It’s Trumper on Trumpie in the MAGA battleground of X, where supporters of the president-elect are waging a civil war over racist jabs about Indian tech workers and absurd takes on visa policies.
The rhetorical battle over skilled immigration — sparked by a misleading tweet from a known conspiracy theorist and fueled by internet pundits who apparently had nothing better to do on Christmas Day — has pitted Silicon Valley MAGA bros against the movement’s far-right hardliners.
A post from Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur, kicked the hornet’s nest.
Loomer blasted Sriram Krishnan — Donald Trump’s new senior artificial intelligence policy adviser — for a November tweet in which he suggested removing country caps on green cards.
Anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge. https://t.co/21toGtW5lS
— Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk) November 14, 2024
Krishnan was, until recently, a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and led product teams at Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter. He was also co-host of the biggest show on Clubhouse, the short-lived audio hangout app.
“Deeply disturbing,” Loomer wrote. “How will [we] control immigration in our country and promote America First innovation when Trump appointed this guy who wants to REMOVE all restrictions on green card caps in the United States.”
Loomer’s tweet was false. Krishnan suggested removing per-country limits, not doing away with the overall cap on green cards issued each year.
But it nevertheless unleashed a torrent of far-right outrage.
Loomer — a twice-failed congressional candidate who once suggested that 9/11 was an “inside job” and that she’s “blacker than Kamala Harris” — has tweeted more than 100 times since Monday about the issue, referring to Indian tech workers as “third-world invaders” who don’t have “running water or toilet paper.” (Loomer later added that she was “not denigrating Indian people.”)
“It was white Europeans who created the American Dream,” Loomer wrote. “Don’t talk to me as an American citizen about INNOVATION when we actually have running water and indoor plumbing here in America.”
“Did any of y’all vote for this Indian to run America?” another right-wing account captioned a photo of Krishnan.
The Silicon Valley MAGA sect was quick to circle the wagons as the discourse turned to H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled migrants to work in the U.S. and serve as one of the primary pathways to winning a green card.
“Sriram has been a U.S. citizen for a decade,” wrote David Sacks, the San Francisco-based investor and Trump backer. “He’s advising on AI policy. He will have no influence over U.S. immigration policy. These attacks have become crude, and not in the holiday spirit.”
Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, tweeted “Keep skilled immigration legal” and said he supports removing country caps while also keeping out “mid to low skill applicants.”
Elon Musk wrote that “the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley” is a lack of engineering talent, later implying that U.S. companies need H-1B visas to hire top talent. He added that Loomer was “trolling.”
“You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago,” Loomer retorted. “I’ve been here supporting Donald Trump with the millions of other patriots in MAGA since the beginning.”
It’s true that the H-1B system is flawed. Bloomberg reported this year that some firms that hire Indian workers game the visa lottery by flooding it with applicants. In some cases, those firms engaged in overtly illegal practices like submitting false information or multiple entries for one worker. Another Bloomberg investigation found that a New Jersey-based IT giant favored Indian workers with H-1B visas over American workers and fired Americans at twice the rate as their visa-holding counterparts.
But much of the online discourse has had little to do with H-1B policy — or reality, for that matter.
On Christmas Eve, Loomer nonsensically blamed migrant tech workers for a technical failure at American Airlines “and, perhaps worst of all, iOS 18.” (She may have still been bitter about an incident hours earlier, in which she blamed American Airlines for “breaking my brand new suitcase.”)
This is the result of the wonderful “high skilled” labor that our Silicon Valley overlords have been importing for decades.
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) December 24, 2024
We get cancelled flights, dysfunctional digital infrastructure, and, perhaps worst of all, iOS 18—just so that they can save a few bucks by importing… https://t.co/J4NbNlvTpc
Sometime presidential hopeful and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency co-head Vivek Ramaswamy chimed in to suggest that the “key” reason U.S. companies are forced to hire H-1B workers is that American children have too many sleepovers, watch reruns of “Friends,” and spend their free time hanging out at the mall.
Ramaswamy’s antidote: weekend science competitions. Also, make kids watch more movies like “Whiplash,” which chronicles an obsessive drummer driven to the brink of insanity by an abusive music teacher who publicly humiliates him.
Bay Area politicians like State Sen. Scott Wiener and Rep. Ro Khanna jumped into the fray too.
“In the Leopards Eating Faces category, tech Trump people now realize MAGA wants to get rid of all immigrants,” Wiener wrote.
Khanna called Krishnan’s critics “fools.”
If history is any indication, the online vitriol will soon shift to the next faddish culture-war topic. But the open animosity between two disparate MAGA factions underscores the unruly nature of the coalition Donald Trump has gathered.
The only person who seemed pleased with the battle was Loomer, who took credit for singlehandedly sparking it and appeared to revel in her holiday timing.
“Silent night. Holy night,” she wrote. “Is when I like to strike.”