Donald Trump’s richest supporter, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, has no patience for reactionary Americans, even if they helped send Trump to a second term as president in the 2024 election. On Dec. 27, Musk tweeted that “contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party.” He defined contemptible fools as “unrepentant racists” who oppose certain types of legal immigration.
Other Trumpers clapped back at Musk. Strategist Steve Bannon called Musk a “toddler,” while Trump activist Laura Loomer posted that “we are nauseated with Big Tech bros [such as Musk] who think we are peasants and dumb.” Democrats salivated at the Trump world dysfunction, no doubt recalling the hell Hillary Clinton caught in the 2016 presidential campaign when she called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables.” Now, mega-MAGA Musk seems to agree with her.
This spat is largely a social media dumpster fire that will soon yield to the next nasty thing. But the underlying issue — immigration — is a political live wire that is going to produce plenty of fireworks during Trump’s second presidential term, and the Musk-fool battle lines are a preview of what’s coming.
Musk drew fire because he defended a program that allows a small number of foreign workers to work legally in the United States. Trump, late to the battle, said on Dec. 29 that he agrees with Musk and supports those visas.
MAGA heads began spinning because Trump is supposed to be the anti-immigration nativist who wants to build a wall on the southwest border and deport millions of undocumented migrants. Did Trump flip-flop?
Not really. But the coming immigration battles are likely to cause heartburn for a lot of Trump supporters who thought Trump opposed foreign workers, period. Here are three reasons why:
1.Immigration is deeply complex and poorly understood. Show of hands: Who knows the difference between an H-1B visa and an H-2B visa? Hardly anybody, yet this kind of distinction is crucial to the immigration debate unspooling under Trump and Musk. H-1B visas allow educated foreigners to work in American professional jobs, many of them in tech positions such as programming. These are the visas Musk was defending. H-2B visas are for lower-skilled, non-agricultural workers needed for short periods of time, such as construction workers during the peak summer months. There are nearly two dozen types of visas allowing foreigners to work in the United States, demonstrating how convoluted the US immigration system is.
At the broadest level, there are two types of immigration to the United States: legal and illegal. Yet even this basic distinction gets conflated into the single rubric of “immigration.” As for illegal immigration — the most controversial type — there are several forms of that. Some foreigners sneak in and are in the United States illegally from the start. Others gain entry lawfully but overstay a visa or miss a court hearing and end up undocumented, aka “illegal.” Each group of migrants has different characteristics. Some are criminals, but many have jobs and contribute to the economy.
Musk was defending one type of migrant. Many of his critics may have thought he was defending illegal immigration, which he wasn’t. Bannon has opposed legal immigration as well as the H-1B program and was dinging Musk for backing any form of immigration at all. The word “immigration” means different things to different people, and nobody in Trump world has defined the terms.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk (Brandon Bell/Pool via AP, Archive) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
2. Trump himself has demagogued the issue, adding to the confusion. Trump’s best-known immigration policy is to deport migrants who are in the country illegally. But Trump also endorsed efforts that would sharply reduce legal immigration. In speeches, Trump often refers to “migrants” without specifying whether he means those here legally or only those here illegally. And the words Trump uses to describe migrants are uniformly negative: “Monster.” “Killer.” “Criminal.” “Animals.”
Polls clearly show that Americans think Trump will do a better job dealing with immigration than any Democrat. But few polls break immigration down into its various forms or ask about the myriad visa programs that allow foreigners to work in the United States. Musk is basically telling Trump supporters to start thinking about immigration more thoughtfully than they may have before. That conflicts with Trump’s oversimplified message, which is basically that all immigration is bad and that he’ll fix it.
3. There’s a painful truth in the need for some immigrants. Musk’s fellow tech bro, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, delivered the most cutting jab at anti-immigration Trumpers when he said on Dec. 26 that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” He went on to praise immigrant parents who overload their kids with math and science, compared with Americans content to cheer sports teams and binge on sitcoms.
Ummm.
This is unlike anything Trump would ever say. Trump’s core message is that Americans are entitled to good-paying jobs, especially the less-educated, lower-skilled Americans who form his base. Trump’s tariffs and his deportation plans are supposed to protect those people by bringing manufacturing back to America and kicking out migrants filling jobs Americans might otherwise have.
Yet Ramaswamy is right, in large measure. American businesses need migrants to pick produce and process chickens, jobs Americans largely shun. Many other nations produce better math and science students than the United States, which means US firms need to bring some of those people to the United States if they want to keep their most innovative work here. Some employers abuse the system by hiring cheaper foreign workers instead of paying qualified Americans more. But there’s overwhelming evidence that America needs more immigrants, not fewer, if it wants to sustain a vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world.
As the world’s premiere entrepreneur, Elon Musk — an immigrant himself — knows all this. He seems surprised that many of his fellow Trumpers don’t. The intriguing question is whether one part of Trump world will be able to persuade the other.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman.
