The Great MAGA Immigration Meltdown

Illiberal Sources of Tech "Pro-Immigration"

I’d hoped to be on break for the holidays, but, alas, the news intrudes.—

It was always uncertain that the unwieldy coalition cobbled together by Trump would hold together, but the first fissures are already visible even before the administration has taken office. For the past week or so, Twitter has been aflame with a battle between different Trumpist factions over immigration, namely the H-1B visa program, which permits employers to import workers to work in “specialty occupations.” While Elon Musk and his tech oligarch cohort have revealed themselves to be pro-immigration—at least,t for the type of skilled workers that they need for their businesses—the national populists of MAGA are up in arms about what they feel is a betrayal of the fundamental anti-immigration principle of the movement. These objections have been articulated in terms that range from putatively colorblind civic nationalism to raging racism and antisemitism, with the predictable specter of Jewish capitalists importing pliant ethnic hordes—a Great Replacement—being raised. It’s descended into name-calling with the pro-immigration business lords calling MAGA types “retards” and the MAGA types responding with other slurs that I will not repeat. For those of us who wish ill on all these characters, the battle has been amusing to watch. If only Bannon, Musk, Loomer, and Vivek could somehow all lose. It’s also pretty funny to see the racism machine that Musk built blow up in his face, although we all now have to live with the fallout.

As might be expected, Trump, himself an employer, has deferred to the power of money—the only force he respects—and come out in favor of the H-1B program.

This is not a debate about policy as such—in fact, many of the people doing the argument seem to have a very vague idea about how the program works—but, as the antagonists realize, about the ideological content of MAGA. Some liberals have pointed out the irony tech-lords’ views on immigration align with their own and they should’ve remained Democrats. But I’m not sure I agree that the tech-bosses are just cosmopolitan liberals who disguised their views in order to get one over on the MAGA dupes. I thought I had to revise my view that the tech oligarchs would be closer to the MAGA core on immigration because they ultimately had a program to replace mid-level work with AI. This is not practical in the short-term However, on reflection, I think their position on immigration still reveals a highly illiberal and authoritarian conception of capitalism, something that even dimwitted critics like Steve Bannon have noticed in their references to “techno-feudalism.” There are four illiberal sources of pro-immigrant Trumpism so far as I can see:

1. H1-B is not exactly a liberal model of employment, in the classical sense of an economic regime where workers can leave their employment at will and seek jobs elsewhere. Of course, as critics of liberal capitalism have long pointed out, that’s a bit of a myth—the imperatives of hunger make freedom of contract a false freedom—but H1-B workers are particularly chained to their jobs: they cannot simply quit, and look for employment elsewhere without losing their legal status in the country. Some right-wing critics have labeled this a form of indentured servitude. And, indeed, because of this precarious status, these workers are particularly liable to discipline and exploitation, which is the point.

2. The vision of immigration they are propounding is not one of free movement of people and free trade in goods and services but a jingoistic and mercantilist one. You grab “the best people” from foreign countries to ensure productivity, export-led growth, and autarchy. This obviously appeals to Trump: it’s exactly how he views the world. And some centrist liberals are tempted by this because of their investment in a new Cold War with China.

3. Related to this “grab the best guys”-type mercantilism is the tech-lord’s highly racialized conceptions of labor and capital. The fight here is not between, on the one hand, colorblind cosmopolitan liberal meritocracy and, on the other, a backward ethnonationalism, but between fundamentally racist worldviews. The élite side of the debate advocates race science that organizes productive workers by intrinsic qualities, a kind of caste capitalism that purports to use “objective” measures to discover the highest IQ individuals and put them in the right spots. The “sophisticated” race science humpers are ready to gamely admit that sometimes whites, especially working-class and poor ones, are not as genetically fit as other race—particularly Asians and Jews—and therefore their subordination is justified in some way. Conveniently, this serves capital’s need for a disciplined and divided labor force. I called this once Lord of the Rings or Star Wars-type racism that puts different workers into species-containers and thereby tries to solve issues of labor unrest and the competitive marketplace. It usually provides a shared anti-blackness that glues together a coalition that might otherwise be torn asunder. (Antisemitism can also be of use here by attacking liberal cosmopolitan and “globalized” conceptions of capital as secret racial insider trading or national betrayal.)

4. Capital as such is notoriously free-floating and mobile—it cannot be pinned down—but this particular iteration of fetishized capital is static and implies a world of permanent hierarchies of value in terms of race, national interests, and, with cryptocurrency, deflationary notions of hard currency. It implies not a world of trade and exchange, but one of plunder, a kind of primary accumulation of human capital.

I will leave comparisons to unfortunate 20th-century regimes aside for the moment, but I think that this is not just a reversion to liberalism per se but is in line with the reactionary modernist project of the tech oligarchs.