To hear my liberal friends tell it, the Republican Party is being torn apart by a debate over immigration policy in the second Trump administration.
One such friend directed me to a prominent liberal commentator, a historian by the name of Heather Cox Richardson. She recently wrote a piece in which she framed this as a fight between the Make America Great Again movement (MAGA) and Trump’s recent proposal to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“Original MAGAs who want the government to expel immigrants and elevate white evangelical Christian men are facing off against the new DOGE MAGAs who disdain original MAGA culture and want the government to turn the tech billionaires loose from regulations and taxes to create their own global oligarchy,” she writes.
I’ve been covering Trump’s since his rise in 2015. (and even earlier) I’ve covered more of his rallies than I can remember, in places like Poughkeepsie and Pennsylvania.
I’ve seen plenty of people wearing those red MAGA hats. But I have never seen or spoken to anyone who could be put into the category of “white evangelical Christian men.”
I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. But I live in Ocean County , which gave Trump his biggest margins in the state. The last identifiable white evangelical Christian man I know used to live across the street from my friend Zeke in Brick Township. But that guy moved away back in the 20th Century and I haven’t seen one since.
I’ve seen plenty of Trump supporters, however, including Zeke. He’s got a Trump sign on his lawn. But if he’s got a religion it’s working on cars, preferably foreign cars. Like most car-lovers, he’s opposed to the move by the outgoing administration to use regulation and taxes to put gas-burning cars out of existence.
But he doesn’t want to kick out the immigrants, perhaps because his wife is from Taiwan.
There is indeed a conflict here, but it is not tearing the Republican Party apart.
It began when Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Trump’s lead man on DOGE, made a comment about H-1B visas that set a lot of people off.
Ramaswamy, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, defended the practice of handing out H-1B visas.
These are visas given to people with valuable skills and/or lots of wealth. Our tech industry needs such people to remain competitive, he said in a post on Elon Musk’s X site.
But he went on to say that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence.”
In his own post, Musk wrote: ”There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”
Those comments caused the infighting on the right – and the elation on the left about this alleged food fight among Republicans.
But it’s a minor point in the immigration debate, said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Elon has walked it a fight, but there’s common ground,” Krikorian said. “Trump has always said we want people to come in, but come in legally.”
Fanning the flames was Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart editor who likes to position himself as the leading conservative activist in America.
Bannon referred to Musk and others newcomers supporting Trump as “converts.”
“But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years,” he said. “Don’t come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be. If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.”
Musk offered similarly lofty rhetoric:
“Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face,” he wrote to his critics. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
That sounds pretty serious. In fact, it’s a line from Tom Cruise in the 2008 movie “Tropic Thunder,” which was a comedy.
That’s the way this whole kerfuffle should be taken according to another immigrant who came here from India and built a successful business that employs dozens of high-tech workers.
“This is just a case of ‘affluenza,’” he said. “If you’re in a Third World country, you don’t have time to think about that. You’re wondering what you’re going to eat next.”
The media like to manufacture conflict by quoting characters like Bannon, but he’s not a Republican leader. He’s what has come to be known as an “influencer.” And my Republican friends say they wonder if he has any influence with Republicans.
At the moment, he’s convincing a lot of liberals that he can convinced President Trump to crash the high-tech economy by shutting down the H-1B visa program.
But can he convince Republicans?
I suspect this fight was over before it got started.
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Publish date : 2025-01-04 22:52:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2025-01-05 15:08:17
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