Greg Sargent
Sat, January 18, 2025
NEW REPUBLIC
Republicans may not know it yet, but they’re in the process of handing Steve Bannon a powerful weapon to wield in his war with Elon Musk over visas granted to high-skilled immigrants. This could further divide the MAGA coalition over immigration—and badly inconvenience Musk, who is trying to protect those visas from a ferocious assault being waged by Bannon and his allies.
The weapon in question, it turns out, is buried in the Laken Riley Act, the controversial bill that would mandate the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of minor nonviolent crimes. Another provision in the bill—which the Senate advanced in a key procedural vote Friday with Trump’s tacit blessing, putting it on track to become law—would authorize state attorneys general to bring lawsuits to force presidential administrations to deny visas to any particular country that isn’t accepting deportees. That provision has attracted public criticism, but Republicans have been unmoved.
What observers haven’t noticed, however, is that this measure is directly relevant to the Bannon-Musk battle. Bannon can now enlist a right-wing state attorney general—like Ken Paxton of Texas—to bring a lawsuit designed to halt visas to, say, people from India, which supplies many high-skilled tech workers. Under the law, it’ll be perfectly plausible that a handpicked judge could stop the issuance of such visas.
“We’re definitely going to use it, and we’re going to get after attorneys general,” Bannon told me when I contacted him to ask whether he sees the law as useful to him.
Bannon stressed that he fully supports Trump, and that he expects Trump to use all his power on his own to deny visas to countries that don’t accept deportees. But Bannon confirmed that he will seize on the law if Trump’s State Department fails to deny visas. “We certainly will call for state A.G.s to do this,” Bannon said.
Musk and many tech executives adamantly support H-1B skilled-worker visas, arguing that they supply tech talent to fill a real shortage of U.S. expertise. Bannon and his camp strongly oppose H-1B visas, claiming that “globalists” like Musk actively seek to give these jobs to foreigners even though Americans absolutely could fill them.
The opposition’s cause has also attracted racists and “great replacement theory” fanatics, who describe H-1B visas as a Trojan horse for “third-world invaders.” As Vox’s Andrew Prokop details, this issue is fertile soil for those who like to believe America’s supposed white European identity is under siege, not least because high percentages of recent H-1B recipients come from India.
Trump recently sided with Musk in this battle. But when the Laken Riley Act becomes law—which looks inevitable after the Senate voted to end debate on it Friday, with 10 Democrats in support—Trump can’t necessarily control what happens next.
The reason is that the bill grants broad authority to state attorneys general to bring lawsuits against an administration—to force it into compliance with immigration laws—under various circumstances, provided their state can show that federal enforcement failures are minimally damaging to it. One such scenario is triggered if the government tries to deport people to their country of origin but that country refuses them.
If that happens, under the new bill an attorney general from that person’s state of residence can ask a federal judge to apply a Cold War law that empowers the State Department to halt some or all visas to that country’s people. Administrations generally don’t implement blanket visa bans due to diplomatic and international factors. But under this bill, an attorney general can ask a judge to require this. And a judge can do exactly that.
What people have missed is that Bannon can use this against Musk. If a few Indian nationals in Texas are subject to deportation but India doesn’t accept them (India is recalcitrant about this), Bannon can publicly urge Paxton to act. Paxton could argue that these deportation failures damage his state in some tiny way and find a pliant Texas judge who’s willing to require the visa ban on India.
“A federal judge absolutely could invoke the Laken Riley Act to block all visas from India, or even just specific types of visas, like H-1Bs,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told me. The law, which I strongly oppose, is the direct result of Trump’s relentless 2024 elevation of Riley’s awful murder by an undocumented immigrant last February.
It’s possible that a given attorney general might refuse to bring such a lawsuit even if Bannon asks. But at minimum, this gives Bannon a way to pressure pro-MAGA attorneys general to act by mobilizing the base against them via his War Room podcast.
