The innovative MAGA coalition has actually had its first inner debate, and it’s over H-1b permits. It started when Trump , appointed , Sriram Krishnan, a previous Twitter executor and Andreessen Horowitz lover, to be a top AI plan consultant.
Krishnan has been a outspoken supporter of qualified immigration. This angered some right-wing activists, including an anti-immigration group calling itself” US Tech Workers“, as also as , Laura Loomer,  , Charles Haywood, and other , MAGA ranters:
Different numbers on the Tech Right, including , Elon Musk,  , David Sacks, and , Joe Lonsdale, gamely stood up for Krishnan and for the thought of high-skilled multiculturalism in general:
A great fight ensued , on X, which has essentially become the in-house chat room for the National right. Far-right trolls ( including the pathetic but persistent “groypers” ) jumped in to attack Indians as a group, and Indians jumped in to defend themselves.
However, more philosophical debate shifted to the H-1b card, which — though not the same as the green card concern that Sriram was talking about — has become a focus point of right-wing pushback against high-skilled immigration.
The disputes over high-skilled immigration, American immigration especially, and applications like H-1b are closely related — extremely so, in fact.  , Most H-1b workers are Hindu, and Indians , render up a plurality , of foreign-born STEM employees. American workers have become far more essential than Chinese employees to America’s proper high-tech industries:
And although Indians are now , the second-biggest group of foreign-born residents  , in America ( behind Mexicans, of course ), they are also the most successful by many measures — their , median household income , far exceeds that of any other group. 1
And Indian Americans are now , influential , also beyond STEM and the technical world— for instance, in elections. Vivek Ramaswamy is assisting in the new Department of Government Performance, and Ash Patel has been chosen to lead the FBI.
Yet Vice President JD Vance’s woman is Indian! Although Indian Americans also lean a little toward the Democrats on average, they ‘re , becoming more properly split , between the parties — there are  , a large number of Indians on the right , today, despite the presence of another party of the right that doesn’t specifically like Indians.
The debate over skilled immigration is therefore only one more discussion about the rapidly expanding role of Indian and Indian-Americans in the US elite. But first, let’s talk about skilled immigration on its own merits.
H-1b workers are beneficial for American tech workers in general and for American workers in particular.
First, let’s point out that skilled immigration overall is very important and good for America. America will lose if you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, according to Elon Musk. Here are two Noahpinion posts ( here and here ) that lay out the case pretty exhaustively.
In fact, the American people pretty strongly agree. A recent , Pew poll , found that an overwhelming majority of Americans place a priority on letting in highly skilled workers:
Other , polls , find , the , same thing.
But H-1b is a little different. Technically, the H-1b is a “nonimmigrant” visa — you can only work in the U. S. for six years before returning to your home country. In practice, many H-1b workers apply for employment-based green cards while they’re here, which is one reason why people casually refer to H-1b as “immigration”, but it’s really a guest worker program.
The question is whether those visiting employees harm American tech workers.
You would be led to believe otherwise by the lobby group” US Tech Workers.” It is an affiliate of Kevin Lynn’s Institute for Sound Public Policy, a political pressure group, and does not represent any organization of actual US tech workers.  ,
Lynn has about 2.5 years of experience working in the tech sector, and he hasn’t shown any signs of ever having done the kind of work an H-1b worker might be hired to do.
Even his cofounders have a limited amount of experience in the tech sector. So it’s just a nativist group that claims to represent a class of workers that it doesn’t actually represent, on the premise that American workers are harmed by the presence of foreign workers.
But does that theory still hold any water? The idea behind the influx of foreign labor is that it will help to boost the supply of tech workers. When supply goes up, price goes down — that’s Econ 101.
Now, I often remind readers that immigration , as a whole , doesn’t seem to decrease , native-born American wages. And that’s true — immigrants don’t just work, they also buy stuff, and that increase in demand roughly balances out the increase in supply. But in a specific sector, immigration definitely , could , decrease wages for the native-born.
If you attracted a lot of STEM workers, they could lower the cost of their labor while their demand for local goods and services raises wages in other sectors. In this case, American labor , as a whole , wouldn’t be affected, but American STEM workers would get the short end of the stick.
Interestingly, thought, this doesn’t seem to happen in practice! Because the H-1b program uses a lottery system, we can create a very effective randomized natural experiment that can demonstrate how the H-1b program affects the fortunes of businesses by comparing the companies whose applicants win with those whose applicants lose.
On top of that, there have been occasional changes in the , total , number of H-1b visas, so we can also look at the results of those policy changes on companies that are more dependent or less dependent on H-1b workers.
Any way you slice it, it doesn’t look like H-1b workers hurt the native-born, even when they seem to be in direct competition:
- Mayda et al. ( 2017 )  , found that when national H-1b numbers were restricted, employment for similar native-born workers didn’t rise.
- Mahajan et al. ( 2024 )  , found that companies who won the H-1b lottery didn’t hire fewer “H-1b-like” native-born workers. They come to the conclusion that “lottery wins enable firms to scale up without causing significant substitution for native workers.”
