Transcript of Uproar breaking out inside MAGA-world over H-1B visas and foreign workers

Tonight, as President-elect Donald Trump is preparing for a widespread immigration crackdown when he takes office 25 days from now, we're seeing a crack between some of his top advisors and his MAGA base. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramiswami are both facing major blowback from their own supporters for not only backing, but encouraging offering more visas to highly skilled foreign workers. Over the Christmas holiday, Musk posted this online saying, Think of this like a pro-sports team. If you your team to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. He later added, I'm referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top 0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning. He's talking about H-1B visas, which allow employers to hire highly skilled foreign workers. Musk, who himself is from South Africa, said that he once had this visa, and he's arguing that Silicon Valley is facing a shortage of excellent engineering talent, as he put it. But the annual cap on those kinds of visas right now is at 65,000, with another 20,000 for those who get a master's or a doctorate in the US. Musk is being backed up by his partner and Trump's government efficiency initiative, Vivek Ramaswami.

He says it's a cultural issue that there aren't more competitive engineers in the US. Here's what he said online. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from Boy Meets World or Zack and Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell, or Stefan over Steve Hercel in Family Matters will not produce the best engineers. But that argument is not going over well with Trump's MAGA base, certainly not online. Some of them saying, We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy. Tech wants indentured servants, not high-skilled workers. You don't even know what MAGA immigration policy is. Now, Trump himself, who I should note restricted H-1B visas in his first term, has said on the campaign trail this time around that he did want to make it easier for educated foreigners to work in the US.

What I want to 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. Anybody graduates from a college, you go in there for two years or four years. If you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.

My political sources tonight are former New York City mayor, Bill De Blasio, CNN political commentator and Republican strategist, Sher Michael Singleton, and also CNN economics and political commentator, Katherine Rampell. Katherine, you have covered this issue for a long time. Can you just lay out what we're looking at here in this divide between what Elon Musk says he thinks would be the best for the United States and why we are seeing something that we have not seen, frankly, almost at all lately, which is a lot of people in the MAGA universe outright disagreeing with him, arguing with him, and breaking with him online.

So Elon Musk and Rebecca Ramiswami, in this particular case, I think are exactly right. America's ability to attract talent from around the world is basically our economic superpower. The fact that in particular we've been able to attract high skilled immigrants quite reliably in this country over the past century or so is why we have this enduring leadership in science, tech and business. So just as an example of all Fortune 500 companies, about half of them were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants and of the Nobel Laureates, American Nobel Laureates who have received prizes for the hard sciences this century, about 40% of them are immigrants who came to this country. So again, this is our superpower. And I'm very glad that Musk and Divek Ramaswami recognize it. I very much hope that they are able to influence Donald Trump on this particular issue, but I'm doubtful about it because just as you mentioned in his first term, Trump was actually quite hostile to legal immigrants, in particular, by the way, high skilled legal immigrants. He made it really hard for them to come here, not just those who wanted work authorisation, international students who cross subsidized American students, by the way.

He basically harassed them and made it very difficult for them to keep their legal documents in order. That's because as much as Trump has said, oh, he only objects to illegal immigration. He's very much in favor of legal immigration. His policies don't bear that out. And that's partly because Stephen Miller is the one who was the architect of Donald Trump's immigration policies last time around, and will probably do so again this time around, and is unlikely to adopt the Musk, that Ramaswami view of things.

Yes, Stephen Miller is getting a huge job in the West Wing. He's been around Trump for the four years he was out of office. Sure, Michael, as the Republican here, I wonder what your view on this is, because this is happening within the Republican Party. I mean, these are two top advisors to Trump, the MAGA World, who are framing this as the true believers who say, We asked for stricter immigration policies. That didn't mean coming with a carve out for high-skilled workers that they say are taking American jobs here.

