Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Assault on the American People

Elite migration fractures the MAGA coalition

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Images by Wikimedia Commons and Gage Skidmore.

When I wrote “I’m One of You Now: A Vignette on Elite Migration” last year, I had no idea that the issue of “high-skilled immigrants” would become the central point of conflict in the MAGA movement as Donald Trump prepares to take office. I wrote this piece out of frustration with the American left and right’s hyperfocus on poor and working-class migration at the expense of a serious conversation about the drastic impacts of elite migration. While Trump had spoken in passing on the H1-B visa regime previously, his 2024 campaign chose to focus almost exclusively on the issue of illegal (often poor and working-class) rather than legal (often elite) migration.

When he did address elite migration on the campaign trail, Trump struck a more than conciliatory tone in order to placate his Silicon Valley backers. He began to make overtures to these Big Tech funders as early as June 2024 when he appeared on the All-In Podcast, a discussion hosted by a group of prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Trump emphatically stated that his new immigration policy would make it easier for elite migrants to stay in the United States after finishing college:

You need a pool of people to work for your companies. You have great companies and they have to have smart people. Not everybody can be less than smart. You need brilliant people, and we force [out] the brilliant people—the people that graduate from college, the people that are number one in their class from the best colleges—you have to be able to recruit these people and keep the people. It was such a big deal: Somebody graduates at the top of the class—they can’t even make a deal with a company because they don’t think they’ll be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on day one!

“That’s fantastic, that’s fantastic,” responds Sri Lankan-born billionaire, Chamath Palihapitiya, to Trump’s passionately delivered remarks. His fellow venture capitalist, South African-born David Sacks, adds, “I think we all wholeheartedly agree with that. Being in the tech industry, we understand the importance of that.”

Trump’s statement—a reversal of his previous position on elite migration undoubtedly influenced by his new right-wing progressive donors in Silicon Valley—implies that American workers are “less than smart” compared to their immigrant peers. While it is futile to read too much into Trump’s passing remarks, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (Trump’s picks to co-lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency”) recently made this point as clear as day on X. On Christmas, Musk wrote: “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” in his bid to increase the number of elite migrants to the United States.

Musk’s efficiency co-tsar, the Indian-American biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, piled on. In a long-winded diatribe against the “mediocrity” of “American culture,” Ramaswamy explains that “top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans” because the latter simply can’t perform in the “hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.”

Musk and Ramaswamy’s vociferous X posts elicited an immediate reaction from others in the MAGA fold who were outraged at the brazen globalism of its newly minted technocratic spokesmen. In response to Musk, Steve Bannon stated: “You think we're going to tolerate that? We're not going to tolerate it. And I don't care in that regard, I don’t care how big a check you wrote.” For a full account of this schism within MAGA, see

Maajid Nawaz

’s detailed summary in “Elon Musk Tells MAGA to ‘F*ck Your Own Face’ & Censors Users to Promote More Indian Immigration.”

I have discussed my views on elite migration and the H1-B visa regime in “I’m One of You Now.” I would encourage you to read that essay, which is now more relevant than ever. What I will do here is make three observations about what this intra-MAGA row over elite migration means for contemporary American politics.

1. Right-wing progressivism and populism are at loggerheads.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, latent contradictions within the MAGA movement came to the fore. Many of these contradictions centered around divergent positions on “cultural” issues, which journalist

Emily Jashinsky

does an excellent job describing on an

Ezra Klein

podcast episode aptly entitled, “MAGA Is Not as United as You Think.” However, as I have argued here on Handful of Earth, “many of the so-called ‘culture wars’ in post-pandemic America can be more accurately described as ‘technology wars.’”

The high-tech right-wing progressive vision promoted by the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy—with its rocket ships, cryptocurrencies, biotech start-ups, and brain-computer interfaces—stands in stark contrast to the populist base of the MAGA movement. On the one hand, the right-wing progressives want to “Make America Great Again” through unrestrained technological “progress.” On the other hand, the populist wing of MAGA is animated by a vision of America grounded in the physical world of the real economy and place-based forms of belonging.

Between Trump’s victory and his imminent return to the White House, the issue of elite migration has become the most important dividing line between the right-wing progressive and populist factions of the MAGA movement. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

Wall Street Journal article published on December 27, 2024 in the wake of Musk and Ramaswamy’s X offensive.

Muskian “dark MAGA” right-wing progressivism relies on an army of elite migrant labor to “Make America Great Again” in the image of its globalist, technotopian worldview. In contrast, the America First vision of the populist MAGA camp asserts that America can only be made great by putting Americans First. As I argued in “We Are All Trumpains Now,” the populist wing of MAGA is fundamentally anti-globalization, which implies an opposition to both the outsourcing of American jobs and the importation of foreigners to replace American workers at home.

