Will a MAGA storm bring down the US House of Green Cards?

Years ago, during a talk on the idea of nation-states, I quipped that the Indian education system was unique that its pedagogy began a bit like this – ‘A.. B…C..H-1B’. The levity in brevity was to emphasise the sacrosanctity of the United States’ high-skilled visa to the Indian economic immigrant and the tech worker.

The H-1B visa programme created by the Congress in 1990 through the Immigration Act was vital for the US in addressing skill shortages in its labour force in areas like technology, engineering, and medicine.

It was a supply and demand issue, where the American behemoth had traditionally not produced (in numbers) the kind of engineering graduates required to fill the gaps. Hence, the H-1B visas have sought to attract the best and brightest from the world, with India in the upper echelons of those numbers.

Donald J Trump’s return to the Oval Office brings a sense of airwaves playing up his cantankerous gripes and umbrage on a host of issues, none more so than immigration. The current H-1B debate came to a crescendo when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, the venture capitalist from Silicon Valley to serve as senior White House policy adviser for AI. The Chennai-born tech honcho backed the same process of high-skilled immigration that paved the way for him and plenty of other Silicon Valley founders and CEOs. The data and ‘data science’ is compelling — half of Fortune 500 companies, were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants, and 40% of US Nobel laureates trace their birth to another country

Expectedly, this causes a stir in the Trump camp, with the MAGA base of Ann Coulter and Laura Loomer vociferously berating the H-1B programme and Trump’s new ‘government efficiency czars’ Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are in the eye of the storm.

The word ‘immigration’ is a natural trigger for the MAGA ilk unless prefixed with ‘no’ or ‘ban’ or ‘illegal’. Musk and Ramaswamy maintain that the American Dream is indeed the American Superpower — the economic elixir that was the allure for the best and the brightest. South Africa-born Musk understands the pangs of immigration. Musk has run Tesla, Space X and X, and has seen first-hand the ubiquity of Indian tech talent many parts of the US.

Musk who is now Trump’s whisperer-in-chief, has publicly advocated for the H-1B visa programme being critical to ensuring US companies can find highly skilled labour which he says may not be easily available in the US labour force and must be expanded. He also suggested that the system was ‘broken’, and needed ‘urgent reform’.

On December 26, Ramaswamy — the child of immigrants, born and raised in Ohio — tweeted that the US needed to unlearn the cultural issue it has perpetuated. Ramaswamy said the H-1B system is badly broken and should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting ‘the very best of the best (not a lottery), pro-competitive (no indentured service to one company), and de-bureaucratized.’

There is little doubt that American bureaucratic backlogs, an unfair lottery, and H-1B abuse by tech and staffing companies have even precluded genuine talent from getting such visas. Furthermore, the US, unlike Canada and Australia, doesn’t follow a points-based immigration system, and prioritises family-based immigrant visas.

Trump has publicly come out in support of Musk’s stance and said he wants to keep talent, those with advanced degrees from US universities in the country, and that he supports immigration visas for highly skilled workers.

The cat among the pigeons has been set in the MAGA base. The split is evident between the tech Right and the MAGA Right, the fissures between the libertarians and the social conservatives. Broadly, during the campaign trail on the Trump train, they coalesced on 70-80% of the issues but diverged on immigration. At a kernel level, there is an archaic antiquated notion of immigration from the MAGA ilk, conflating legal and illegal immigration.

Libertarians espouse free-market economics, while the MAGA conservatives touch on the plight of the white working class. MAGA hardliners want Trump to follow through with his promise to promote US workers and impose tougher restrictions on immigration. They see it as not just a threat to the US worker, but immigrants diluting the social fabric of their notion of ‘Americanism’.

The ongoing debates within the GOP reflect the complexities of immigration policy. The MAGA core base seems to perhaps conflict with the issue of undocumented immigration and troubles at the southern border, with legal immigration required to maintain US competitiveness.

While the MAGA ilk has been vehemently anti-immigrant, the ire has been reserved for undocumented migration on the southern border. Indians have eschewed this wrath, largely touted under the positive stereotype of ‘ideal’ or ‘model minority’.

Despite Trump’s affirmation of high-skilled immigration, political amnesia may cause us to forget that Trump 1.0 was indeed hostile to legal immigrants and increased the immigration pangs, with fewer than 100,000 legal immigrants per year between 2017-2021.

Musk and Ramaswamy point out that in a new great power competition with China, the US needs to remain competitive, and ergo needs the best of the brightest, described by Musk as “the 1% of the smartest people, especially in engineering and scientific talent”.

It’s clear that in a world of Artificial Intelligence, some of the immigration czars seem to display intelligence that is artificial.

(Akshobh Giridharadas is a Washington DC-based public policy professional, and visiting fellow, Observer Research Foundation.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.