MAGA’s divisions can’t be healed The H-1B row is only the start

Even before his return to the Oval Office, the coalition that allowed Trump to win the election is fracturing. It is still too early to tell just how serious the rift caused by the H-1B visa row really is. But what’s truly shocking is just how quickly and how dramatically the onset of serious internal conflicts within MAGA has been. Even the more cynical observer would have probably been inclined to give Trump until the 2026 midterms before the presidential honeymoon was over; now it seems in trouble a full month before the presidential term has even started.

At the heart of this growing rupture are the two figures who just a short while ago were feted as genius reformers by much of the MAGA Right: Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. Though Trump has always displayed an uncanny ability to walk away from controversy pretty much unscathed, the same cannot be said of Vivek and Elon. And while neither actually started this controversy, both have chosen to jump into the fray to become principal spokespeople for the pro-H-1B Silicon Valley set, thereby confirming the fears on the MAGA Right that Trump is about to “sell out” on immigration.

To say that this is a serious conflict is an understatement. In truth, the use — and abuse — of H-1B visas is about as hated by the Republican voting base as America’s tacit acceptance of illegal immigration as a way to dump working class wages. Musk and Ramaswamy are happy to regale us with stories about H-1B visas being crucial in order to draw in “the best and brightest” to America so that it can compete with China. But neither will publicly acknowledge the H-1B programme’s most important and beguiling feature for American employers.

Because the key feature of the H-1B visa is not that it offers American employers and companies such as Tesla and SpaceX a chance to attract the world’s best and brightest. In fact, that function is already being fulfilled by the O-1 visa, which specifically exists to do just this job. The O-1 offers individuals with “extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics” a chance to work inside the United States; unlike the H-1B, the O-1 has no element of lottery to it, nor is it capped.

But the O-1 visa is meant for individuals; it can be used to bring over Nobel Prize winners and computer geniuses, and to secure one, you (or your employer) has to actually demonstrate that you possess some sort of extraordinary ability. H-1B, by contrast, offers access to a far larger number of far more ordinary workers. And these workers, once they arrive inside the United States, have almost zero bargaining power with their employer, because their visa is tied directly to their employment. An American programmer who is asked to work unpaid overtime cannot be deported from the country for saying “no”. A programmer brought over on a H-1B visa can; this makes him a far less demanding person to employ.

This is not a big secret. As far back as in 2015, the way in which the H-1B program was being used to essentially replace American workers with indentured foreigners was well known. To take just one example, tech workers employed by Disney came to work one morning to find that they were all going to be fired. Their last task was to train their replacements, brought over courtesy of the H-1B program. So much for “best and brightest” rhetoric. When Wernher von Braun or Albert Einstein came to America, they did so because they were the trainers, not the trainees.

As the H-1B controversy has intensified, many Silicon Valley grandees — such as megadonor and billionaire David Sacks —  have tried to defuse it by appealing to the idea of a grander common interest. Sure, maybe Silicon Valley and MAGA Main Street can’t actually agree on H-1B visas, but that has nothing to do with the issue of illegal immigration. But this framing is a sleight of hand, because both sorts of workers are essentially the same: functionally indentured servants, with very limited economic and political rights. And it is the end product here — the destruction of American living standards through the growing use of indentured foreign labour — that people are actually fed up with, not the legality or illegality of that process.

The real question here is not “does America need Einstein?” The actual core contradiction that is now tearing apart Donald Trump’s fusion of Main Street, middle-class populists on one hand, and billionaire CEOs on the other, can more succinctly be put as: “Does America need indentured labour?” Indentured labour force already exists for blue-collar work, which is why the Republican Party has never shown much interest in cracking down on large institutional employers of illegal immigrants. Now, the time has come for white-collar workers to be subjected to similar competition.

The tragedy is that the pro-H-1B faction is arguably correct, at least from their own point of view. If “America” really wants to “compete with China and Russia”, and if it really wants to “win against China”, H-1B visas are probably necessary. In this view, the expansion of all manners of legal or illegal channels of labour arbitrage is all but inevitable, and the deterioration of founding-stock American living standards is not just unavoidable, it is in fact necessary. It is necessary, because what is meant here by “America” is not a country for or by the American people. The “America” that can only “win against China” through large scale labour importation is not America the people: but America the empire.

