Yesterday morning, I started seeing stories about a Twitter spat between the DOGE boys and Laura Loomer, a far-right “influencer” of whom I was only marginally aware.
The New Republic (“MAGA in Total Mayhem as Laura Loomer Goes to War With Elon Musk“):
Right-wing influencer and Donald Trump gadfly Laura Loomer is attacking Elon Musk, seemingly over his desire for more immigrants to work and study in science and technology fields in the United States.
In several posts on X Thursday, Loomer railed against Musk and his influence on Trump. She attacked Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” project with Vivek Ramaswamy, calling it a “vanity project” on Wednesday before accusing it as a smokescreen for “the pet projects of tech bro billionaires” on Thursday. She also claimed that there would be a falling out between Musk and Trump soon.
In response, Musk accused Loomer of being a troll and said she should be ignored. Loomer continued her attacks unabated, calling the tech CEO a pawn of China, resorting to homophobic and racist insults, and accusing Musk of having “bought his way into MAGA.”
“Remember when you voted for Biden and propped up @GovRonDeSantis and you said Trump was too old? We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing,” Loomer wrote in one post, and in a follow-up, she called Musk “a total f****ing drag on the Trump transition.”
“He’s a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar a Lago in an effort to become Trump’s side piece and be the point man for all of his accomplices in big Tech to slither in to Mar a Lago,” Loomer posted.
Loomer, renowned for her Islamophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories, appears to be opposing Musk for those very reasons, as her virulent racism drives her anti-immigration views. Her attacks on Musk are flavored with that racism, from her invoking of China to repeated attacks on people from India.
On a related note, Musk’s DOGE sidekick, Vivek Ramaswamy, also got piled on Thursday by MAGA for his own immigration views after making the glaring mistake of claiming there were shortcomings in American culture, fueling racist attacks from the far right. It seems that Musk and Ramaswamy are already wearing out their welcome in Trumpworld, and soon might anger the big guy himself.
The Independent (“‘Should MAGA stay home in 2026?’ Laura Loomer wages ‘racist’ war against ‘tech bros’ over Indian migrants“):
Trump acolyte and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe”Laura Loomer is threatening to tell MAGA to “stay home” during the next midterm elections amid an escalating feud with “tech bros” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy over Silicon Valley’s reliance on foreign-born workers.
Loomer has engaged in a multi-day social media tirade over President-elect Donald Trump’s recent appointment of Indian-American entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan as a senior policy adviser for AI, prompting the loyal MAGA supporter to rage about Krishnan’s support of H-1B visas for Indian immigrants.
With the Trump administration promising an immediate crackdown on immigration, Loomer has launched a series of attacks on Indians described as “racist” following Krishnan’s appointment, which she called “deeply disturbing.” Describing workers from India as “third-world invaders,” Loomer also took issue with Musk and Ramaswamy defending the tech industry importing “super talented engineers” from overseas.
“The average IQ in India is 76,” Loomer tweeted at one point, along with several other posts disparaging Indians and their home country.
Loomer, who previously sparked backlash for making bigoted remarks about Kamala Harris’s Indian heritage, has found support among what some have described as “OG MAGA” in her civil war against Trump-supporting tech entrepreneurs. In particular, she has received quite a bit of backing from “groypers,” the followers of notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
The whole thing struck me as weird but not enough to write about. Loomer is obviously a racist loon. It did, however, spark a social media debate over our immigration policy.
NY Post (“Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy in fiery spat with MAGA allies over foreign worker visas: ‘Essential for America to keep winning’“):
Tech titan Elon Musk — who has quickly become President-elect Donald Trump’s right-hand man — got into a fiery spat Thursday with MAGA allies over foreign worker visas, arguing along with Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy that the program is key for American innovation.
The billionaire DOGE bosses lashed out the day after Christmas Day at some of Trump’s staunchest supporters and other immigration hawks for opposing the H-1B program, which lets highly skilled foreign workers enter the US for companies who sponsor them.
“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 wrote on X, comparing the US to a sports team bringing in athletes to boost their game.
The richest man in the world had been agreeing with his DOGE counterpart Ramaswamy, who went to argue that American “culture” was celebrating “mediocrity” — sparking the initial rift with members of MAGA world who want to restrict even legal immigration into the US.
