Just Don’t Come for MY Immigrants!

An online war has erupted over H-1B visas and giving foreign skilled labor jobs in tech, and it’s put Musk and Ramaswamy in MAGA’s crosshairs.

Photos via AP

Right wing populism has always had an uneasy relationship with the tech bro billionaire class, which is often responsible for who gets good jobs and who doesn’t in the U.S.

Over Christmas, that uneasy tension erupted into an online bloodbath as the face-eating leopards pounced. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are the co-chairs of Trump’s newly designated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), came out publicly in favor of H-1B visas for highly skilled, foreign workers.

Musk said the quiet part out loud, arguing that the number of “super talented engineers” who were also “super motivated” was far too low, implying that Americans lacked both talent and motivation.

Hmmm. Folks on the right didn’t like that so much.

Then, adding his own cultural fuel to the fire, Ramaswamy posted that high tech companies need to bring in foreign workers because Americans lack a strong work ethic due to cultural factors. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he scolded. The Trump presidency, he added, will elevate “hard work over laziness.”

Ruh-roh.

As you might expect, the blowback from this was swift and brutal. MAGAs don’t take kindly to being told they aren’t talented or motivated enough to be rewarded with the best tech jobs (even if that objectively is true), and that their “culture” is somehow to blame. That’s not very “America First,” and the fact that it came from a brown-skinned son of immigrants from India didn’t help.

Nor do they like the idea of a lot more immigrants, mostly from South Asia, being let into the country legally in order to fill jobs that their tech lord masters simply claim they can’t do. What happened to kicking all the immigrants out? Isn’t MAGA about stopping the “invasion” of America by all these brown people who are coming and taking our jurrrrbs?!

As commentator Ron Filipkowski noted, “Elon is just saying what every other Republican employer is about to say in 2025 - deport everyone else’s employees, but not mine because I really need them.”

The reckoning between the skilled labor needs of the broligarchy and the “less than smart” people (Trump’s words, not mine, as I’ll discuss below) who demand those good jobs for ’Muricans exposes a widening rift within MAGA. Over the past 48 hours, that rift has begun to blow wide open. And surprise, surprise, rather than have an open discussion about it, Musk, the self-described savior of free speech, is clamping down on voices of dissent by stripping privileges from right wing accounts on X.

Welp. As Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) put it,

“I won’t have enough tea to sip nor popcorn to eat over the next 4 years! I’ve done countless interviews explaining that we need immigrants and that they contribute to our economy! Businesses blow us up about needing workers.

And what do ya know?! MAGA got played & is mad at who?! The same 2 guys that they were just yelling was looking out for them last week as the government was on the verge of a shutdown!

Elon said what?

On Christmas Day, Musk responded to a question on his X platform. The original poster was Amjad Masad, the CEO of the tech company Replit, who asked,

Genuinely curious: Are there actual instances where qualified native born Americans couldn’t get jobs in tech because foreigners took all of them?

I’d be surprised if it’s true because at any given point there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in tech.

Musk should have left this question alone. Instead, he responded, “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”

Mario Nawfal, who claims to host the “largest show on X,” quoted Musk and added some stats:

The U.S. semiconductor industry alone needs over 160,000 engineers by 2032, driven by $250B+ in new investments.

Demand for AI experts has skyrocketed, with Elon calling the talent war the “craziest” ever. Meanwhile, STEM programs struggle to produce enough graduates.

This shortage threatens innovation, from AI to semiconductors, slowing progress and global competitiveness.

Expanding STEM education, streamlining high-skilled immigration, and reskilling workers are urgent solutions. Investing in talent is investing in the future.

Okay, so far, so good, until Musk replied,

No, we need more like double that number yesterday!

The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.

Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.

Big right wing influencer accounts pushed back, their comments often laced with racism or nativist sentiment. One asked,

“There are over 330 million people in America. Surely, there must be enough among them to build your ultimate team? Why would you deny real Americans that opportunity by bringing foreigners here?”

Musk responded by digging the hole even deeper, stating that the questioner’s “understanding of the situation is upside-down and backwards.” While Musk claims he and his companies would “prefer to hire Americans,” rather than go through the slow and painful visa process, he stated that the “mental differences” between Americans and foreign skilled labor was enormous:

This is not about handing out opportunities from some magical hat. You don’t get it. This is blindingly obvious when looking at NBA teams, as the physical differences are so obvious to see. However, the MENTAL differences between humans are FAR bigger than the physical differences!!

Wait, did Elon just call Americans stupid?

Right wing commentator Mike Cernovich tried to bring it back to economics. He argued that if Apple couldn’t raise its compensation enough to attract domestic talent, it should be allowed to fail as a company. Musk responded that Cernovich had made an “incredibly foolish and wrong statement,” that “Apple pays extremely well,” and that the expertise they need simply does not exist in America in sufficient quantities.

