Tech mogul Elon Musk may have become a close ally to President-elect Donald Trump, but he’s butting heads this week with some of Trump’s longtime MAGA supporters over immigration
“The immigration hot-button topic is the biggest DKE situation I’ve ever seen,” said Musk in a Thursday X post. He was apparently referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect, described by Psychology Today as “cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area.”
This online scuffle over immigration began when Trump named venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan, who is from India, as his adviser on artificial intelligence policy. His choice sparked anti-Indian backlash and criticism of Krishnan’s support of lifting caps on green cards, Axios reported.
During his first presidency, Trump had a strong stance on immigration. He enacted a travel ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries and started up a project to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to deter illegal immigration. On the campaign trail for the most recent election, Trump continued to focus much of his rhetoric on illegal immigration.
“Illegal aliens are pouring in and they’re taking your jobs,” he said at Detroit’s 180 Church in June. “The Black community is being hurt more by the illegal aliens – 16, 17 million – they’re taking your jobs.”
Following the anti-Indian backlash over Krishnan’s appointment, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy also joined the discourse around immigration. Ramaswamy is the son of Indian immigrants and he ran in the Republican presidential primary. He was appointed by Trump, along with Musk, to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in his upcoming administration.
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer),” said Ramaswamy in an X post.
He went on to criticize Americans for watching shows like “Boy Meets World” and “Friends” and for activities like “hanging out at the mall.” Axios noted that these comments “escalated the conflict into a full-blown war,” within different parts of the MAGA crowd.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers,” said Nikki Haley, another former GOP presidential candidate who is a child of Indian immigrant parents.
“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?” said right-wing personality Mike Cernovich said in a response to Ramaswamy on X.
Those H-1B’s mentioned by Cernovich are part of a visa program that “applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability,” per the U.S. Department of Labor.
“A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent,” the department explained. “The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.”
According to CNN, Musk once worked in the U.S. on an H-1B visa before he became a citizen in 2002. He is originally from South Africa. The Washington Post said that H-1B visas have “long been a lifeblood for Silicon Valley,” and Axios said that as many as 75% of those petitioning for the visas have been from India in recent years.
“Musk spent most of the afternoon trying to defend his DOGE co-leader and explain his argument, framing it as using immigration to supplement, rather than replace, American workers,” on X – a website that Musk himself owns – Axios said.
“Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk said in one post. “This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA. Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”
Laura Loomer, a right-wing content creator and Trump ally known for spreading rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets, also took to X to criticize Ramaswamy and Musk.
“I got you and all of your Big Tech buddies who are trying to infiltrate the White House to respond and expose yourselves as being in opposition to MAGA immigration policy,” she said in one post.
Loomer also said that Musk censored her account and removed her subscribers after the posts: “Full censorship of my account simply because I called out H1B visas. This is anti-American behavior by tech oligarchs. What happened to free speech?”
The Washington Post said this sparring between Trump supporters signifies a “potential rift between Trump’s core nationalist base and technology executives who have come to support him,” and Axios said “the fight exposes one of the MAGA movement’s deepest contradictions.” While white, working class Americans have been an important part of Trump’s political success, the outlet said the movement is now “under the full control of billionaire technologists and industrialists, many of them immigrants.”