Just a few days before Christmas, when U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the appointment of the Indian-born venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, tensions within Trump’s 2024 coalition led to a full-blown online war between certain Trump advisers, like the entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and supporters who take a more hard-line stance against immigration. Krishnan, who moved to the United States almost two decades ago, is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and has previously led product and engineering teams at several tech giants, including X, Meta, Snap and Microsoft.
The clash started when the Trump ally and far-right provocateur Laura Loomer criticized Krishnan’s appointment, calling it “deeply disturbing” on X and highlighting one of his tweets from November, in which he supported the removal of country-specific caps on green cards and “unlocking skilled immigration.” The present system does not allow any country to receive more than 7% of the estimated total of 140,000 employment-based green cards per year. Hence people from large countries such as India and China often face long backlogs compared to those from smaller nations.
As soon as Loomer’s post gained traction and media attention, the focus shifted to the H-1B visa program, which allows highly skilled foreign workers in specialist occupations to be temporarily employed in the U.S. It turned into a racist row targeting Indians in the U.S., since they are the largest beneficiaries of this visa program. Over 70% of the H-1B visas approved have been allotted to people born in India each year since 2015. Those born in China are a distant second, hovering at the 12%-13% mark since 2018.
There is an annual regular cap of 65,000 new visas under this program each fiscal year, with an extra 20,000 visas available to those with a master’s degree or higher from an American university. The recipients are picked through a lottery system.
Pursuing a postgraduate degree in the U.S. and hoping to get picked for the H-1B visa through a job in the tech or finance sectors has long been a pathway for Indians to migrate to the country, especially in the past decade. Indians also account for the second-highest number of international students in the U.S. In 2023, the U.S. government issued over 140,000 visas to students from India and, as of 2024, there were over 377,000 Indians studying in the U.S.
It is this dominance of Indians that seems to have caught the attention of the hard-line nativist wing of the MAGA world, whose adherents argue that the H-1B program, meant to attract top talent from around the world to the U.S., is misused by tech companies to staff their low-to-mid-level workforce for much lower pay than Americans would demand. However, Musk and Ramaswamy, Trump’s choices for the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, have weighed in in favor of H-1B visas, saying that “there is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” and, if the U.S. were to let go of this global talent, it would be employed by competitors.
As much as it was a “debate” over H-1B visas, this online backlash has exposed the anxieties among Trump allies and MAGA supporters over Trump’s appointment of several Indian Americans to his Cabinet. These include Ramaswamy, Kolkata-born Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has been appointed as the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Harmeet Dhillon as the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. Kash Patel is Trump’s pick to be the FBI director, while Vice President-elect JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, will be the first Indian-American second lady.
It is also, broadly, a reactionary lashing out against Indian immigrants in the U.S., who total a little over 5 million and are a highly influential community as well as the wealthiest minority group in the country. The majority of those who moved to the U.S. after 2010 are high-skilled workers who have well-paying jobs in fields like tech, finance, medicine and law. They are often cited as examples of immigrant achievement in the West and described as a “model minority.”
While it is well known that Indian-origin CEOs dominate Silicon Valley leadership, including Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft chair and CEO Satya Nadella, about one-third of tech employees in Silicon Valley are also of Indian origin and a number of other top-tier leadership positions in these companies are also held by Indians or those of Indian origin. According to a recent report by the nonprofit Indiaspora, in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, of the 648 unicorn startups (privately owned startups worth over $1 billion) in the U.S., 72 are led by Indian-origin founders.
Around 78% of Indian Americans hold bachelor’s degrees or higher, more than double the national average of 36%. Their median household income of $166,200 is nearly double that of all immigrant-led households ($78,700) and native-led households ($77,600), according to a Migration Policy Institute report. “In 2023, Indian immigrants were roughly half as likely to be in poverty (6%) as immigrants overall (14%) or the U.S. born (12%),” the report said.
But apart from drawing attention to Indian immigrants in the U.S., this controversy has also sparked a conversation on “merit-based” or “skills-based” immigration, which has become something of a policy darling within some Republican circles. The GOP’s 2024 party platform prioritized “merit-based immigration” over what it described as “chain migration,” the process by which relatives sponsor immigrants for entry into the U.S., describing the former as “ensuring those admitted to our Country contribute positively to our Society and Economy, and never become a drain on Public Resources.”
