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Why Opinions on Legal Immigration Divide, and may Ultimately Doom, Trump’s MAGA Movement

17 Jan 2025
By Dr Nicholas Morieson
Elon Musk at the Kennedy Space Center Florida, 30 May 2020. Source:
 (NASA/Bill Ingalls) / https://t.ly/Lj8KG

The first fissures of the second Trump administration have begun to open on immigration. With such figures as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon taking opposite sides of the debate, and pushing their agendas, the first year is poised to offer a rocky start for the administration. 

Donald Trump portrayed himself as an enemy of the pro-immigration “elite” throughout his successful 2024 presidential election campaign. Now, however, Trump–while maintaining his opposition to illegal immigration–appears to be supporting Elon Musk’s plan to expand America’s H-1B visa system, which is purposed towards bringing talented foreigners into the United States. Trump’s about-face on immigration has drawn strong criticism from his own supporters, who are dismayed that their populist hero is now joining forces with the wealthy business elite. The fissure on immigration priorities now threatens to split the Trump movement. Can Trump avoid fracturing his own political movement when much of his support is driven by anti-elite, anti-immigration sentiment?

Trump’s about-turn on immigration has led to a split within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, a broad, cross-class, multi-ethnic coalition of voters brought together due to dissatisfaction with traditional Republicans and the Democratic Party’s turn to the left in the 2010s. The split pits working-class, particularly white working-class Americans who were attracted by Trump’s populist anti-elite, nostalgic, “America First” anti-immigration politics, against the pro-immigration billionaire “tech bros,” including Musk, whose financial backing of Trump ensured his election victory. Thus, while the MAGA movement may seem united behind Trump, it is in fact a fragile coalition in danger of breaking apart over disagreements on the controversial issue of legal immigration.

So far, it appears Trump is listening to Musk. He has stated, for instance on social media, that he has “many H-1B visas on my properties” and is “a believer in H-1B,” and that he has “used it many times.” It is, in his own words, “a great program.” Trump’s statement was greeted with anger by many long-time Trump supporters, dismayed that the president-elect had abandoned—before taking office—his working-class supporters and embraced the tech elite. Nobody personified this anger more than former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Far from being a “strongman,” Trump is deeply reliant on people around him to help him in his decision making, Bannon has suggested. When he campaigned for president in 2016, Trump was deeply reliant on Steve Bannon, whose populist narrative, pitting working-class Americans against the coastal “elites,” contributed to Trump’s unexpected victory in November that year. However, shortly after winning office Trump cut ties with Bannon, and despite his eccentric rhetoric and behavior, governed in a largely traditional Republican manner, cutting taxes for people on high incomes and removing red tape, but doing little to benefit working class Americans. The result of Trump’s turn against populism was his loss in the 2020 elections, in which working class white Americans, in particular, turned sharply against Trump.

In 2024, Trump again ran a campaign aimed at winning the support of working-class Americans. Promising to close the southern border to migrants and deport millions of illegal immigrants, Trump also chose J.D. Vance, who despite his education in some ways personifies the white working class, to be his running mate. However, he also invited Elon Musk into his inner circle of supporters, and now boasts the support of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Furthermore, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now renamed “X,” allowed Trump back into the online public sphere and opened up the “Overton window” enough to permit ordinary Americans to express taboo opinions important to the Trump campaign, including on demographic change, immigration, LGBT issues, and identity politics.

The illustration of the current internal conflict is evident in the recent clash between Bannon and Musk. Musk has never hidden his belief that the United States needs more skilled immigrants. While condemning the Biden administration’s policy of permitting illegal immigration via the southern border, Musk has argued that America needs more high performing immigrants if the country is to continue to compete with rising nations such as China. He has even demanded giving H-1b visas to any immigrant who completes a Masters degree at an American university, something he argues will contribute to the vitality of the American economy.

Bannon, responding to Musk’s pro-immigrant policies, argues that far from increasing immigration, the Trump administration should deport “the workers that are here on H-1B visas …at the same time we’re deporting the 15 million illegal aliens Biden brought across the border to suppress wages to low-income workers.” “American workers should be hired immediately to fill those gaps,” he continued, “and then we should start the discussions on reparations, on what they knowingly did to American tech workers.”

After Elon Musk vowed to “go to war” to protect and expand the H-1B visa program, Bannon issued his own warning to Musk, telling him that he would not permit “Silicon Valley’s sociopathic overlords to destroy American citizens,” demonstrating the irreconcilable fissure between the two men and the groups and ideas they represent.

Although Musk is now attempting to moderate his policies and rhetoric, the clash demonstrates the fundamental incoherency and weakness of the MAGA coalition. The fracture between the pro-worker populist right and the tech billionaires within the MAGA coalition is deeper than a disagreement over H-1B visas. The populist right looks back nostalgically towards a partly imagined “golden age” of post-war America, in which working-class jobs were plentiful and well paid, and white American culture remained dominant. Elon Musk, himself an immigrant, appears to feel little nostalgia for America’s past, valuing rather its people and their economic output.

Musk is nothing if not an elite, and although he shares their antipathy towards the excesses of left-wing identity politics or “wokeness,” he is hardly a friend to the working-classes or “America First” nationalists. Indeed, Musk makes his cars in China, wishes to replace human workers with artificial intelligence and robots wherever possible, and boasts about his plans to fire vast numbers of public service workers after Trump is inaugurated president.

Can Trump satisfy both parts of the MAGA coalition? Balancing the interests of the nostalgic populist right against the interests of tech billionaires like Musk may simply not be possible. Were Trump to increase legal immigration, he might risk losing the support of the populist right and white working-class voters who put him into office, or at the very least lose the support of Steve Bannon and other supporters of Trump’s “America First” policies. On the other hand, if Trump were to deny Elon Musk the foreign workers he desires he will lose his most important donor and online champion.

Donald Trump may be content to lose his working-class, “America First” supporters if it means he can attract the monetary and rhetorical support from the tech elite. Other MAGA Republicans may not be so content to see their movement fractured. J.D. Vance, in particular, may not be able to form the same populist cross-class coalition that put Trump into the White House not once but twice, should Trump throw his working-class, anti-immigration supporters under the bus and embrace America’s technology elite.

Dr Nicholas Morieson is a research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Melbourne. He is the author of two books on populism, including Religions and the Global Rise of Civilizational Populism, (Palgrave MacMillan 2023) and has lectured on American politics at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.