It remains to be seen how this contradiction will play out during Trump’s second administration. In “Election Reflections,” I suggested that “Musk is a far more dangerous figure than Trump. What’s more, his Silicon Valley ideology shares much in common with the values of many leftists and liberals, a fact which has made it difficult for them to mount a substantive critique of Musk.” Indeed, Democrats are far more amenable to aligning with Musk’s high-tech elitism than Trump’s anti-globalization populist base. The Financial Times reports:

Joe Miller’s December 30, 2024 article in The Financial Times.

Musk’s edgelord Trumpian culture war veneer is a Trojan horse for a right-wing progressive politics to destroy Trumpian populism from within.

2. MAGA populism has a life independent from Trump.

Trump’s recent comments on the H-1B visa system indicate that he has reversed his earlier opposition to the program. Newsweek reported on New Year’s Day that:

Newsweek report on the schism within MAGA over the H-1B visa program.

This headline illustrates the media’s recent realization that MAGA has taken on a life of its own. I made this argument back in July 2024 here at Handful of Earth: “While there is undoubtedly a cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump among quarters of his base, the evidence indicates that Trumpism has much broader and deeper appeal than Trump as an individual.”

Prominent populist MAGA influencers who have expressed opposition to Musk and Ramaswamy’s calls for increased elite migration may eventually line up behind Trump even if he sides with these tech billionaires. However, in light of the national discourse on elite migration that this internecine struggle has brought about, I do not suspect that grassroots Trumpian populists will be so easily passified.

Sohrab Ahmari’s August 28, 2024 cover story in The New Statesman on the contradictions within the MAGA movement.

If Trump continues to abandon his populist base in favor of his newfound right-wing progressive donors, it is unclear where these populists will turn. But this much is clear: they will remain a pivotal force in American politics with or without Trump.

3. The common denominator of left-wing progressivism and right-wing progressivism is progressivism.

This statement is a tautology, but it is one that merits reflection. In his important January 2024 essay, “The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives,”

N.S. Lyons

analyzes how

the rising influence in America of a wider group of what should properly be called Right-Wing Progressives, provides a great example of how our whole left-right conception of politics has degenerated into a state of deep confusion and uselessness—and how this is leading to some very muddled thinking about who is what and what should be done about the raging dumpster fire of our present modernity.

According to Lyons’ formulation, right-wing progressivism is united with its left-wing counterpart by the glorification of “technology, progress, and boundless growth.” Right-wing progressives disagree with left-wing progressives on a host of specific issues, but these foundational convictions are shared by both camps. While the two are clearly distinct political personality types in the abstract, it is unclear how different the concrete practice of governance will look under left- versus right-wing progressivism.

Right-wing progressives rhetorically bash “wokeism” at every chance they get, but they will continue to promote the elite migration that fuels ideologies of derecination (including, but not limited to, wokeism) in the United States. As

Mary Harrington

writes in an Unherd column entitled “The Future Belongs to Right-wing Progressives”:

The Right-wing progressive framework…is upbeat about migration—provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likelihood of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

While some of these elite migrants and their children will integrate into American life without much fanfare, many others, like Vivek Ramaswamy himself, will hold dearly to their cultural nationalism. Don’t get me wrong: Ramaswamy loves America because it made him rich. But he would rather do away with the pesky—and embarrassing—realities of “American culture.”

Ramaswamy, who hails from the same elite Tamil Brahmin community in India as Kamala Harris, has no problem bringing his ideology of caste superiority to the United States. As Yvette Carnell observes: “This is thousands of years of learned oppression that this man is importing into this country.” The import of foreign forms of oppression into the United States imbues right-wing progressivism with a novel flavor palette of rightist cultural politics. Besides the culinary diversity that endears so many left-wing professional-managerial class progressives to global migration, Ramaswamy and his ilk serve up an enticing smorgasbord of exotic social hierarchies for their right-wing progressive acolytes to feast on in America.

Carnell points out that Ramaswamy’s caste animus is directed first and foremost at black Americans, whose historical struggle to make American citizenship mean something he dismisses and maligns. However, Ramaswamy’s recent attacks on “‘native’ Americans” (with “native” placed in woke-style scare quotes) demonstrate his diverse and inclusive contempt for the American people.

Musk and Ramaswamy have said the quiet part out loud. Right-wing progressivism has shown its true colors in the MAGA schism over elite migration. It is now up to us—not just the MAGA movement, but all Americans—to decide if we will accept Musk and Ramaswamy’s insult to our intelligence, attack on our jobs, and assault on our citizenship.