JV Last made an excellent observation about this Musk vs MAGA flap. This is from his Bluesky account.
These guys are super into H1B precisely because they’re also into corporate tax cuts. They want to offload the expense of creating an educated workforce and just conjure labor out of thin air.
This worldview makes sense if “efficiency” is your highest goal. You can outsource expenditures for human infrastructure to other countries and then import that fully formed human capital.
It’s also a worldview in which the government’s primary function is to support corporations and all policies are downstream from that goal.
Anyway, it’s absolutely impossible to reconcile “forgotten man” MAGA with the Elon/Vivek corporate ubermensch MAGA. The only thing that united them was that they hate trans people and NYT columnists.
That works if you’re in the outside. But once you have power you have to make choices on how to apply it. And the zero-sum game pits the two factions against one another.
Corporate MAGA is betting that the rubes won’t really know what’s going on. That’s probably right. If Trump can make enough noise and trigger the libs hard enough, the avg forgotten man voter will be happy. But at the MAGA elite level there’s going to be a death struggle for dominance.
Here’s a little taste of the incoherent rage on Twitter over the last couple of days. it’s really something:
Charlie Kirk fires back at Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
— Ron Smith (@Ronxyz00) December 28, 2024
"It's what the American people want. The American people overwhelmingly voted for less immigration and the prioritization of the American children and the American worker— not the American oligarch."
We're witnessing… pic.twitter.com/UyumUMTQxJ
Basically, the MAGA folks are saying that they don’t like any dark skinned foreigners while the Tech bros insist they need to import skilled dark skinned foreigners they can exploit for low wages as indentured servants. (They all seem to agree that white immigrants like Musk and Melania are a-ok, of course.)
The bigger picture is that this argument has exposed the essential incoherence of the MAGA coalition between the billionaires, the CEOs and the professional Trump cultists. As Last argues, this battle for dominance is very real. The corporate people control the money and the professional Trump cultists control the rubes. Trump has come down on the side of the money on this one. It will be very interesting to see where this goes.