MAGA Immigration: Ignoring Economics Isn’t ‘America First’

in the absence of the H1-B visa program, some tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans would have jobs, but hundreds of millions Americans would be poorer. How's that for America First?

An online civil war broke out on the American Right after President-elect Donald Trump announced his nomination of Indian-American venture capitalist and entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan as artificial intelligence senior policy advisor. Although Krishnan himself won’t have say over the Trump administration’s immigration policy, Krishnan’s public statements in favor of removing caps on green cards and his own status as an Indian-born American ignited an inevitable debate between the ‘Tech Right’ and the ‘MAGA Right’ over America’s H1-B visa program.

While the factions are roughly in agreement that illegal immigration is a problem and that the situation at the southern border requires a hawkish approach, they are split over whether or not American companies should be allowed to import foreign laborers. America’s H1-B visa program allows employers to sponsor high-skilled professionals to come to America and work for up to six years (subject to conditional extension).

Relevant to the civil war is the fact that many leaders on the Tech Right are intimately familiar with the program, as Silicon Valley is home to a large fraction of H1-B visa holders who’ve made their way to California as coders or related technical experts (and often from India). In the cutthroat world of West Coast builders, shaving costs is a matter of survival. If companies can lower their labor expenses, they’ll take it.

Meanwhile, much of the MAGA right is intimately familiar with not landing jobs—many feel that, after years of DEI hiring practices that make it more difficult for white men to get work, bringing in more competition is pushing their faces in the dirt even further. And the fact that this competition comes in the form of ‘non-Americans’ is yet more insulting—hardly the ‘America First’ project they’d signed up for.

Make MAGA Economically Literate Again

While feelings and experiences play a role in political discourse, they’re not arguments. Does bringing in foreign workers put downward pressure on wages? Yes—and in that sense, the American who would have accepted that backend developer job at $60,000 indeed loses out to the Indian who accepts the same job at $40,000. Surely, says MAGA, we shouldn’t allow companies to ‘put profits over the American people’. But contrary to this Leftist economic fallacy, higher profits signal that companies are producing something of value to their consumers—many of whom are Americans.

The cost savings to the H1-B visa sponsor may well be the difference between the company being viable at all and closing up shop. Fewer businesses means fewer innovations, fewer products and services that can improve Americans’ lives. It also means less competition, which puts upward pressure on the prices of consumer products. So in the absence of the H1-B visa program, some tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans would have jobs that they wouldn’t otherwise have, but hundreds of millions Americans would be poorer and have fewer options than they otherwise would.

How’s that for America First?

Higher profits also mean that companies have more capital at their disposal, some of which they will invest into their own growth. And growth means more problems to solve—more product releases, more marketing campaigns, more…jobs. So killing H1-B visas doesn’t grant more jobs to native-born Americans, but rather replaces more productive jobs with less productive ones.

Another criticism of the H1-B visa program is that employers abuse it by importing workers who don’t meet the stated criteria—they might bring in low-skilled workers when they’re really only allowed to bring in highly skilled specialists, for instance. But the economic arguments stated above apply to the economy as a whole, not merely to this or that sector, this or that class of employee. So employers aren’t ‘fleecing’ Americans by skirting the law—they’re making the lives of American consumers even better. To be sure, violating any law vitiates the country’s broader respect for the institution of rule of law, so something should indeed be done—the visa program should be (gradually) expanded.

Your Culture Will Be Fine—and Maybe Improve

Occasionally, MAGA thought leaders grant the economic arguments in favor of a more liberalized job market but argue that we should restrict foreign labor on cultural grounds. “America is a nation, not an economic zone,” they say. First of all, foreigners who come to America are precisely those that value our ideals—at least to the extent necessary to live a productive life this side of the Atlantic. Flying across the world and integrating into the American economy is not a trivial task, and to do so successfully, a foreigner must take on board a whole suite of American cultural norms. He must respect the rule of law; he must take the institution of private property seriously; he must not demand those around him submit to his native cultural practices if said practices violate widespread American sentiment; he must learn our manners, our norms around professionalism, and enough of our language to engage in mutually beneficial interactions. The aspects of his native culture that he might retain are precisely those that do not significantly impede his ability to develop fruitful relationships with the Americans around him.

Secondly, culture is not a static thing that native-born American parents pour into their children like some passive fluid. Our young learn the culture of their parents, yes, but they also change it in both conscious and unconscious ways, often for the better. That our collective culture has improved is the reason why Christians of yesteryear defended slavery by referring to the Bible, while American Christians of today denounce slavery by pointing to the same document. The idea of some immutable American culture is a fantasy. MAGA voices who reject immigration on the grounds that immigrants will change it miss the fact that, well, culture is always changing.

Moreover, it’s not a given that foreigners will significantly impact American culture—as has been the case since before the Revolutionary War, cultural transmission is a two-way street. Immigrants come here for a reason, and even temporary foreign workers may well drop their native practices in favor of those they discover here.

Finally, there is no reason to think that inferior immigrant cultures will ‘contaminate’ that of the native-born. Changing a culture requires persuasion—and either Americans won’t be convinced that the practices of their new Indian neighbors are worth adopting, or else they’ll think that Indians exhibit some norms that might suit them better than those into which they’d been inculcated. Concerns over mass cultural shifts away from, say, traditional Christian practices by the importation of around fifty to one-hundred thousand temporary workers per year in a country of about three-hundred and fifty million people suggests an extreme insecurity around one’s native culture. Either people like their culture enough to maintain it in the presence of a small and only mildly different one, or else they hadn’t preferred it much in the first place.

Learn the Lesson of the Left’s Failure

This won’t be the first intra-Right fight we see during the second Trump administration. The American Right has historically consisted of disparate factions that occasionally come together to win political victory over the government-is-always-the-solution Left. In that sense, the latest fight over immigration is nothing new.

But what is new is the public square that is X. Politicians are still figuring out how much weight to place on social media relative to polls and other ways of gauging public opinion. As social media currently stands, users don’t always express their honest, unadulterated thoughts—simplistic and absolutist takes often generate more clicks than sober analysis. And two-thirds of Americans still aren’t on X at all—to say nothing of the entirely non-political users of the platform.

The first half of the 2020s saw the Left succumb to cultural and political forces that were wildly out of step with the median American voter, in large part because its leaders were afraid of the loud, aggressive, myopic mob on X.

The Trump administration has an opportunity to learn from their mistakes this time around—Trump’s team shouldn’t outright ignore the loudest voices on X, but they shouldn’t be held hostage by them, either. In this fight, it does seem that Trump has indeed sided with Musk and the Tech Right in supporting the H1-B visa program, despite the anti-immigrant sentiment by MAGA on X. How ironic if Trump, slandered by the Left as a fascist dictator, at last liberated all politicians from fears of their most rabid and performative online factions.