On the one side stand Silicon Valley moguls and leaders of corporate America; on the other, longstanding Donald Trump loyalists and supporters of the Maga (“Make America great again”) movement. One side claims to be building America’s bright new future by recruiting the best talent from across the globe, the other to be defending US workers from the depredations of global capitalism. One side portrays itself as challenging racism and bigotry, the other is outraged by bigoted views of American culture.
The H-1B visa – which allows US companies to hire foreign workers with “highly specialised knowledge” – might seem an unlikely spark for a mini civil war among Trump supporters. Yet the bitter feud that has gripped the Trumpsphere over the past week has exposed many of the fissures of US conservatism. There is little to admire on either side and much to deplore. Both sides are right in certain respects, but usually for desperately wrong reasons.
The fallout began when Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with the ear of the incoming president, described as “deeply disturbing” the appointment by Trump of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born US venture capitalist, as policy adviser on AI. She was alarmed by “the number of career leftists … appointed to serve in Trump’s admin” whose views “are in direct opposition to Trump’s America first agenda”.
Then Vivek Ramaswamy published a long post blaming “American culture” for the need to import foreign engineers. A former presidential rival turned Trump supporter, and Trump’s pick to run, with Elon Musk, the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Ramaswamy claimed that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long”. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the maths olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian,” he added, “will not produce the best engineers.”
The post inevitably enraged Maga loyalists and anti-immigration activists, from one-time Trump confidant Steve Bannon to former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley. While many simply pushed back at the deprecation of American culture and the claim that US workers possess insufficient skills, there was also considerable outpouring of racist bile.
Musk waded in both to defend the H-1B scheme, of which he has long been a fervent advocate, and to demand that the “hateful, unrepentant racists” be “removed from the Republican party”. Trump himself, who in 2016 described the programme as being “very, very bad for workers” and one that “I frankly use and… shouldn’t be allowed to”, and who four years ago temporarily suspended the scheme, last week backed his new Silicon Valley friends against their Maga critics. Policy walks to where money talks.
It’s a bit rich, though, for the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy to cry racism about those objecting to their favoured visa scheme when they themselves have been so fervidly disseminating racist tropes about immigrants. Musk helped promote the notorious claim that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, were “eating pets”. He and Ramaswamy have been advocates of the “great replacement theory”, the belief that the elites are “importing” millions of illegal immigrants to replace white people. Ramaswamy called it “a basic statement of the Democratic party’s platform”, while Musk claimed it was part of the Democrats’ attempt to create “single party rule”. Last month, Musk backed the far-right AfD as the only party that can “save Germany”.
Having unleashed the racist hounds, to claim now that the pack is pursuing the wrong hares carries little credibility. Trying to draw a line between “immigrants we hate” and “immigrants we like” becomes a fool’s errand when you’ve nurtured conspiracy theories that make all immigrants fair game for bigotry.
The argument of Maga supporters that their opposition to H-1B rests on a desire to defend American workers is, in most cases, equally fallacious. There is certainly evidence that employers manipulate the visa system and discriminate against local workers to help keep wages low. Many describe the visa programme as “indentured servitude” because any worker complaining about pay or conditions can have their visa rescinded by their employer and be deported.
Hostility towards such abuse should be directed against not immigrants but the employers who exploit both US and foreign workers. I have previously observed about Britain that rightwing critics of immigration portraying themselves as champions of British workers rarely support working class interests in other spheres. Most want to strip down trade union rights, support labour market “flexibility”, are hostile to strikes and nurture intolerance towards benefit claimants.
The same is true of the American debate. While there are good reasons to oppose the exploitation of H-1Bs by big business, most critics are more concerned with creating hostility to immigration than with defending workers. If they truly wanted to champion working-class interests, they would call for the expansion of union rights, proper socialised healthcare, a progressive taxation system, sanctions against price gouging, and so on. Few on either side of the Trumpsphere split are willing to do so. Workers get championed, it seems, primarily when there are immigrants to deprecate.
“You can fawn over Elon Musk or you can run a populist political campaign. But you can’t do both.” So wrote the American conservative Sohrab Ahmari three months before the US election. He pointed to Trump’s decision to frame Democrat candidate Kamala Harris “as a ‘communist’” rather than as “an Obama-style neoliberal Democrat” as revealing the shallowness of his populist argument.
While he is perceptive about tensions within the Trumpsphere, Ahmari’s suggestion that Trump could solve his dilemma by leaning “in hard into a pro-labour, anti-corporate stance” is less convincing. Certainly, there are strands of conservatism sympathetic to working-class needs. But any “anti-corporate stance” is always limited, shackled by conservative conceptions of social order and the championing of the profit motive. Class politics for conservatives means the working class knowing its place within the social and economic order.
The H-1B debate does not pit the elite against the working class but rather is a tussle between two sections of the elite with different strategies for US capitalism, a debate in which the working class becomes merely a commodity to be exploited, before being discarded when no longer needed. This is true not just of America, but of similar debates in Britain and Europe over immigration, the working class and political realignment. On both sides of the Atlantic what is too often missing is the organised voice of labour.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
