SPECIAL REPORT: Massive debate erupts on X over immigrant tech workers, tech leaders cozying up to Trump

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A huge ‘catfight’ erupted between some of President-elect Donald Trump’s biggest supporters on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday night, which has continued all day Thursday.

The topic of discussion: Silicon Valley importing tech workers from India.

Some of the top names participating in the heated debate: Independent journalist Laura Loomer, DOGE leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, investor David Sacks (who Trump has chosen to serve as the White House A.I. and Crypto Czar), and several others.

Podcast host Dennis Michael Lynch also responded to comments by Musk and Ramaswamy.

The whole saga started when Loomer voiced her concerns after Trump announced that Sriram Krishna would serve under Sacks as the “Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.”

Krishna was born in India, and started working for Microsoft in 2007. He has also worked at Facebook, and then at Twitter, where he reportedly assisted Elon Musk to revamp the platform after Musk purchased it in 2022.

Loomer voiced concern that so many tech executives who never supported Trump previously are now rushing to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump, making huge donations, and either getting spots in his administration or wiggling their way in to his inner circle.

She also shared a screenshot of a post on X where Krishna called to remove country caps for green cards and “unlock skilled immigration.”

This started a massive debate on X… and it’s still going!

Investor David Sacks jumped in to claim, “You’ll be happy to know that no one on the AI team will be working on immigration policy so their views on green cards are irrelevant.”

“I think we can also agree that before even discussing legal immigration, we should completely seal the border and stop migrant crime like the insane NY Subway attack,” Sacks admitted.

Investor Joe Lonsdale, founder of PalantirTech, jumped into the fray, defending Krishna. “My friend Sriram is America First. For USA to have the highest standard of living, generous govt services, and strongest military, we need to recruit the best and brightest and build the best companies. I’m against more low-end H1B immigrants; but let’s win at the talent game,” Lonsdale wrote.

Loomer then tore into Lonsdale in a scorching rebuke. She wrote:

With all due respect, what the hell do you know about MAGA and the Trump America First agenda? Do I need to remind you of how I exposed you for your DeSantis fundraisers you and your China affiliated wife hosted for @GovRonDeSantis when he primaried President Trump in 2024?

That’s why you blocked me right? They say if you want to know what someone’s agenda is, all you need to do is FOLLOW THE MONEY. Along with donating to Kevin McCarthy, and hosting an event for Governor DeSantis’s presidential campaign, Lonsdale has also donated to Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom, Trump hater Mitt Romney, he donated to Chris Christie over President Trump in 2016, suspected Chinese Communist Party asset and Democrat Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, anti-Trump Congressman Dan Crenshaw, and pro-impeachment Republican Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler, Fred Upton, Anthony Gonzalez, and GOP Senator Ben Sasse, all of whom voted to impeach President Trump.

In 2019, Lonsdale donated $1,000 to radical Leftist Pete Buttigieg, who currently serves as the United States Secretary of Transportation in Joe Biden’s administration.

You and your buddies at @PalantirTech want one thing and one thing only. You want to GET RICH off of your access and proximity to President Trump, which you’re hoping to maximize via your friendships.

You didn’t support Trump’s campaign. In fact, you hate Trump. Now you want an Indian who supports increasing H1B visas determining policy in the Trump admin?

Who the hell do you think you are? You never supported Trump. Why should MAGA trust you?? You didn’t even have the political acumen to support Trump in the primary. You’re an opportunistic tech bro and it won’t fly with MAGA. I’m telling you right now.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramasamy, who Trump has appointed to lead the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) agency, joined the discussion as well.

The debate got wild, fiery and yet fascinating, as Loomer, Musk, Ramaswamy, Sacks, other top CEOs, investors and entrepreneurs battled it out, along with other journalists and concerned Americans.

“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk claimed in one post.

Mario Nawfal quoted a report that claimed, “The U.S. semiconductor industry alone needs over 160,000 engineers by 2032, driven by $250B+ in new investments. Demand for AI experts has skyrocketed, with Elon calling the talent war the “craziest” ever. Meanwhile, STEM programs struggle to produce enough graduates.”

Musk replied, “No, we need more like double that number yesterday! The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low. Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”

In another post, Musk added, “OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process. HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.

