News/Commentary

Trump expresses support for specialty visas at heart of Maga v. Musk tiff

December 29, 2024 | | Print Article

Squabbling over visas gave cause for the president-elect to remind split supporters on how he’s “always” felt about the immigration policy.

Throughout the week, conflict cropped up on social media at the intersection of legal paths of immigration and core concepts of the America First agenda. Disputes that saw Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy defending H-1B visas could count President-elect Donald Trump as an accord after he unequivocally weighed in during an interview with the New York Post.

“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the newspaper over the phone.

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times,” he added. “It’s a great program.”

Though the president-elect had not inserted himself into the middle of the debate as his designated co-chairs of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency had defended the program with an eye toward meritocracy, he had a history of opining on the subject.

In June while campaigning, Trump had appeared on the “All In” podcast where he’d remarked, “It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT — from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done this but then we had to solve the COVID problem because that came in and sort of dominate for a little while, as you perhaps know.”

“But I wanna do, and what I will do, is: you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too,” he continued, lamenting that many who benefited from an education in America took their ideas to have success in other countries.

Trump had even made exceptions to suspending visa programs as COVID restrictions were implemented because of the potential impact it would have on the supply chain. Still, as had been reported, the supposed “MAGA civil war” had proven a delight for detractors of the once and future president who savored any hint of discord.

This included Musk responding to having one of his own quotes thrown at him as a user juxtaposed efforts to better the visa program with the past suggestion, “Stop trying to optimize something that shouldn’t exist.”

In response, the world’s richest man paraphrased a line from the film “Tropic Thunder” as he asserted, “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and F*CK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

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Rather than decry the arguments, cartoonist Scott Adams highlighted a silver lining about healthy debate, “The foreign workers debate on X has been great. We fight. We learn something. We correct course. Trump watches and absorbs. And we did it by entertaining ourselves and getting smarter at the same time.”

“America’s Golden Age,” asserted the writer Friday.

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Kevin Haggerty
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