“Always In Favour”: Trump Backs Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy In H-1B Visa Debate

In a contentious argument that split his traditional followers from tech titans like Elon Musk, Donald Trump chimed in on Saturday, stating that he supports a special visa program that facilitates the entry of highly talented individuals into the US. In his first public remarks on the issue since it erupted this week, the president-elect told the New York Post, “I’ve always liked the (H1-B) visas, I have always been in favor of the visas, that’s why we have them” at Trump-owned sites. There has been a heated back and forth between Silicon Valley’s Musk and conventional anti-immigration Trump supporters, with Musk even threatening to “go to war” over the matter.

Trump defeated Joe Biden in the November election largely due to his unrelenting demands for drastic immigration restrictions. He has pledged to restrict legal immigration and deport all unauthorized immigrants. However, tech entrepreneurs like Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-chair a federal cost-cutting commission under Trump alongside Tesla’s Musk, and Musk themselves strongly support the H1-B program, arguing that the US produces too few highly trained graduates. Musk wrote on his X platform Thursday that attracting top engineering talent from overseas was “essential for America to keep winning.” Musk himself immigrated from South Africa on an H1-B.

A tweet by Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, fueled the controversy. He lamented a “American culture” that, in his words, glorifies mediocrity and warned that the US could have “our asses handed to us by China.” Long before Musk publicly joined their cause this year and contributed more than $250 million to the Republican’s campaign, that infuriated a number of well-known conservatives who had been supporting Trump. “Looking forward to the inevitable divorce between President Trump and Big Tech,” remarked Laura Loomer, a conspiracy-theorizing far-right MAGA who frequently accompanied Trump on his campaign jet. “We have to protect President Trump from the technocrats.”

According to her and others, Trump ought to be elevating American workers and further restricting immigration. Musk retaliated against his detractors after organizing an internet campaign that helped destroy a bipartisan budget agreement last week, which had previously angered several Republicans. On his own social media platform, X, he posted a warning about a “MAGA civil war.” In a direct insult to one critic, Musk declared, “I will go to war on this issue.”

Trump advisor Steve Bannon responded to it by writing on the Gettr platform that the H1-B program brings in immigrants who are essentially “indentured servants” who labor for less than natives of the United States. Bannon slammed Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Trump’s close pal, by calling him a “toddler.” Some of Trump’s early supporters say they worry he is straying from his campaign pledges and succumbing to the influence of wealthy tech fundraisers like Musk. Whether Trump’s comments will ease intraparty division, which has revealed how divisive altering the immigration system could be once he takes office in January, was not immediately apparent.