Bannon confirmed that he will bring this sort of pressure. “The populist right, who’s trying to defend American workers’ rights, will be all over these attorney generals,” he told me.
Republicans may not know it yet, but they’re in the process of handing Steve Bannon a powerful weapon to wield in his war with Elon Musk over visas granted to high-skilled immigrants. This could further divide the MAGA coalition over immigration—and badly inconvenience Musk, who is trying to protect those visas from a ferocious assault being waged by Bannon and his allies.
The weapon in question, it turns out, is buried in the Laken Riley Act, the controversial bill that would mandate the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of minor nonviolent crimes. Another provision in the bill—which the Senate advanced in a key procedural vote Friday with Trump’s tacit blessing, putting it on track to become law—would authorize state attorneys general to bring lawsuits to force presidential administrations to deny visas to any particular country that isn’t accepting deportees. That provision has attracted public criticism, but Republicans have been unmoved.
What observers haven’t noticed, however, is that this measure is directly relevant to the Bannon-Musk battle. Bannon can now enlist a right-wing state attorney general—like Ken Paxton of Texas—to bring a lawsuit designed to halt visas to, say, people from India, which supplies many high-skilled tech workers. Under the law, it’ll be perfectly plausible that a handpicked judge could stop the issuance of such visas.
“We’re definitely going to use it, and we’re going to get after attorneys general,” Bannon told me when I contacted him to ask whether he sees the law as useful to him.
Bannon stressed that he fully supports Trump, and that he expects Trump to use all his power on his own to deny visas to countries that don’t accept deportees. But Bannon confirmed that he will seize on the law if Trump’s State Department fails to deny visas. “We certainly will call for state A.G.s to do this,” Bannon said.
Musk and many tech executives adamantly support H-1B skilled-worker visas, arguing that they supply tech talent to fill a real shortage of U.S. expertise. Bannon and his camp strongly oppose H-1B visas, claiming that “globalists” like Musk actively seek to give these jobs to foreigners even though Americans absolutely could fill them.
The opposition’s cause has also attracted racists and “great replacement theory” fanatics, who describe H-1B visas as a Trojan horse for “third-world invaders.” As Vox’s Andrew Prokop details, this issue is fertile soil for those who like to believe America’s supposed white European identity is under siege, not least because high percentages of recent H-1B recipients come from India.
Trump recently sided with Musk in this battle. But when the Laken Riley Act becomes law—which looks inevitable after the Senate voted to end debate on it Friday, with 10 Democrats in support—Trump can’t necessarily control what happens next.
The reason is that the bill grants broad authority to state attorneys general to bring lawsuits against an administration—to force it into compliance with immigration laws—under various circumstances, provided their state can show that federal enforcement failures are minimally damaging to it. One such scenario is triggered if the government tries to deport people to their country of origin but that country refuses them.
If that happens, under the new bill an attorney general from that person’s state of residence can ask a federal judge to apply a Cold War law that empowers the State Department to halt some or all visas to that country’s people. Administrations generally don’t implement blanket visa bans due to diplomatic and international factors. But under this bill, an attorney general can ask a judge to require this. And a judge can do exactly that.
What people have missed is that Bannon can use this against Musk. If a few Indian nationals in Texas are subject to deportation but India doesn’t accept them (India is recalcitrant about this), Bannon can publicly urge Paxton to act. Paxton could argue that these deportation failures damage his state in some tiny way and find a pliant Texas judge who’s willing to require the visa ban on India.
“A federal judge absolutely could invoke the Laken Riley Act to block all visas from India, or even just specific types of visas, like H-1Bs,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told me. The law, which I strongly oppose, is the direct result of Trump’s relentless 2024 elevation of Riley’s awful murder by an undocumented immigrant last February.
It’s possible that a given attorney general might refuse to bring such a lawsuit even if Bannon asks. But at minimum, this gives Bannon a way to pressure pro-MAGA attorneys general to act by mobilizing the base against them via his War Room podcast.
