The MAGA Civil War Over H-1B Visas

If you woke up from your Christmas reverie and encountered your news feed full of stories about something called H-1B, you could be forgiven for thinking we were experiencing the latest strain of bird flu. In fact, it was the fulcrum of the first great MAGA schism—and Trump isn’t even in office yet.

H-1B is not a new pandemic, but a visa program intended to allow American companies to hire temporary skilled workers from abroad—emphasis on skilled. The H-1B program, which goes to some 65,000 people a year, most from countries like India and China, is beloved by tech companies because they can bring in highly educated, technically proficient engineers, and pay them less than they would pay an American doing the same job.

Its supporters—the techno-libertarian wing of the MAGA movement, led by Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other DOGE proponents—say that it provides American companies with the kind of talented employees they simply can’t get here. As Musk put it on X, “The reason I’m in America with so many critical people who built Space X, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.”

Its detractors point to a series of ways the program has been abused over the years. The good-faith ones include Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former vice-presidential candidate, a Silicon Valley lawyer, and, notably in this case, Sergey Brin’s ex-wife. “The system we’ve constructed with H-1B visas, whether we like it or not, incentivizes people to come here and serve as essentially indentured servants for Big Tech, taking on the tough, grueling jobs that few here in America are excited to perform at the current suppressed salaries.” she wrote on X. The program, she concluded, needed to be overhauled.

Another criticism, coming from Eric Weinstein, the mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital, described the H-1B visa program as an anti-labor device. Its original aim, he wrote on X, “was to weaken American workers’ bargaining positions so much that they would be ‘forced’ to mitigate their wage demands at your bargaining table. It’s a wage tampering program.”

Disagreements about immigration policy are totally within the bounds of political discourse. What isn’t—or at least, what didn’t used to be—is the way this debate devolved into plain old unapologetic racism. It was focused on a Trump appointee, an Indian American immigrant named Sriram Krishnan. Shortly after Krishnan was named to an advisory role on AI policy, he called for caps on green cards to be lifted—and all hell broke loose.

Led by Laura Loomer, who was once considered a Trump confidante, Krishnan’s critics weren’t just angry about his proposal to lift the caps. They were angry about his Indian heritage. “Our country was built by white Europeans,” she wrote on X, “not third world invaders from India.” She was hardly the only one: “This country was built by white europeans and we will not destroy it importing third world Indians and Arabs to do our work, steal our jobs, and suppress our wages,” wrote another critic. And on and on. (Musk called them “contemptible fools” and “hateful, unrepentant racists.”)

In the end, the debate was less about immigration policy or about whether or not H-1B can be reformed, which of course it can. It was about more fundamental disagreements brewing inside the right: between the Musketeers and the Steve Bannon wing; between the libertarians and the protectionists; between Silicon Valley elites and the working class; and between those who still sincerely believe in America’s identity as a nation of immigrants—and those playing with identity politics of the white racial kind. And it remains to be seen which side will win the soul of MAGA.