The coalition of people we call the MAGA movement in American politics is a very broad church that has attracted the allegiance of those holding diverse strands of political thought. I knew from the beginning of the 2024 campaign that there would arise some tensions between the various tendencies. Mr. Trump has not yet taken the presidential oath and some internal fighting has already broken out.
Not content to deal with the gigantic tasks associated with the nearly impossible brief of cutting back bloated federal government bureaucracy as co-chairmen of DOGE, the billionaire team of Musk and Ramaswamy has chimed in on the debate over HB1 visas, a program that brings in 65,000 third-world immigrants a year, mainly Indians, to work in high-tech fields. The billionaire boys club has made public statements defending the program. These statements are couched in terms of disparagement of native-born American workers, implying that almost no one in the US studies in the STEM fields anymore.
Musk and Ramaswamy are being intellectually dishonest. The HB1 program was never about a dearth of high-tech talent in the US but always about importing tech workers from overseas and paying them crappy wages, the kind of wages US workers could not raise a family on. According to CompTIA’s June 2024 “Tech Jobs Report,” unemployment for IT professionals reached 3.7%, the highest number since August 2020.
HB1 was always about the corporate bottom line and never about an alleged shortage of tech workers. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump quite rightly took aim at the program and tried to reduce that 65,000 number to a much lower figure, but like so many of Trump’s good ideas, he was never able to get the modifications past Congress.
Musk and Ramaswamy went public because Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan as his AI Advisor, who was seen to be pro-HB1 and there was push-back from ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, first-term Trump “Senior Advisor” who will hold the dual posts of Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy after Trump is sworn in. Miller and Bannon are immigration hardliners. MAGA becomes pretty much useless if you take away the immigration control aspects of the movement. The whole of the Democratic Party and half of the Republican Party exists to defend the interests of Big Business. The time has come for billionaires to make sacrifices and not oppress middle- and working-class Americans.
Mr. Musk is an anti-woke liberal and Mr. Ramaswamy is, essentially, a libertarian. In his last speech before the annual National Conservatism Conference, Ramaswamy outlined an essentially libertarian vision for America’s future. Auron MacIntyre, an intelligent nationalist observer, found his comments rather shy of America First principles.
Don’t get me wrong, Ramaswamy and Musk are creative and intelligent men. I have high hopes for their work with the Department of Government Efficiency. Their task is important. There exists a real possibility that a debilitating recession is around the corner and if sufficient cuts are made in spending, a disaster can be averted. I am certainly no believer in Austrian economics and I would be highly insulted if someone called me a libertarian, but government spending has been completely out of control for the past decade. Even if DOGE leaves entitlements alone and just concentrates on waste, fraud and abuse, much can be accomplished.
When Trump nominated RFK Jr. to the post of Health and Human Services Secretary, he made it quite clear that the nomination was based on Kennedy’s ideas on vaccines and food purity and not on his fanatical environmental opinions, which are similar to the policies that are now destroying Western European economies. In the same way, Trump needs to limit Musk and Ramaswamy’s brief to government efficiency and keep them both out of the public immigration debate. Thus far, Trump has not weighed in on the controversy, probably not wanting to insult his two efficiency experts. I am hoping that privately he will reign the two billionaires in and stick to his anti-HB1 visa position.