Look, I think with all due respect to Mr. Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, they should focus on saving federal dollars for the taxpayers and not immigration policy. I understand some of the points that Katherine made, and I agree to an extent, but I think the US should focus more on domestic skill development. Studies also show that H-1, B-1 exacerbates employers hiring individuals from outside of the country when they can potentially hire minorities, for an example, which we know there's a shortage in the STEM fields. There are a significant number of Americans who I think would love opportunities if they had the proper training and skills to operate in those jobs fairly well. So why not start and focus there? I'm not of the support or mindset, Kaitlyn, that we should let in more than the 60 plus thousand that were already We let it into the country. Do we have some deficits? I certainly understand that point, again, to what Katherine was alluding to. But I think by focusing on increasing domestic skill development, you can decrease the furtherance of those deficits by The coverage is saying, you know what? We're going to spend more of our time, more of our dollars educating our own citizens to compete for these jobs, versus saying, let's increase to 100,000 or maybe even more for employers to bring in individuals from India, which is a predominant country where many of them come from.

I I don't agree with that at all. I think folks in the migrant world have every right to be angry with Vivek and Elon Musk.

Yeah, well, that's an interesting point because I saw that argument being made. But also I saw Mark Cuban, Mr. Mayor, responding to that saying, as well. I think we have what he had posted quoting to Elon Musk and Vivek, saying, well, everyone argue college is overrated. If you're arguing we need to have more homegrown engineers, don't we need more kids who are going to college? I think he's being a bit sarcastic there there, but that is the dual arguments that you see sometimes from this political orbit.

I see a couple of things going on here. First of all, I have to say I agree with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaiswami. I think they're pointing out the the way that we're living. You could say, and I hear Sure Michael's point, I disagree with it, though, because I think it misses the fact we want to get to the place where we can maximize the use of our own talent in this country. Let's bring in the best of Brian from all around the world. Let's really make our economy longer, let's become even more tech dominant. That's the way, in fact, to elevate the whole country and to create more opportunity for Americans of all kinds in the tech field. I don't know why on Earth we wouldn't want to grab all the talent out there, especially because if we don't, our competitors will. I think it's also fascinating that we're seeing this open conflict. I think it's going to be the first of many. Of course, that speaks to the question of Elon Musk's role. I think really soon we're going to see more divergence between Elon John Musk and Donald Trump. It's natural, given each of them having the power they have.

I think that's going to be a very, very important storyline in 2025, that these two people who appear to be allies but really have very different interests start to diverge issue by issue. We saw it also during the recent budget fight. I think we're going to see it on issues like artificial intelligence and climate, where Musk has been in a different place than Trump. That's going to have ramification for how successful Trump can be in general. Then finally, look for the MAGA world to be turning on their own this quickly. This is also an interesting question. They almost look like Democrats here. I say this lovingly as a Democrat. We have an ability to eat our own very quickly sometimes. Well, this is fascinating. Here are these heroes just a few minutes ago, and they say one thing that a lot of the MAGA world disagrees with, and suddenly they're being villainized. That's not good for that coalition.

Yeah, I think that's interesting in terms of what the West Wing will look like, too. Elon Musk is not coming in, Katherine, but in in official capacity, but he's in the room. He's always at Mar-a-Lago. Trump jokes about how he's always often there. He has dinner with him regularly. Between that and the tech moguls who have been parading down to Mar-a-Lago to also have dinner with him, I wonder what that looks like with this divide that is so clear between Steven Miller and what he has been advocating for and what we know he did in the first term and what this looks like with a new big advisor in Trump's ear, like Elon Musk.

Trump seems to listen to the last person he heard from. If that is Elon Musk, it might be Elon Musk. If it's Steven Miller, and as you point out, Steven Miller will have a very powerful job in the next administration, it's probably going to be him. Frankly, I don't think Trump pays all that much attention to the nitty-gritty policies that are taking effect under his watch, which is probably why he doesn't even realize that last time around he did a lot more to reduce legal immigration than illegal immigration, because Steven Miller was running the show. I think that whatever Trump says he wants to do, the actual people who are executing the policy at the end of the day will be making the decisions.