The past two days have revealed a split in Donald Trump's coalition over H-1B visas, which are used by big tech companies and some major media conglomerates to attract highly skilled workers to work in the United States.
“That pretty much sums it up,” Musk wrote on Channel X on Thursday evening. “This was amazing.”
Musk was responding to a post in which one user “No, you need to hire Americans,” and the technological right is like “But you guys are backwards,” and the technological right is like “You can't out-exist,” and while it was all “It happens. We learned that some people *really* don't like Indians.”
Musk, an immigrant, also wrote: “Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I point to bringing in the top 0.1% of engineering talent via legal immigration as essential for America to continue to win. This is like bringing in the Jokic's or Wemby's of the world to help your entire team (which consists of Mostly Americans!) to win the NBA Thinking of America as a professional sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.
But the divide between Musk and other Trump-supporting tech moguls and the traditional MAGA company came to a head on Thursday. That's when Vivek Ramaswamy, who partnered with Musk on a project to reshape the federal government, posted on Innate to American IQ (a lazy and wrong interpretation) A key part of it goes back to the C word: culture. Hard questions require hard answers, and if we're really serious about solving the problem, we have to face the truth: I'm honored “Our American culture has been mediocrity at the expense of excellence for too long (at least since the 1990s and probably longer). It doesn’t start in college, it starts young.”
He then turned to popular culture to make his point. “A culture that reveres Cory on Boy Meets World, or Zack and Slater over Screech in Saved by the Bell, or Stefan over Steve Urkel in Family Matters, will not produce the best engineers. (Truth: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents) In the 1990s who actively limited the amount of their children watched those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity… And their children became largely successful STEM graduates more movies like Whiplash, fewer Friends reruns, more math lessons, more weekend science quizzes, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more creativity. “Less ‘relaxing’, more extracurricular activities, and less time spent in malls.”
Musk and Ramaswamy's posts drew quick pushback from MAGA figures like Laura Loomer, who complained about being censored on X.
The use of H-1B visas has long been a flashpoint among Trump supporters. During his 2016 campaign, Trump criticized the use of highly skilled foreign workers, and as the Florida primary approached, he cited the Walt Disney Company as an example. The previous year, about 250 IT workers at Walt Disney World were laid off, their jobs transferred to foreign workers who obtained visas and were hired by contractors. However, Trump at times appeared to soften his view, saying in the primary debate in Florida: “We have to have talented people in this country.” Disney said at the time that the incident was misunderstood because it was part of a reorganization, and many workers were hired back.
However, the issue has continued to worsen, especially as Trump has continued to focus heavily on immigration in his presidential campaigns since then. What is different is the support that Trump received from figures in Silicon Valley during the last presidential cycle, while they did not give up on their business needs to employ a highly skilled workforce.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) wrote on About our need for workers and what do you know?! MAGA has been manipulated and is angry at who?! The same two men they were yelling at last week when the government was about to shut down!