Bannon confirmed that he will bring this sort of pressure. “The populist right, who’s trying to defend American workers’ rights, will be all over these attorney generals,” he told me.
Bannon said he expects the law to be more useful under future administrations, because he thinks Trump will use the visa-denial tool to compel countries to take deportees without lawsuits forcing him to. “I believe strongly that President Trump will have our back,” he said.
But will likely Secretary of State Marco Rubio really undertake mass visa suspensions? If not, Bannon noted, the law empowers attorneys general to make it happen, and he’ll demand as much: “It gives us another avenue.”
Indeed, this possibility apparently has some tech company lobbyists worried. A source familiar with ongoing conversations told me that tech lobbyists have been telling GOP lawmakers that they fear the law could be used to shut down some H-1B visas. Those lawmakers have been responding that state attorneys general won’t use it that way, the source says. But those lawmakers cannot make this promise, since they don’t control what these attorneys general may do.
If Bannon does go this route, such a lawsuit might end with the Supreme Court striking down the provision empowering attorneys general, which many experts believe is unconstitutional. But Bannon absolutely can attempt this, and there’s no telling how the courts will rule or how long it will take them to do so.
Either way, all this could create complicated situations. In Texas, for instance, Musk’s Tesla recently laid off workers while hiring many H-1B visa holders. While it’s not clear whether those things were directly linked, the move stoked controversy. Bannon could use the law to pressure Paxton to act. With Austin emerging as a tech hub even as Texas is ground zero in the immigration wars, Bannon said, the issue will grow in importance there.
“Ken Paxton is one of MAGA’s top attorney generals,” Bannon told me. “So I think Texas is going to be an early test case for this.”
The battle could put other MAGA leaders in a tough spot. The New York Times reports that top Trump adviser Stephen Miller recently told tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg that he’d better get on board with the Trump agenda, and that Zuckerberg meekly agreed. However, although die-hard nativist Miller opposes H-1B visas, the Times reports that he’s refraining from talking Trump out of supporting them. If Bannon picks up this banner, it could make Miller’s position look awkward—or, dare we say it, positively “globalist” and even cuck-ish.
The bottom line is that the Bannon-Musk battle represents a genuine, deep tension inside the MAGA coalition. Though Musk pushes anti-immigrant social media memes to excite MAGA incels, he and many tech executives really seem to believe dynamic, entrepreneurial outside talent benefits the country—along with their bottom lines, of course.
Many opponents of H-1B visas also operate from a genuinely held worldview. In their reading, they allow globalist corporate oligarchs to hire foreign workers more cheaply, which, critically, relieves society (or the state) of any obligation to better equip Americans to fill such rewarding roles. Bannon recently argued that anger over that national failing helped fuel the rise of Trump.
The schism also reflects bigger arguments on the right over how to achieve the sort of American greatness the MAGA right professes to value—whether skimming the world’s outside talent can help outrace China or, conversely, whether brutal international competition for top tech jobs is producing an elite that’s lacking in patriotism and virtue.
How these conflicts will shake out is unclear. Many Republicans appear to agree with Musk, whom they now dare not cross. It’s perversely amusing that in their rush to give Trump the early victory he craves by passing a terrible immigration bill, Republicans may have inadvertently handed Bannon a potent weapon to use against their new tech overlord—one Bannon appears prepared to wield as aggressively as possible.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are pushing the H-1B visa. Does it take American jobs?
Daniel de Visé, USA TODAY
Fri, January 17, 2025
A recent flare-up over visas for tech workers revealed a rift among Republicans on immigration.
Steve Bannon, once President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist, termed the H-1B visa program a “total and complete scam.” Many Trump supporters sided with Bannon. So did Bernie Sanders, the progressive Vermont senator.
