ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President-elect Trump will take office next month with a Republican-controlled Congress and, on paper, few obstacles to enacting his agenda. But a social media fight among conservatives this week around legal immigration for skilled tech workers highlights one challenge he'll face - keeping sometimes conflicting coalitions happy. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and other Trump backers in the tech industry say hiring workers on H-1B visas is aligned with Trump's America First agenda, while other conservatives argue legal immigration should be curbed to protect American workers. NPR's Stephen Fowler is here to help explain the debate. Hi, Stephen.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: This is a famously slow news week, so why are we talking about immigration and high-skilled tech workers? What's going on?
FOWLER: So for people who are not terminally online, here's a quick recap. Trump made a number of smaller staffing announcements for his second term earlier this week. One of them is a high-profile tech entrepreneur named Sriram Krishnan, who's worked at Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Far-right activists started trashing the pick on the social media site X, pointing out that Krishnan was born in India, that he previously made comments advocating for more green cards, and devolving into a lot of racist and anti-immigrant attacks on foreign workers that come to the U.S. on these H-1B visas.
SHAPIRO: And then how did Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy get involved?
FOWLER: So the two of them are the heads of the outside group the Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut government spending. They both defended the visa program on X, which Musk also owns. Both of them kind of kicked the hornets' nests with this. Musk said there aren't, quote, "supermotivated and supertalented engineers in the U.S." And Ramaswamy posted this very long response that said, among other things, that, quote, "our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence." And he said that kind of culture would not produce the best engineers. That did not go over well.
SHAPIRO: Sure. So that's all on social media, but setting aside internet fights, what is the actual policy debate here over hiring skilled tech workers? And how might things change in a Trump administration?
FOWLER: Ari, the debate over H-1Bs and legal immigration and what Trump might do about them is not something new. In his first term, Trump said that certain visa programs were being abused to bring in foreign workers to replace American workers. He suspended the H-1B program during the pandemic for the same reason, but this time around, things could be different. People in the tech industry, with the Musk-Ramaswamy viewpoint that the U.S. needs more of these top workers no matter where they're from to keep an edge in fields like AI - they're more in Trump's ear and his good graces this time around.
There's also interest in reforming the visa process not just for these tech workers - from lawmakers across the aisle who say it's an overly complex system chock full of carveouts that benefit certain industries and, like Trump has said, are being abused. But there's also a lot of conservatives, especially among the base of the GOP, that shape primary elections, who believe Trump's hard-line immigration stances means reform should primarily come in a reduction of immigrants. And so far, Trump hasn't weighed in specifically on this online kerfuffle or indicated what his plans are for this particular issue in his second term.
SHAPIRO: No political party is a monolith. The same is true of Trump's GOP. So what does this particular political conflict foreshadow for policy fights in Washington?
FOWLER: Well, as we saw with the threat of a government shutdown earlier this month, there are going to be challenges for Republicans to get enough votes in the House to get much done, regardless of what flavor of ideology wins out on these issues. The big tent of Trump has a growing divide between MAGA cultural conservatism and this sort of new tech-right of Silicon Valley that skews more towards deregulation and an economic worldview of people like Musk, who, I should point out, is himself an immigrant who also uses this visa program for his companies.
So this could be a defining feature of Trump's second term - all of these different factions and groups seeking sometimes contradictory goals - and it seems Trump is the only captain who can make them all row in the same direction. He may be fighting against the current with many of these issues.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Stephen Fowler. Thank you.
FOWLER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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