Next month, the Republican Party will run Washington as a whole, but there are already cracks in the party’s coalition, even before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The most recent disagreement is about immigration and whether Trump should agree with tech billionaires like Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla TSLA -4.95%, who say that the U.S. should let in more immigrants instead of fewer, as long as it’s legal and the foreigners are picked based on their skills.
The fight got worse on social media after Trump hired Indian-born startup capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence.
Critics said Trump should hire native-born Americans instead of immigrants because he has attacked them on the campaign road as the Republican Party’s nominee for president three times in a row.
The median annual salary for H-1B workers was $118,000 in 2023, compared with just over $48,000 for the median American.
Political reporter and co-founder of Axios Mike Allen called the fight a “MAGA Civil War” in a message on Friday.
He wrote, “The fight shows one of the MAGA movement’s deepest contradictions.” “It rose to power mostly through the white, less-educated working class, but now it’s completely run by billionaire tech and business leaders, many of whom are immigrants.”
How many of each H-1B visa are there?
The Immigration Act of 1990 made the H-1B visa possible. It replaced a similar system with fewer rules that critics said was used by American companies to hire foreign workers and keep wages low.
The H-1B visa was different from the one that came before it because it focused on high-tech areas and had specialty occupation requirements like having a bachelor’s degree. To protect workers even more, it set a limit on the number of applications that could be approved each year.
The current limit is 85,000, and a specific company has to sponsor a visa applicant. This makes it hard for these workers to switch jobs in search of better pay or treatment.
In 2023, the average H-1B worker made $118,000 a year, while the average American made just over $48,000.
The Department of Homeland Security says that 386,559 petitions for these workers were made in 2023, which is a lot more than the number of visas that can be given.
From the past (January 2023): Powell of the Fed says, “We need more people.” Is that a sign that immigration laws need to be changed?
Last year, 65% of all applications were for jobs in “computer-related occupations.” About 22% of all accepted applications were for people with master’s degrees, and 4% were for people with doctoral degrees.
A possible deal
Even well-known immigration activists like Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies think there is room for compromise. In a Thursday article in the online magazine Compact, he said Trump could move to limit other types of legal immigration while changing the H-1B system so more truly skilled immigrants can legally work in the U.S.
Since the election in November and since then, Musk has been seen a lot with Trump. He has framed the debate so that people with an H-1B visa are “super talented people,” like NBA players who come from other countries to play.
“I am talking about how important it is for America to keep winning that the top 0.1% of engineering talent come in legally,” Musk wrote on X Thursday. “The best way to think about America is as a professional sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning.”
A political science professor at Harvard named Ron Hira is an expert on high-skilled immigration. He has said that the current program is not aimed at the top 0.1% of talent, but at many workers with “ordinary skills” who could be easily replaced by Americans, who would demand higher wages and better working conditions.
Hira wrote in the socialist magazine Jacobin, “Weak labor safeguards make it very profitable for an employer to hire an H-1B worker instead of a US worker. This is not because the H-1B worker has skills that are hard to find in the US, but because they save money on payroll costs and are basically indentured to their employer.”
One way to get progressive and conservative critics of the program, as well as tech leaders who openly back the new president, to work together would be to give H-1B visas to people who have the highest-paying jobs.
Krikorian wrote, “The idea is that if these workers are truly valuable, then their employers will value them highly, and that will show in the pay.”
That kind of rule was made by Trump near the end of his first term, but it was thrown out by the courts for technical reasons, and the Biden administration didn’t back it up.
From the past (September 2014): Obama’s White House says Republicans are making the immigration problem political, but they won’t take any action until after the midterms.
In Congress, people from both parties agree on these changes. For example, conservative Republican Sen. Tom Cotton recently introduced a bill that would lower overall immigration but increase high-skilled immigration based in part on how much employers are willing to pay to fill those jobs.
The H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act was backed by top lawmakers from both parties in March. It is another plan that works across party lines.
Founder and co-chair of Trump’s planned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGe), Vivek Ramaswamy, said it best in an X post on Friday: He wrote, “I will say it again.” He had said it many times in the past two years. “The H-1B system is badly broken, and it needs to be replaced with a system that gets the best people.”