Bannon was addressing comments from billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s corporate ally, who had come out in favor of H-1B visas. Musk tweeted that the visa was “the reason I’m in America,” adding an expletive. “I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
The Trump sided with Musk, who was born in South Africa, setting the table for a potential showdown in the second Trump administration.
At issue is a visa program designed to help American companies import skilled workers from other countries.
Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald Trump, is a critic of the H-1B visa.
Does the H-1B visa take away American jobs?
Supporters say the H-1B visa encourages innovation and fires up the American economy. Detractors say the program takes jobs from Americans.
"The main function of the H-1B program is to lower the wages of American workers, and to exploit people from abroad," Sanders said in an interview with USA TODAY.
Before we roll out the arguments from both sides, let’s summarize what research and hard data say about the H-1B:
Yes, the program hurts some American workers, especially in tech. Investigations have revealed cases where employees had to train the H-1B workers who replaced them. Research shows computer scientists would earn more money in a world without visas.
But there’s ample evidence the H-1B helps pretty much everyone else. Workers who enter the country on visas go on to start and run billion-dollar companies. Musk says he entered the country on a visa. He now runs Tesla, which employs more than 100,000 people.
“Bottom line, Americans are better off,” said Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied the H-1B issue in depth.
The visa allows companies to “obtain high-skilled workers on a temporary basis,” generally to work in specialty jobs, often in tech, according to a recent government report. The visas are typically granted for three years but can be extended to six. Many visa holders become permanent residents.
The number of new visas is capped at 85,000 a year, although the limit doesn’t apply to nonprofit employers. All told, the government approved or extended about 386,000 visas in fiscal year 2023.
The median salary for an H-1B worker was $118,000, which is roughly twice the median income for an American worker.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has spoken out against the H-1B visa.
Critics say companies use the H-1B visa to exploit foreign labor
Yet, critics say corporations exploit the H-1B visa to get cheap labor from abroad.
“The program is designed to allow U.S. companies to bring in foreign guest workers to replace or displace American workers,” said Eric Ruark, director of research and sustainability at NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for immigration curbs. “It isn’t that there aren’t available workers in the U.S. to do these jobs.”
An income of $118,000 doesn’t sound like cheap labor. However, a 2020 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that employers generally undercut local wages when they hire H-1B workers, paying them below market rates.
"The way I see it is, this is a program which enables large corporations, often high-tech corporations, to make more money by paying foreign workers lower wages than they pay American workers," said Sanders, the independent Vermont senator.
A more recent report from the economic think tank found that the top 30 H-1B employers hired more than 34,000 new visa workers in 2022, while simultaneously laying off at least 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023.
Visa critics point to Census data that show only 28% of U.S. college graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) actually work in STEM jobs.
Meanwhile, H-1B workers are being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists and cooks, Sanders said, in an op-ed for Fox News.
Sanders wrote that many visa workers are effectively indentured servants, who “can have their visas taken away from them by their corporate bosses if they complain about dangerous, unfair or illegal working conditions.”
Academic research seems to confirm that American tech workers would be marginally better off if the visa disappeared. One 2017 study estimated that American computer scientists would earn as much as 5% more if the H-1B didn't exist.
But here’s the caveat:
“Everyone else in the U.S. economy is better off, and meaningfully better off” because of the H-1B, said Khanna, the San Diego economist, who co-authored the study.
Advocates say the H-1B visa is good for the US economy
Supporters say the H-1B visa supercharges the American economy.
“My take is that it’s a benefit to U.S. workers that H-1B workers come here and increase production on goods and services that are extremely valuable to them and improve their standard of living,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
A fact sheet from the American Immigration Council, a research and advocacy group, lists five ways visa workers help the economy:
◾ They often have different skill sets than American-born workers and can complement them in the workforce;
◾ They spend and invest in the U.S. economy;
◾ Businesses leverage visas to expand U.S. operations, rather than contract or move overseas;
◾ Visa workers create new companies, expanding the labor market;
◾ Ideas and innovations from visa workers fuel economic growth.
