Tech Right Self Destructs Over H-1B Visas

I’m still not sure what started all of this.

The divide between MAGA and the Tech Right on X seemed to widen over Christmas Eve and Christmas until the the rift triggered a major earthquake yesterday afternoon. Like most people, I was trying to focus on my family and enjoy Christmas, but the debate kept growing and growing.

My vague impression is that Laura Loomer, who is still nursing a personal grudge after getting ejected from Trumpworld, started driving the wedge by drawing attention to Trump’s appointment of Sriram Krishnan as senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence. This kicked off an extremely divisive debate about legal immigration from India, the country caps on H-1B visas and green cards with our side obviously being completely against any attempt to increase legal immigration from India.

Business Insider:

“President-elect Donald Trump’s backers in Silicon Valley are at odds with his MAGA loyalists over a key issue: immigration.

In recent days, Elon Musk and others in the tech sector have increasingly shared support for visas that allow companies to hire highly-skilled workers from overseas. The move has riled up Trump backers in favor of stricter immigration rules in the process.

The recent debate came after Trump offered Sriram Krishnan, a Chennai-born, Indian-American investor, a role as a senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence — a move that triggered heated criticisms online. …”

I have never seen such a spectacular political collapse.

Just last week, Elon Musk’s name was being thrown into the ring by some Republicans to make him Speaker of the House. He had singlehandedly killed the CR in the House with a few tweets. It took him less than 48 hours on Christmas to completely burn through all of his good will on the Right.

Axios:

“A MAGA-world civil war erupted over Christmas when a social media post on American culture turned into a pitched battle over race, immigration and billionaires versus the working class.

Why it matters: The fight exposes one of the MAGA movement’s deepest contradictions: It came to prominence chiefly via the white, less-educated, working class but is now under the full control of billionaire technologists and industrialists, many of them immigrants. …”

It would be an understatement to say Elon Musk swallowed the bait.

When I logged off last night, Musk and the Tech Right had gone full mask off. Their position is that everyone who doesn’t support “high skilled,” legal immigration from India is a racist and a retard. The backlash was so enormous on X that Musk changed the algorithm to de-verify, demonetize and shadow ban his critics. CNN devoted a twenty minute segment last night to covering the divide.

A few years ago, the populist Right hated Big Tech and Silicon Valley, which really only changed after Musk bought Twitter in 2022. We seem to be on the cusp of returning to that.

Note: As I said on X, it wouldn’t be Gilded Age II without oligarchs and their unquenchable thirst for cheap labor becoming villains for the way they treat their workers.