Can Nativists and Dynamists Coexist Within Trump’s MAGA Coalition?
When President-elect Donald Trump tapped Sriram Krishnan to be a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence, he inadvertently revealed one of the major fissures within the nationalist conservative coalition—and the fault lines will likely shape a good portion of his second term in office.
Krishnan is an Indian-American tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and business partner of Marc Andreessen, a key Trump ally with significant ties to Silicon Valley. As a wildly successful immigrant, Krishnan has advocated for streamlining America’s overly bureaucratic green card system and eliminating the per-country caps on H1-B visas, which are available to specially skilled foreign workers. Most of the H1-B workers in the United States are Indians, but there would likely be even more if the arbitrary per-country caps were eliminated.
Those are ideas that make a lot of sense. Giving employers in the United States better access to the best and most skilled workers, regardless of where in the world they might currently live, is an easy way to ensure America keeps winning the global competition over technology. It would boost other industries too, and (as with all forms of immigration) would strengthen America’s economy.
However, an online backlash against Krishnan’s nomination reveals that a significant portion of Trump’s political coalition doesn’t care much about America winning that competition or ensuring a stronger economy. For them, Trump was elected to keep foreigners out—even if America suffers as a result.
That backlash got rolling on December 23, when Laura Loomer, the right-wing political activist who informally advised Trump’s campaign, called Krishnan’s appointment “deeply disturbing” in a post on X. Removing caps on H1-B visas would allow more foreign workers to come to the U.S. and “take jobs that should be given to American STEM students,” she argued.
Complaints from Loomer and other nativists on social media drew responses from some of Trump’s top allies, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—a pair of immigrants who made fortunes in tech and the co-chairs of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE,” Musk wrote in one post, replying to another X user who made a Loomer-esque point about foreign workers taking jobs from Americans. “If you force the world’s best t
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