“What’s at stake is that we would have much less innovation, a lot fewer startups, and more work would go abroad” without the H-1B, said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research organization.
“The H-1B visa, in practice, is the only way for a highly skilled foreign national to come into the United States and work,” he said.
The program is not perfect. In particular, observers on both sides deride the annual cap. Demand for visas often exceeds supply. As a result, visas are awarded by lottery.
“The lottery doesn’t seem to be serving anyone’s interest very well,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute.
The 85,000-visa annual limit “is totally arbitrary, just made up,” said Bier of Cato.
But Gelatt doesn’t think either Congress or the Trump administration would seriously consider removing it.
“I think that there are a lot of people aligned with the incoming Trump administration who don’t see value in immigration, period,” she said.
Steve Bannon mocks Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos as Trump ‘supplicants’ making an ‘official surrender’
Phil Thomas
Sat, January 18, 2025
Steve Bannon speaking to Jonathan Karl on ABC News show This Week (ABC News)
Steve Bannon has intensified the MAGA civil war by comparing the sudden support for Donald Trump from tech titans Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II.
Trump’s one-time White House chief strategist fired his latest broadside against Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk in an interview with ABC News the weekend before his former boss is sworn in for a second term.
The two have crossed swords in recent weeks on the subject of H-1B visas, which are used to attract highly skilled foreign workers. Musk, who spent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get elected and is now seen as almost inseparable from the president-elect, supports them; Bannon, and other longtime anti-immigration Trump faithful, fiercely oppose them.
Bannon told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that the decision of Musk, Meta CEO Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Bezos to attend Monday’s inauguration made them “supplicants.”
He invoked US General Douglas MacArthur receiving Imperial Japan’s unconditional surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in 1945 to paint a picture of the tech titans bending the knee to Trump.
And he mocked Zuckerberg’s decision to back away from Facebook’s former policy on fact-checking, something that has become a bone of contention in Trump circles because of the freewheeling attitude to facts of the president-elect and his supporters.
“As soon as Zuckerberg said, I’m invited, I’m going – the floodgates opened up and they were all there knocking, trying to be supplicants,” Bannon said.
“So I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them. And they surrendered. They came and said – oh, we’ll take off any constraints, there’ll be no more checking.”
He added: “I view this as September of 1945 – the Missouri – and you have the Imperial High Command … and he (Trump) is like Douglas MacArthur.
“That is an official surrender, OK? And I think it’s powerful.”
Earlier this month Bannon called for a “100 percent moratorium” on all immigration, while upping the rhetoric against Musk, suggesting he would “rip your face off” unless he stopped pushing for more visas.
He said: “We love converts. But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.”
Bannon told Musk not to “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.”
Bezos has faced backlash for pulling an endorsement of Kamala Harris from the Washington Post, which he owns, before the election. Other staff have left the paper since the election, including a cartoonist whose drawing of Bezos and others kneeling in front of Trump was pulled. The paper insisted that it was not censoring the cartoon and said it was repeating points made in a column on the subject.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckberg are putting aside their differences to focus on their current shared interest: supporting Donald Trump (Getty / Getty / AP)
The hostilities represent a growing schism within MAGA ranks that Trump will need to navigate carefully.
Musk – and fellow tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – have been put in charge of a government advisory agency called DOGE which aims to cut billions from federal spending.
The Tesla boss has already flexed his new political muscles when a deal to avert a government shutdown fell apart at his urging last month.
Bannon, while no longer a key figure in the Trump set-up, is seen as representing the views of many of the incoming president’s most loyal supporters.
Bannon’s reference to the three billionaires as “oligarchs” echoes the nickname given to a group of ambitious entrepreneurs in Russia who made their fortunes and accumulated political power amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the shaky rule of Boris Yeltsin – only to be forced to bend the knee to Vladimir Putin once he took power, or else face prison or exile abroad.
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