“This is not about handing out opportunities from some magical hat. You don’t get it. This is blindingly obvious when looking at NBA teams, as the physical differences are so obvious to see. However, the MENTAL differences between humans are FAR bigger than the physical differences!!”

Thursday afternoon, Musk wrote, “Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.

“This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA. Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”

Podcast host Dennis Michael Lynch (DML) posted the following response to Musk:

With all due respect, Mr Musk, you’ve got this all wrong. I’ve spent 20 yrs on this topic, spent a decade on Fox News sharing facts, made four documentaries on the topic, and held countless study sessions with the top minds within immigration: If our schools and colleges taught our students useful information, and if companies in tech didn’t want cheap labor, we would have the best and brightest come from within. Legal immigration is necessary only when we abandon our own. We have abandoned our own youth and used bullshit excuses to cover it up.

I pray Trump won’t listen to you on this topic, but then again he too hires the visa crowd so it’s a moot point trying to convey facts and truth w/this administration when it comes to this topic.

Everyone in the Trump camp focuses on the criminals. The criminals, although very bad and unwanted, are not the ones bankrupting our schools and hospitals, diluting job markets and wages, and interfering in the housing rental space. It’s the everyday illegal and foreign worker. Foreign students take spots away from our kids in medical school, etc.

Get rid of ALL illegals, end the visa programs for students and workers. Reform our schools and revamp our university system— focus on OUR KIDS. And that’s how you truly make America great again. Anything short of that is just a hat, and a plan to fail.

“AI will take over tech support bigtime in 2025,” Musk predicted on Thursday.

Loomer fired back, “If that’s the case, then why do we need to import more Indians into America? @elonmusk 🤨🧐. What are all of these unemployed immigrants going to do in our country once AI takes over their jobs aside from making it harder for unemployed American IT workers to get jobs?”

Investor Jason brazenly declared, “We should be trying to grow to 1b Americans. Recruit 5 million immigrants to America every year for the next 20! 🇺🇸.”

Loomer pounced. “Wow. @DavidSacks podcast host and friend @Jason just said we need to be importing 5 million immigrants into the US every year for the next 20 years. Allowing big tech executives into Mar a Lago is going to be the death of our country. Isn’t it?

“Jason wants our national population to be 1 billion people. He wants to turn our country into a third world shithole. This is the associate of a man who was appointed to be AI and crypto Czar in the incoming Trump admin. We have to re-evaluate some of these nominations.”

Several people commenting on the debate pointed out that the American education system is failing students, and focusing instead on ‘woke’ agendas.

In one post on Thursday, Ramaswamy said Americans have failed to push their youth to succeed, and allowed them to settle for mediocrity. He wrote:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

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 Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

Mike Cernovich responded, “The Woodstock generation managed to build out aerospace, the one before went to the moon, America was doing great. Underlying your post is that we were all living in squalor until being rescued by H-1B’s. Then why did everyone want to come here?”

Ramaswamy replied, “That version of America, the one that used to embody unbridled exceptionalism, is exactly what we want to return to. That’s a point about culture, not immigration policy.”

Podcast host Dennis Michael Lynch responded to Ramaswamy:

Vivek, with all due respect, you’re dead wrong. Although I totally agree that our kids should spend less time watching TV, your synopsis suggests kids should be reading engineering books on their days off from school, and instead of watching / playing sports. You suggest they should dream of code instead of dating the hottest girl. You want kids to be robots?

The problem is the school system. We no longer teach excellence; we no longer teach STEM; we teach bullshit. If we taught really important and useful information to our kids 5 days per week, 8 hrs per day, all the kids in America would have a real value / real chance. They’d thrive and fill the needs of high tech.

A kid should be well rounded, happy, and balanced. They should be focused on school during the day, activity after school, family at night, fun on weekends. They don’t need to walk around and then sleep with a calculator.

And let’s not forget how big tech LOVES cheap labor and the control that comes with holding visas over their foreign employees’ heads.

I appreciate your opinion, and there is value in some of it. But in general: You missed the mark.

Loomer declared Thursday evening, “This conversation needed to happen. My number one goal is to make sure President Trump’s policies and his agenda are implemented and fully supported so that we can truly put America First. I don’t know why that’s so controversial. If you want to be angry with me over that, so be it. I’m used to people being angry with me. It’s par for the course when you fight for truth. If you stand for nothing you will fall for everything. MAGA!”

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