On New Year’s Eve, America’s most prominent nativist declared that the nation needs more immigrants.
“We need competent people, we need smart people coming into our country,” President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, “we need a lot of people coming in.”
It may sound as though Trump was just visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. But it was actually extremely online white nationalists who triggered the president-elect’s rhetorical shift on immigration.
On December 22, Trump named the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as a senior adviser for artificial intelligence. The racist provocateur — and Trump insider — Laura Loomer condemned Krishnan’s selection because the Indian-American investor had recently called for increasing skilled immigration. In Loomer’s telling, Krishnan wants to let more “foreign students” come “to the US and take jobs that should be given to American STEM students.”
This sparked a bitter intra-MAGA debate over high-skill immigration in general, and the H-1B visa — which gives temporary legal status to highly educated immigrant workers employed by American companies — in particular. The tech right, led by Elon Musk, insisted that ensuring Silicon Valley’s access to top global talent was in America’s national interest, much to the chagrin of Loomer, Steve Bannon, and other ultranationalist Trump supporters.
Both factions in this debate gravitated toward the ugliest possible arguments for their respective positions. One can make reasonable criticisms of the H-1B visa system, which plausibly reduces wages and employment opportunities for native-born tech professionals. But Loomer preferred to argue that the program enables “third world invaders from India” to steal the American dream from “white Europeans.”
Renowned “populist” Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, defended high-skill immigration on the grounds that US tech firms need access to foreign labor because working-class Americans are culturally deficient.
This said, in between portraying most of their countrymen as untalented and lazy, Musk and company voiced some laudable sentiments. The Tesla CEO posted on X that “Anyone – of any race, creed or nationality – who came to America and worked like hell to contribute to this country will forever have my respect,” and reiterated his belief that “We should greatly increase legal immigration of anyone who is hard-working, honest and loves America.” Musk further implied that opponents of such immigration effectively “want America to lose for their own personal gain.” Trump proceeded to signal sympathy with Musk’s perspective, both on Truth Social and in remarks to the press.
Trump and Musk are right to suggest that increasing legal immigration is in America’s national interest. But their conception of worthwhile immigration is much too narrow.
Both have argued that America specifically needs highly skilled and superlatively talented immigrants while demonizing less educated and lower-income migrants, including some who came to the United States legally. Yet an immigration policy that truly put “America first” would also allow more of these “low-skill” workers into the country.
For one thing,