On the question of immigrants to the U.S. in general, one take received a revealing nod from Musk. The commentator wrote that the U.S. doesn’t want “millions of unvetted, low-skilled immigrants who will take advantage of our welfare” (a false statement, if he is speaking about undocumented workers who aren’t eligible for welfare) but rather we want “highly skilled immigrants who will ‘assimilate’ and contribute to our society.”

“Yeah,” Musk agreed.

Loomer targets Musk

Right wing provocateur and one-time suspected gal-pal of Trump, Laura Loomer, put Musk on blast over his stance favoring more legal immigration to fill high tech job shortages. She took a screenshot of all of the positions open at Tesla for H-1B visa holders, including some that paid wages around 70K:

Loomer also questioned whether DOGE was really a way to “cut spending” or rather to redirect spending toward the “pet projects of tech bro billionaires.” And with that, the internal MAGA war had begun.

Wild indeed, and honestly quite satisfying.

When Musk accused Loomer of “trolling” for attention and suggested readers ignore her, she responded, “We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing [sic].”

Musk responded by limiting Loomer’s ability to monetize on his platform, canceling all her paid subscribers, and removing her verified checkmark. Loomer tweeted,

@elonmusk has removed my blue check mark on X because I dared to question his support for H1B visas, the replacement of American tech workers by Indian immigrants, and I questioned his relationship with China.

Looks like Elon Musk is going to be silencing me for supporting original Trump immigration policies.

I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.

Elon has decided to retaliate by removing my blue check and demonetizing me.

I guess he doesn’t really believe in Free speech after all.

Did he ever though, Laura?

Other right wing accounts seemed to have been hit as well for speaking out:

Loomer later decided to go scorched earth on Elon, but something about a stopped clock being right sometimes?

It also looks like she has some company on the far right in her criticism:

Ramaswamy thinks it’s a cultural thing

You really have to read Vivek Ramaswamy’s long post in its entirety to understand just how mad MAGA got over it. It’s one thing to talk economic realities and the need for skilled immigrant labor. It’s another entirely to blame American culture for it.

As of this writing, that post has been viewed 63 million times on X alone.

Perhaps because of the color of his skin, Ramaswamy received far more online hate than Musk, who was singing a similar tune and calling Americans untalented and unmotivated enough to deserve the good jobs.

A smattering of replies and responses:

Cernovich: “The Woodstock generation managed to build out aerospace, the one before went to the moon, America was doing great. Underlying your post is that we were all living in squalor until being rescued by H-1B’s. Then why did everyone want to come here?”

Posobiec: “Why would America recruit foreign talent rather than recruit own on talent right here at home? Imagine how many more JD Vances are out there.”

DC_Draino: “How did DOGE go from ‘let’s cut wasteful government spending’ to ‘here’s why we need to import more immigrants’ almost overnight? Did I miss something?!”

I’m not sure if it’s because Ramaswamy and Musk are drunk on their own power, or if they fundamentally do not understand white grievance and how it is incompatible with hiring foreign skilled workers for jobs Americans want but are being told they aren’t qualified for.

What the tech bros fail to understand, as author Joey Politano writes, is that “stoking anti immigrant backlash against Mexicans, Haitians, Guatemalans, etc would inevitably lead to anti immigration backlash against Indian tech workers.” Politano adds, “oh people who are big fans of the ‘immigrants are eating your pets’ routine actually don’t like the H-1B program? Who could have foreseen this? Where was this righteous indignation when the target was anyone except your buddies in the tech industry?”

It is somewhat surprising that the right is only now coming to understand that these same billionaires would put the profits of their companies and the needs of Silicon Valley tech giants over MAGA anti-immigration principles.

So where does Trump stand?

There’s something I haven’t seen widely reported yet but could become big news in light of this battle over skilled worker immigration. In a video appearance on the right-leaning All In podcast, Donald Trump put forward a truly startling proposal: that any immigrant who completed a college degree should immediately receive a green card.

In it, he explains the basis for his thinking but also says the quiet part out loud:

You need a pool of people to work for your companies. You have great companies, and they have to be smart people. Not everybody can be… “less than smart.” You need brilliant people.

Oof. Here’s the clip, posted by another right wing troll account, Ian Miles Cheong (who lives in Malaysia, has never set foot in the U.S., but somehow is deeply invested in our politics):

Trump may be publicly against issuing more H-1B visas, but this dramatic shift in immigration policy would result in a huge rise in legal green card holders in the U.S. Not a great thing for America, if you’re on the far right.

It isn’t clear whether Trump was serious or speaking off the cuff, but it’s likely to upset a lot of his base once they understand what it would mean.

So who put that idea into Trump’s head? Elon Musk? We might never know. For the time being, Musk is whining about how hard it is to be the de facto king and is lashing out at his critics, while others are cowering in fear of his reprisals.

Rep. Crockett was right. There really isn’t enough tea or popcorn.