Civil war around Trump – about increased immigration

Published December 28, 2024 at 4:32 p.m.

Foreign. An internal battle has flared up around President-elect Donald Trump and his upcoming immigration policy. Elon Musk and a number of tech billionaires want to increase immigration from India, among other countries, despite Trump winning the election on a promise to reduce immigration.

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Trump and immigration

• USA: Large companies employ 94 percent non-whites

The battle took off in earnest when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan as senior advisor for AI issues on December 22.

Krishnan is an immigrant who came to the United States from India on a work visa obtained through Microsoft.

Previously, Krishnan worked as a “general partner” at the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz and served as its ambassador on Twitter after Musk's purchase of the platform. A purchase that was partly financed by Marc Andreessen.

Krishnan is the latest Trump appointee from a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who call themselves “Little Tech,” mostly in the circle around Elon Musk and right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. However, this appointment drew widespread criticism from Trump supporters, who highlighted previous statements by Krishnan in which he argued for increasing the number of work visas granted to third-world countries. The “Little Tech” or “Tech Bros” faction, including Elon Musk and his colleague Vivek Ramaswamy, joined with figures like David Sacks and Sean Maguire in coming to Krishnan's defense.Musk began to speak warmly about “highly skilled” immigration from the third world and accused his detractors of being motivated by racism. Yesterday and today, major American right-wing accounts that criticized Musk, such as “@ConservativeOGs” and “@ProjectGroyp”, were stripped of their verified status on X. The accounts were thus severely limited in terms of distribution and character length. Later, X continued with a raid on other well-known accounts that had entered the fray, when Dalton Clodfelter, Tyler Russell, Ray, ClassicsGroyp, KaizerRev, Pinesap and Bookcat were permanently suspended from X. At the same time as the suspensions occurred, Elon wrote that “spammers” were being “nuked” on X. The tech billionaire's blocking raid has now attracted criticism from several quarters within Republicans and on social media, where he is accused of behaving “like a kindergartener” when he sits and removes those who criticize him from the platform. Musk himself says that he is ready for “war” against anyone who questions the US's labor immigration program and that he does not intend to give in.