Donald Trump declared his side in the MAGA civil war about immigration, and his supporters are not happy.
“This is the definition of selling out” wrote white supremacist and Trump fanboy Nick Fuentes surrounding Trump’s decision to support the H-1B visas for foreign workers. The H-1B visa allows companies to hire foreigners to perform specific jobs for a limited period of time, and is heavily embraced in the tech industry to court talented international engineers.
It was a tech industry giant that sparked the civil war in the first place. In a lengthy post to X, Trump administration pick Vivek Ramaswamy lamented the fact that American culture valued “mediocrity over excellence,” and claimed that top tech companies hire foreign workers over Americans due to these perceived faults with the American workforce. The backlash was explosive. Ramaswamy was excoriated by leading MAGA politicians on the platform, and soon Elon Musk joined the online war, telling detractors of the H1-B visa to “F*CK YOURSELF IN THE FACE.”
In an attempt to put the issue to bed, Trump made a statement in support of the H-1B visa, much to the chagrin of his most xenophobic supporters. Trump’s stance appeared hypocritical to many MAGA voters, and Nick Fuentes himself pointed out that Trump was flip-flopping on the issue. “In 2016 Trump said the H-1B program ‘shouldn’t exist’ because it is “very unfair for (American) workers,” wrote Fuentes in his post. Fuentes is pointing to remarks that Trump made during the 2016 primaries, were he called H-1B visas “very bad” and “unfair” to the American workforce.
Fuentes made a name for himself on the internet as an alt-right troll, whose promotion of racist, antisemitic and misogynist talking points led him to become something of an online celebrity in far right wing digital circles. He became so popular that he was invited to a disastrous private dinner with Trump at Mar a Lago alongside Ye: formerly known as Kanye West. Despite the political fallout, Fuentes’ support of Trump allowed him to court some of his most virulently xenophobic supporters yet.
Trump turned xenophobia into a campaign promise. In the leadup to the 2024 presidential election, Trump ran on a platform of deportation, and swore to forcibly expel millions of undocumented migrants from American soil. Trump’s soaring popularity ironically earned him the support of one of the wealthiest immigrants in the nation: Elon Musk. Musk donated over a quarter of a billion dollars to the Trump campaign and has since been attached at the hip to the president-elect, spending $2000 a night to stay at a small cottage on the grounds of Mar a Lago.
As this user points out, Trump is helpless to resist Elon Musk’s influence, as Musk “bought this election.” Many of Musk’s staunchest internet supporters flocked to the MAGA camp, as the case with Nick Fuentes’ base after he endorsed the president elect. Now Trump is reaping the seeds of discord that he has sown, as tech-industry loyalists and immigration hardliners are duking it out across the internet – the memes flow like blood.
Strangely enough, the issue of Elon Musk and private industry’s unprecedented amount of influence in government are leading some internet users to think that this issue will “reunify” the political right and left against the creep of oligarchy. But so long as people like Nick Fuentes and his supporters hold the socially corrosive viewpoints that they do, those imagined days of unity will likely never come.