A similar defense has been made of H-1B visas, portraying them as beneficial to the U.S. economy and national security, ensuring that the brightest minds come to the country. In a long post on X, Ramaswamy wrote about “culture,” bemoaning the lack of overachievers among 1990s sitcom protagonists. Notably, he said, “‘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.”
In this skills-based view, immigration is an extension of the U.S. economy and a tool for its titans of industry. Under such an immigration system, the government decides what “type” of immigrant is most beneficial to the U.S. and prioritizes immigration access accordingly. A skills-based immigration system provides a tool for recruiting more engineers, computer programmers, welders or whatever occupation is deemed to be in the “national interest” depending on the prevailing influence in Washington.
While revolutionary within right-wing circles for its seemingly colorblind and technocratic approach, merit-based immigration remains at odds with Trump’s racist immigration rhetoric.
The distinction between legal and illegal immigration was repeated on the campaign trail in order to incite against immigrants. Yet Trump’s accusation that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets in Ohio, as well as his “Muslim ban,” highlight that, for him, country of origin remains an important factor in determining someone’s eligibility to immigrate to the U.S. How this reconciles with a skills-based view of immigration remains unclear.
Merit-based immigration offers its own world of obstacles and issues around discrimination, and still fails to recognize a genuine disconnect between how immigration is discussed as politics and the reality of the U.S. immigration system.
Little attention is paid to the workers whose immigration status is tied to their job security. Ramaswamy was quick to extol the virtues of those who value “more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers,” while relying heavily on stereotypes about model minorities without actually discussing any of the challenges immigrant workers face in the U.S.
Ramaswamy has seemingly benefited from people assuming he is himself some kind of genius savant, a trend that is not uncommon in the tech and venture capital industries. The myth of digital wizards poses a unique risk for democratic processes, fueling reliance on technocratic experts who, by and large, seem to be motivated primarily by the pursuit of their own self-interest.
More broadly, merit-based immigration reduces everyone to their profession, a number in a spreadsheet, a smaller part of a much larger economic machine. While presented as technocratic, such an approach ignores what is, by and large, an arbitrary choice about which industry is prioritized. Far from being objective, such a view largely favors wealthier, more educated immigrants who already have an easier time coming to the U.S. It’s bad for workers, regardless of their citizenship status or ethnic background.
Trump weighed in and seemed to contradict comments he made in the past on H-1B, having restricted access to visas for foreign workers during his first term. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B,” Trump told the New York Post over the phone. “I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” On New Year’s Eve, he further added, “I didn’t change my mind. I’ve always felt we had to have the most competent people in our country.”
But it was the nativist community cultivated by Musk on X that spearheaded the initial criticisms of him and the H-1B program. Many of the earliest posts came from accounts affiliated with white nationalists and MAGA trolls, which were later suspended or had their checkmarks removed shortly after criticizing Musk.
This was significant because, for the first time, X had seemingly reprimanded accounts engaged in hate speech, albeit only after they posted about Musk. Prior to their suspension or removal of verified account status, these users were paying for X’s suite of features, which replaced the old verification system, and had leveraged them for increased exposure.
In fact, Musk himself has repeatedly engaged with explicitly antisemitic posts and accounts on X. For instance, in November 2023, he replied to a post accusing Jewish people of spreading “anti-white hate” with praise, stating, “You have said the actual truth.” He also supported Germany’s far-right AfD party after a man drove a car through a Christmas market in Magdeburg. He declared immigration was to blame and penned an op-ed in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, after which the paper’s opinion editor resigned.
This controversy illustrates the influence that Trump’s 2024 allies, especially Musk, wield on the president-elect’s policy agenda, perhaps to the chagrin of his 2016 supporters. While Steve Bannon, a former Trump campaign manager, was quick to criticize the visa system as a “scam,” those involved in Musk’s orbit have insisted that such policies serve the national interest. It appears that Trump has begun to agree with them, at least for now.
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