The Silicon Valley tech titans who joined the Trump coalition during the 2024 presidential race have just had their first major quarrel with the MAGA movement’s more stalwart factions. The issue was high-skilled immigration. It started when Donald Trump announced the appointment of Indian-born venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence. Krishnan had recently tweeted in favor of eliminating country caps for green cards and “unlock[ing] skilled immigration.” When he was attacked, tech bigwigs including Elon Musk and David Sacks jumped in to defend Krishnan and the H-1B program associated with high-skilled immigrants.
“There is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America,” Musk tweeted. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.” Contrary to the “‘fixed pie’ fallacy,” he argued, high-skilled immigration has “essentially infinite potential for job and company creation.”
“The tech bros are wrong.”
The tech bros are wrong. High-skilled immigration threatens to do to the middle class what low-skilled immigration and free trade did to the working class in America. The process is not as far advanced and could still be reversed with the right policies, but if we continue on the current path, the white-collar middle class will see the same result as their blue-collar neighbors.