- Kerr et al. ( 2015 )  , find that when companies successfully hire more H-1b workers, they employ more skilled native-born workers than before.
- Peri, Shih, and Sparber ( 2015 )  , look at the city level instead of the company level, and found that “increases in STEM workers are associated with significant wage gains for college-educated natives”. This should ease worries about hiring H-1b workers and outperforming those who employ mostly native-born Americans.
And so on. It is possible to , find papers that conclude , that H-1b workers displace similar native workers, but they’re few and far between. 2
How are these results possible? One possibility, put forward by Mayda et al., is that H-1b workers and native-born workers just do very different jobs, so there’s a “low degree of substitutability”. Similar to the claim that immigrants take jobs that native-born workers can’t or won’t do, this is also true.
But I think there’s another force at work here:  , industrial clustering. It’s a well-known fact that companies in knowledge industries— tech, finance, entertainment, biotech — tend to cluster together in cities. Why? When you have an area with a lot of high-skilled labor, high-tech companies will find it easier to hire everyone they need in that area, so they’ll pour investment into that location.
Silicon Valley is still a leader in the IT sector despite the Bay Area’s prohibitive costs and dysfunctional governance because it is where all engineers reside, so businesses want to invest there.
At the country level, the same is true. If America weren’t home to so many talented software engineers, for example, the tech industry would be much more reluctant to invest there. Because of their talent concentrations, companies move to San Francisco and Palo Alto, where it would be relatively easy to sell software from Bangalore or Hyderabad.
Thus, H-1b workers could actually be reinforcing America’s overall advantage as the place where high-tech companies want to invest. Naturally, this increased investment benefits native-born tech workers as well.
In fact, there is some evidence for this theory.  , Glennon ( 2023 )  , shows that when companies are prevented from hiring H-1b workers, they start investing in other countries instead:
How do multinational firms respond when artificial constraints, namely policies restricting skilled immigration, are placed on their ability to hire scarce human capital? …]F ] irms respond to restrictions on H-1B immigration by increasing foreign affiliate employment…particularly in China, India, and Canada. The most impacted jobs were R&, D-intensive ones …]F ] or every visa rejection, ]multinational companies ] hire 0.4 employees abroad.
Similar studies conducted at the city level would be interesting to observe the effects of more H-1b residents residing in a particular area. However, this proof strongly suggests that H-1bs “hire them here or hire them there” effect. American tech workers won’t gain if investment dollars are spent abroad rather than staying in the US.
Also,  , Dimmock et al. ( 2018 )   report that startups that successfully employ H-1b workers are much more likely to experience a successful exit. Startup failures pretty obviously don’t benefit native-born US tech workers.
And, of course, there are plenty of startups that , wouldn’t even exist , without founders who used H-1bs to get into the country, not to mention the , beneficial discoveries , that , wouldn’t have been made , ( or at least, not in America ) without H-1b researchers.
In other words, Elon is exactly right about this:
In fact, Elon should know — he worked in America , on an H-1b visa in the 1990s.
( Side note: People should be less likely to accept the” Evil Elon” theory given that Elon has been so pugnaciously insistent here rather than rolling over for the MAGA base like some other tech folks did. Calling for more skilled immigration, even in the face of right-wing rage, is a very pro-American move. )
Of course, none of this means that the H-1b program is perfect. In fact, there are  , at least two reforms that basically everyone realizes would be good. The first is to make H-1b visas transfer more quickly, so that foreigners can move from job to job more quickly without losing their visas. However, it’s probably not nearly as severe as some people believe.  ,
Mithas and Lucas ( 2010 )  , find that once you control for observable determinants of skills, H-1b workers actually get paid , more , than similar American workers, not less. That means they’re generally not being forced to do the same job as a native-born worker for lower cost, as some allege.
Implementing a minimum wage for the H-1b is the second and more crucial reform. Right now, some of the available visas get snapped up by , low-productivity service-outsourcing companies , for low-level employees, instead of being used to hire very high-productivity engineers, managers, etc. That must end, and the only way to do this is to grant H-1bs to employees who will receive high salaries.
Of course, increasing the overall cap on H-1bs would also greatly help this issue. Somehow, I don’t believe the vehement critics of that H-1b program would want to do that.
Anyway, the overall point here is that the H-1b program is good on the economic merits — not just for US companies, but for their high-skilled employees as well. However, after reading the numerous days of the right-wing backlash against skilled immigration on social media, I’m not so sure whether the program’s merits or even the country’s economic fortunes are really what they are trying to say.
Sadly, tweets like this have been common:
As so often happens, I believe the conflict we’re having here is a fight between America’s cultural and racial identity, which some people find it difficult to discuss in terms of its economic impact.
The MAGA backlash against Indians is awful.
Over the past two days, I have seen a lot of tweets like this from right-wing X users:
Of course, as you can imagine, the comments from pseudonymous rightists were more vicious toward Indians.
