The DOGE crowd and MAGA loyalists are in a messy feud over immigration

• Pro-Trump tech leaders and MAGA loyalists are feuding over how to overhaul US immigration.
• A debate over high-skill immigration intensified between the two groups in recent days.
• The debate came after Trump's appointment of an Indian-born tech leader as a senior policy advisor.

President-elect Donald Trump's backers in Silicon Valley are at odds with his MAGA loyalists over a key issue: immigration.

In recent days, Elon Musk and others in the tech sector have increasingly shared support for visas that allow companies to hire highly-skilled workers from overseas. The move has riled up Trump backers in favor of stricter immigration rules in the process.

The recent debate came after Trump offered Sriram Krishnan, a Chennai-born, Indian-American investor, a role as a senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence — a move that triggered heated criticisms online.

Krishnan, who was recently in London leading an expansion of venture capital firm A16z's — previously lived in the US, where he completed stints at Microsoft, Twitter, and Meta from 2005.

Criticisms have largely come from anonymous accounts online — one X post asked if anyone had voted "for this Indian to run America," prompting a defense from Trump's AI and crypto czar David Sacks.

They also prompted a wider debate on the merits of the H-1B visa commonly used to employ skilled workers from other countries.

Tech leaders such as Musk, who have been deeply critical of illegal immigration, have used the saga to defend immigration that prioritizes the transfer of high-skilled foreign workers into American companies.

On Thursday, Musk said his priority was bringing in top engineering talent legally — saying it is "essential for America to keep winning."

"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," he wrote on X.

Musk's co-lead at the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, also took to X on Thursday. He argued that tech companies often hire foreign-born engineers, saying it allowed them to avoid what he called an American culture that has "venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long."

"A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers," he wrote in an almost 400-word post.

In a later post, he said immigration rules should be reformed more effectively to funnel talent to the US. The H-1B system was not effective, he said, and "should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best."

Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce, also weighed in, offering a solution to keep the "best and brightest" foreign students in the US after graduation: "Can we staple a US green card to every degree earned at an American university?"

The pro-immigration messages haven't gone down well with everyone in the Trump pack.

Former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who Trump briefly put forward to be his Attorney General, wrote an X post on Thursday saying that tech figures should butt out.

When Republicans embraced them, he said, "We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy."

Meanwhile, far-right activist and Trump supporter Laura Loomer used several posts to express strong opposition to H-1B visas and her concerns over the "replacement of American tech workers by Indian immigrants."

Where Trump will land on the issue remains to be seen. Immigration lawyers have warned tech workers that a "storm is coming" with the arrival of a second Trump term, and suggested those who have left to get back before it's too late.

The debate signals a deep divide between different groups of Trump supporters as he prepared to take office.