“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,” Ramaswamy wrote in a lengthy post on X.
“Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH.”
Ramaswamy then laid out how popular American culture, since at least the 1990s, has favored “the prom queen over the math olympiad champ” and “the jock over the valedictorian,” allowing other countries like China to retain talented engineers — while the US lost top recruits.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he explained.
“‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”
Those close to Trump are hoping the pair won’t fracture the MAGA coalition, with many expressing frustration that Musk and Ramaswamy aired their opinions so publicly, sources familiar with talks going on at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort told The Post.
[…]
MAGA acolytes like Laura Loomer and right-wing firebrands such as Ann Coulter and Mike Cernovich shot back that Musk and Ramaswamy were only favoring foreign labor for their own Silicon Valley needs.
Their criticisms noted how the visas make it difficult for foreign nationals to leave jobs — and drive down the wages of American workers.
“American workers can leave a company. Imported H-1B workers can’t. Tech wants indentured servants, not ‘high-skilled’ workers,” Coulter said.
“This is why some find this discussion frustrating. Elon is right about the problem. Others are right that the solution is flawed. We ended our farm system, we lost our bench. BIG TECH did this. Now they want more H-1B’s for their self-inflicted wound,” added Cernovich.
It got even weirder yesterday.
Axios (“Musk calls MAGA element ‘”‘contemptible fools’”‘ as virtual civil war brews“):
On Friday, cartoonist and right-wing commentator Scott Adams posted on X that MAGA was “taking a page from Democrats on how to lose elections while feeling good about themselves.”
Musk agreed, and took it a step further.
“And those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem,” he posted.
For people used to being called “deplorables” by Democrats, the condemnation from one of the most important advisors in Trump’s inner circle stoked instant outrage.
“Calling people who have their country’s best interests at heart and wanting to NOT sell out the American people ‘contemptible fools’ is the biggest L that I’ve seen Elon make in a long time. Dude needs to relax,” gaming streamer Hooks posted.
Right-wing activist Laura Loomer tagged Trump in her message. “The Trump base is being replaced by Big Tech executives. So sad to see this. I feel so sad for MAGA,” she said. Loomer has alleged Musk was censoring her for her opposition to his immigration comments.
Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right social network Gab, said in an X post: “He’s declaring war on us btw. Should go over well for him as it has for everyone else who has tried.”
Washington Examiner (“Trump base splits over Musk and Ramaswamy’s support for foreign worker visas“):
“If we are going to have a throwdown, let’s have it now,” said Steve Bannon on his War Room show Friday morning, calling the arguments in favor of H-1B a “total scam.”
Loyal Trump supporters criticized the two tech entrepreneurs over their stance. Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked the two to stay out of immigration policy.
“We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender – and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline,” Gaetz wrote in a Thursday social media post. “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”
[…]
“We’ve already started to see a problem where it looks like Musk is calling the shots like what we last saw last week with government funding,” said a GOP Senate aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity in an effort to reflect candidly on the situation. “We need [Musk and Ramaswamy] to stay out of the conversations about immigration policy on social media. It’s divisive, and I’m sure the incoming administration would prefer to have these conversations behind the scenes instead of debating them out in the open.”
“We are about to have a GOP trifecta, and we need to be united as a party, and this only proves to divide us further,” the aide added.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s comments also drew criticism from former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who called on Trump to prioritize American workers over foreign ones.
“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,” Haley wrote Thursday.
The whole thing is just bizarre.
Musk and Ramaswamy make the traditional arguments for H1B visa expansion: there’s simply a huge demand in the tech industry for people with advanced degrees in science and engineering and not enough Americans with those skills. India, in particular, has a huge supply of people with those backgrounds who, conveniently enough, happen to speak English.
The notion that these immigrants are indentured servants is absurd. They’re paid handsomely and, while it’s harder for them to switch jobs than it is for American citizens, they nonetheless do so routinely. Indeed, as a recent CATO report notes,
On another point, H‑1B job shifting is more common than H‑1B workers starting H‑1B employment for the first time. In 2023, about 61 percent of all H‑1B workers starting with a new employer were existing H‑1B workers hired away from other employers in the United States. This means that US employers are more likely to hire an H‑1B worker already in the United States in H‑1B status as they are to hire a new H‑1B worker not already with H‑1B status.
