‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”
MAGA acolytes like Laura Loomer and right-wing firebrands such as Ann Coulter and Mike Cernovich shot back that Musk and Ramaswamy were only favoring foreign labor for their own Silicon Valley needs.
Their criticisms noted how the visas make it difficult for foreign nationals to leave jobs — and drive down the wages of American workers.
“American workers can leave a company. Imported H-1B workers can’t. Tech wants indentured servants, not ‘high-skilled’ workers,” Coulter said.
“This is why some find this discussion frustrating. Elon is right about the problem. Others are right that the solution is flawed. We ended our farm system, we lost our bench. BIG TECH did this. Now they want more H-1B’s for their self-inflicted wound,” added Cernovich.
Loomer also claimed in a series of posts that her trolling of the DOGE leaders even got her X account censored by Musk — the platform’s owner — and predicted that a “divorce is coming soon,” apparently between the tech billionaire and the incoming president.
Former 2024 Republican presidential primary rival Nikki Haley further blasted Ramaswamy, writing, “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
Silicon Valley leaders view the H-1B visas as a great boon for their industry — but the soon-to-be 47th president took a stand against the policy during his first term, signing an executive order mandating federal agencies to favor higher-skilled, higher paid applicants to “end the theft of American prosperity.”
But Trump, 78, has also said on the campaign trail he wants workers to come into the US legally, especially those with needed skills, and that he wants to “recruit and keep” top graduates to keep them from going back to their countries and starting multi-million companies there.
“You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges too,” Trump said on “The All-In Podcast” with Silicon Valley leaders in June.
Jason Calacanis, one of several tech investors who hosts the podcast, had asked whether the 45th president would “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America” if re-elected.