And America today truly is an empire. If you put all the foreign military bases of China, Russia, India and Iran together, the sum total barely reaches two dozen. America, by contrast, has between 700 and 800. But it is visibly struggling to maintain those bases: its ships are rusting, its military recruitment is collapsing, its industrial base is rotten, and its finances are spiraling out of control. This effectively means that, in the natural lifecycle of empires, America is now firmly in the decline phase. That shouldn’t be controversial, especially because the amount of people who would protest that characterisation — at least off the record — inside Washington itself is very visibly dwindling.

Thus, America finds itself in the same situation as pretty much every other empire on the decline, where it becomes increasingly necessary to cannibalise the very population that served as its original creators. Take the Roman Empire, which was carried by Roman martial virtue in the beginning and ended with half-barbarian generals commanding mostly barbarian soldiers, fighting to keep “Rome” going. Stilicho, the last effective general Rome had, was executed in 408. By 410, Alaric I and his Visigoths had sacked Rome. Of course, just a few years earlier, Stilicho and Alaric had been comrades in arms inside the Roman army.

The reasons the Romans trotted out for needing Alaric were more or less the same as what you’ll find being said in America nowadays. Rome had a recruitment crisis; Romans no longer had a proper work ethic; Rome needed to attract the best and brightest (or at least the strongest and toughest) if it wanted to compete in the world. The Roman people were a spent force; to keep “their” empire going, the actual Roman people were slowly replaced piecemeal until they essentially ceased to exist.

In the same way, the Ottoman Empire collapsed in large part because the Turks felt they were being bled dry in order to defend a sick and decrepit order that would replace them all in a heartbeat if that’s what it took to keep the state going for a bit longer. Before he was assassinated, in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to what was once just called the Austrian Empire, planned to save it by transforming it into a sprawling federation in which the Austrians would just be a minor group among many. Talk to a Russian nationalist today, and it won’t take much cajoling to find that their most common cause of resentment toward the Soviet Union was how it — at least in their view — would put ordinary Russians last to prop up a global imperial project. No matter how far back we turn the clock, the story is always the same. Now, the time has come for the Americans.

One of the most aggressive preachers of this message — that the time has come for Americans to wake up and smell the coffee — has been Vivek Ramaswamy. He was, at one point, seen as a dutiful lieutenant to the broader MAGA movement; now he might have become its most loathed bête noire. In a very long post on X, Ramaswamy said the time had come for the American people to stop watching reruns of Friends, hanging out at the mall, and sending their girls to sleepover parties. No, such frivolous activities were no longer sufficient in today’s competitive world: if America wanted to “beat China”, the American people would have to become more Asian themselves, working far longer hours and subjecting their children to study regimens similar to Japan or South Korea. The fact that these cultures have collapsing birthrates and are essentially going extinct from stress and overwork did not earn much consideration from Ramaswamy; presumably, once that happens in America, the difference can simply be made up by even more immigration.

Even if this H-1B visa controversy blows over, it won’t solve the basic conflict within the MAGA coalition. For their slogan “Make America Great Again” represents an essential contradiction: there are at least two “Americas” being talked about. If, on the one hand, you mean the American people, then replacing these workers with Indians, or sending US military helicopters to the Middle East, instead of dispatching them to North Carolina for disaster relief, is anathema. If, on the other, you care about the survival of the American empire, then the demands of “legacy” Americans really do come across as increasingly petty: these people won’t even sign up for the military anymore, and yet they have the gall to complain at the idea of bringing in foreigners to serve as replacement legionnaires in their stead?

Sure, “Make America Great Again” is a great political slogan. But it is also one that Donald Trump and many people may come to regret, because it has long masked what is now exploding out into the open. There were always two Americas, two conceptions of the future hidden beneath those words. Today, each side in this fight is increasingly finding that the other’s conception of “America” is not just offensive, it is completely irreconcilable with their own. That, too, is a very old human story. These kinds of basic, definitional disagreements about the purpose or nature of a polity should be taken very seriously: they are, at the end of the day, why civil wars actually happen.

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