Between Elon Musk and his lifelong allies, it seems that President-elect Donald Trump has chosen his side, 20 days before his inauguration as head of the United States. This first heartbreak plays out at the heart of a subject that seemed to bring everyone in agreement among the Trumpists: immigration. And more specifically the question of “H1-B” visas, which allow companies to bring in foreign workers with specific qualifications. Enough to oppose two blocks of the Trumpist coalition, composed of both supporters from tech and conservative figures with ardently anti-immigration positions.
H1-B defended by two influential figures from the Trump camp
For several days, the powerful billionaire entrepreneur and Donald Trump’s new Minister for Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, has been defending with great virulence the existence of this visa allowing qualified labor to be invited to the country. . Because not only is it widely used by Silicon Valley – its favorite playground – to bring in foreign engineers. But it is also thanks to the H1-B that Elon Musk himself, originally from South Africa, reached American soil. According to the richest man in the world, who has become a very close advisor to Donald Trump, “bringing the top 0.1% of engineering talent via legal immigration is essential for America to continue to win” on the international stage. ” he pleaded on X.
Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed alongside Elon Musk at the head of this commission to cut state spending, also defended the use of this visa. “Our American culture has worshiped mediocrity rather than excellence for far too long,” the businessman said on X. “A culture that celebrates the high school prom queen rather than the math Olympiad champion, or the athlete rather than the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he added. . Without radical change, “we are going to get our ass kicked by China,” said the former candidate in the Republican presidential primaries. Statements which outraged certain conservative figures, accusing the two billionaires of minimizing the technological achievements made in the United States and of wanting to offer the best jobs to foreigners, rather than to Americans.
Donald Trump comes out of silence
After a deaf silence of several days, Donald Trump finally issued a timid position on the subject, Saturday December 28. “I have always believed in the H-1B program,” the president-elect finally declared in the columns of New York Post. “I have many H-1B visas in my properties […] I have used it many times. It’s an excellent program,” added the billionaire.
Twenty-four hours earlier, however, his own chief of staff, the ultraconservative Stephen Miller, posted on , split the atom, gave the world the telephone and the Internet.” A way for this influential figure of the future government to recall that Donald Trump was once again elected with a primarily anti-immigration program, and that qualified foreign labor is, according to him, not necessary for the United States is accomplishing great things.
It was Elon Musk who then violently stepped up to the plate, first writing that his electric vehicle company Tesla was named in homage to the eponymous inventor of Serbian origin, who arrived in the United States at the end of the 19th century. . Before promising in a post on “The reason I’m in America like so many of the essential people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies […]it’s because of H1-B”, he recalls in his post.
A takeover of Silicon Valley?
During his first campaign for the White House in 2016, Donald Trump expressed his opposition to the H1-B visa, which he admitted to using himself within his companies but which he described as “very unfair for our workers “Americans. And he had put in place certain restrictions on these visas when he came to power, before they were lifted by the Biden administration.
This internal war therefore illustrates for some Donald Trump loyalists the opinion according to which Silicon Valley has already infiltrated too deeply into Trumpist spheres. “We greeted the tech guys when they came running towards us […]. We did not ask them to design a migration policy,” joked Matt Gaetz, formerly elected to Congress and chosen for a time by Donald Trump as future Minister of Justice before having to give up. It remains to be seen whether after these first tensions, the coalition led by Donald Trump will manage to maintain a certain cohesion once in power When Elon Musk almost single-handedly torpedoed a budget agreement in Congress aimed at avoiding a paralysis of the federal state, some Democrats were ironic. on a “President Musk”, with whom Donald Trump would ultimately be reduced to the role of spectator.