The richest man in the world, who has become a close ally and financial supporter of Donald Trump, said Thursday on his X platform that “bringing the top 0.1% of engineering talent through legal immigration is essential for America continues to win” on the international stage.
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“A culture that celebrates the prom queen or the athlete”
Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by Donald Trump alongside Elon Musk to head a commission to cut state spending, also defended the use of foreign workers. “Our American culture has worshiped mediocrity rather than excellence for far too long,” the businessman said on X.
“A culture that celebrates the high school prom queen rather than the math Olympiad champion, or the athlete rather than the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he added. .
Without radical change, “we are going to get our ass kicked by China,” said the former candidate in the Republican presidential primaries.
Shocked conservatives
Statements which outraged certain conservative figures, accusing the two billionaires of minimizing the technological achievements made in the United States.
Ultraconservative Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s next deputy chief of staff at the White House, posted on X a 2020 speech by the Republican leader in which he marvels at the American “culture” which has “mastered electricity , split the atom, gave the world the telephone and the internet. A way for this influential advisor to recall that Donald Trump was once again elected with a primarily anti-immigration program and that, according to him, qualified foreign labor is not necessary for the United States to accomplish great things. things.
Elon Musk appeared to respond to him Friday evening in a post on “He was a penniless immigrant whose inventions led to American domination in the production and use of electricity,” said the billionaire.
Before the first term, a distrust of H1-B visas
During his first campaign for the White House in 2016, Donald Trump expressed his opposition to H1-B visas, which he admitted to using himself within his companies but which he described as “very unfair for our workers » Americans. And he had put in place certain restrictions on these visas when he came to power, before they were lifted by the Biden administration.
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Donald Trump’s decision will show who he wants to rely on
The future American president has remained silent for the moment on this debate which is agitating conservative circles. But a position for one camp or the other would provide clues about his way of governing during his second term. And which factions he intends to rely on the most.
For some longtime devotees, Silicon Valley has already inserted itself too deeply into Trumpist circles. “We welcomed the tech guys when they came running towards us (…). We did not ask them to design a migration policy,” joked Matt Gaetz, formerly elected to Congress and chosen for a time by Donald Trump as future Minister of Justice before having to give up.
An “inevitable” divorce?
When Elon Musk almost single-handedly torpedoed, before Christmas, a budget agreement in Congress aimed at avoiding a paralysis of the federal state, some Democrats joked about a “President Musk”, with whom Donald Trump would ultimately be reduced to a role of spectator.
It remains to be seen whether after these first cracks in the veneer, the coalition led by Donald Trump will manage to maintain a certain cohesion once in power. “I look forward to the inevitable divorce between President Trump and Big Tech,” conservative influencer Laura Loomer said on X on Friday.
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