That’s actually not surprising because the visas themselves are a scarce resource. As an October report by the American Immigration Council noted,
Since the category was created in 1990, Congress has limited the number of H-1Bs made available each year. The current annual statutory cap is 65,000 visas, with 20,000 additional visas for foreign professionals who graduate with a master’s degree or doctorate from a U.S. institution of higher learning (Figure 1). For Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, the cap was reached on December 13, 2023.
The Fiscal Year begins on 1 October. Rather clearly, the demand vastly exceeds the supply.
Let’s dismiss out of hand Loomer’s racist nonsense about Indians having low IQs and companies hiring dumb engineers from India to save money. We’ve already dealt with the Coulter-Bannon argument that companies are hiring them because they’re “indentured servants.” The adjacent argument, that hiring tens of thousands of foreign-born STEM workers drives down the wages for their American counterparts, has some merit.
A 2017 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research sheds useful light on the matter:
In Understanding the Economic Impact of the H-1B Program on the U.S. (NBER Working Paper 23153), John Bound, Gaurav Khanna, and Nicolas Morales explore how the availability of such workers has affected the welfare of domestic workers, firms, and consumers.
Based on their model, the researchers calculate that the influx of foreign-born computer scientists enabled by the H-1B program had a positive effect on the U.S. IT sector, and consequently the U.S. economy, but had significant distributional effects. They estimate that absent the influx of foreigners, U.S. computer scientists would have earned between 2.6 and 5.1 percent more in 2001. Moreover, some U.S. workers switched to other occupations, lowering the number of domestic computer scientists by between 6 and 11 percent. The picture is brighter in other respects: Foreign scientists were found to be strong contributors to innovation and productivity. That translated into wage and job gains in related fields, and into more choice and lower prices for consumers.
The research focuses on the Internet boom years, when workers in computer-related occupations became the largest share of H-1B visa holders. The cap on visas was initially 65,000 a year. That became a binding constraint in the mid-1990s and it was raised to 115,000 in 1999. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that during the late 1990s, 28 percent of all U.S. programming jobs were held by H-1B visa holders.
Although the H-1B legislation stipulates that visa holders must be paid the prevailing wages for their jobs, critics of the H-1B program argue that visa holders have little bargaining power because they can work only for the companies that sponsor them. “It seems reasonable to assume that employers must expect some cost or productivity advantage when hiring foreigners, however modest,” the researchers note. “If not, why would they incur the associated effort and expense?”
The researchers calculate that wages, domestic employment, and, as a result, college enrollment in computer science would have grown even more rapidly than it did, had immigration been restricted. Indeed, the fraction of U.S. college degrees in computer science would have been higher by 1.3 to 2.6 percentage points in 2001. The reduction in labor costs associated with this program spurred growth and innovation in the computer science sector and increased productivity in the economy as a whole. Lower labor costs also increased profits, enabling new companies to enter the field. Growth in the computer science sector also sparked expansion in related fields, raising wages for college graduates who were not computer scientists and for non-college graduates.
For consumers, the researchers estimate, the H-1B program has resulted in lower prices for technology-related products, and has led to a higher rate of product innovation. The innovation effects are particularly important in assessing consumer welfare.
So, overall, it’s good for the economy and drives innovation, but it creates downward pressure on wages and marginally lowers the incentives for Americans to pursue STEM degrees.
To the extent the MAGA movement is driven by the concerns of non-college-educated folks in the working class, though, it’s all to the good. Why should they care that the wages of college-educated elites in the Socialist Republic of California are being driven down slightly? The working class are merely consumers, not creators, of technology and immigration is both driving innovation and keeping prices low.
Obviously, if MAGA’s obsession with immigration is driven mostly by racism, or its adjacent desire to preserve America as a predominantly European and Judeo-Christian nation, it makes more sense. But, Loomer notwithstanding, the animus in that regard mostly seems directed at Blacks and Latinos, with East and South Asians typically seen as the Right Kind of Immigrants, respected for their cultural mores and work ethic.
This could also simply be elite-on-elite violence. Gaetz’s take here seems likeliest to me to be the more widespread within the MAGA core: they welcome Musk’s deep pockets and ability to shape the conversation via the platform formerly known as Twitter but don’t want him sharing control of the social messaging.