The animosity toward Indian immigrants, in particular, is something I’ve seen with increasing frequency on the nativist right over the past few years. Here’s what University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax , said in 2022:
” Here’s the problem”, she said. They are taught that they are superior to everyone else because they are Brahmin elites, but on some level their nation is a” sore.” They now realize how far we have outgunned and outclassed them. … They feel anger. They feel envy. They feel shame. It results in ingratitude of the most abominable kind.”
And these bigoted attitudes could be spilling over somewhat into , everyday society:
We discover that 31 % of Indian Americans think that discrimination against people of Indian descent is a major issue in the country, whereas 53 % think it’s just a minor issue. One in two Indian Americans reported being subjected to some form of discrimination over the previous 12 months, according to data from surveying respondents ‘ lived experiences with discrimination.
The rightists who denounce Indian Americans on social media believe that we must choose between an atomized society where cohesion is sacrificed on the altar of higher GDP and a cohesive nation with strong social ties bolstered by bonds of common heritage. They believe that by excluding people who aren’t of America’s noble founding stock, we can restore civic trust, stop people from “bowling alone”, and so on.
This is abject fantasy. Something like this might make sense in a country like Japan or Sweden, where there is a sense of homogeneity that has been established over the years and where large immigration waves are not. But the United States has been an immigration-fueled polyglot since its very founding.
No sooner had British Americans created the country than it was inundated by Irish Catholic immigrants, causing vast , anti-Catholic backlashes , and , efforts at large-scale deportation. When tensions started to escalate in the late 19th century due to the large-scale arrival of Italians, Poles, Jews, and other East and South Europeans, these had barely subsided. Today’s anti-immigrant freakout is the third since the founding.
So if you decide to try to strip down America’s population to its founding stock, who will you include? Do the Italians have a place to stay? What about the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in Vietnam in the 1970s? Are the Irish part of America’s core population, or papist interlopers? What about Mexican Americans with Mexican ancestry in the 1930s? Where do you draw the distinction? What about a person who appears completely Asian but has an ancestor who navigated on the Mayflower?
When you peel back the layers of an onion, there is nothing left until you reach the center by looking for an ethnicity that represents the” true” or” core” American stock.
Any attempt to ethnically purify America will in reality just turn the country against itself; the debates over Indian immigration on X this week will serve as a model for our daily lives. Imagine spending the entire day wondering if the US government will declare your ethnicity to be peripheral to the American national project if you found dealing with awake people calling you a white supremacist at work in 2018 annoying.
Naturally, you would fight hard to ensure that your ethnicity made it into the circle the purifiers eventually created. Thus, daily life would be reduced to racial conflict.
Americans do not want this.  , Yes, a majority voted for Trump, but it was not because they thought he would racially purify the nation. In fact, his victory was driven pretty much entirely by , defections of Latinos and Asians , from the Democratic coalition. It’s doubtful that those swing voters believe Trump to be an ethnic cleansing agent.
And I predict, pretty confidently, that Trump , won’t  , be an ethnic cleanser in his second term. He flirted slightly with the idea with , his” Muslim ban” but ultimately backed off. There was, and is, simply no national appetite for converting America to an ethnostate. Just a few right-wing activists are posting their Indian coworkers’ social media accounts.
In the old days, when I was growing up, we used to simply call that sort of thing “racism”, and thus exile it from polite society. Behind that taboo were , centuries of history , of contentious nation-building and self-definition. We have seen that a polyglot nation can’t always consider who are the country’s true” sons of the soil” or becomes paralyzed by conflict.
Now, after the 2010s, “racist” is such an overused insult that it’s applied toward basically anything. Social media created a zone of opportunism where anonymous teenagers clawed for status by constantly , finding new innocuous things , to call “racist”, while progressive activists , devalued the term , by , trying to apply it too broadly.
This wrongfully defied the authority of the word by emphasizing the kind of people who post messages on social media and claim that Indian doctors and CEOs are a bunch of third-world nutcases who will pollute the blood of our country. So yes, all the racist racism against Indians that is currently being poured out of right-wing circles is coming from a number of racist racists, but merely acknowledging the fact is no longer enough to stop it.
But at least some people on the new Tech Right are  , now realizing , what kind of tiger — or perhaps,  , leopard , — they’ve chosen to ride. For a reason, the 2016 Trump movement had a reputation for being full of racial-nationalist bigotry; it might have been exaggerated, but the New York Times newsroom staffers had created a progressive fantasy.
Now, if you’re a tech founder who backs Trump and spends the day online on X, your daily routine includes your so-called political allies calling for the deportation of your Indian friends, cofounders, and employees in large numbers.
Well, such is politics. Meanwhile, in the real world, Indian immigrants and their descendants are hard at work making America an even better place, and I would very much like them to continue.
Notes
1 In terms of per capita income, they are slightly behind the Taiwanese, who have smaller households.
2 It’s also not too hard to , write down a theoretical model , in which H-1b workers displace the native-born. However, these models only have the best of the assumptions that are made, and they don’t typically include things like clustering effects. In general, when you have theory vs. high-quality data in economics, go with the latter.
This , article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion , Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion , subscriber , here.