The recent blow up between tech billionaires backing H-1B visas and the “deport them all” MAGA chants have revealed a fundamental schism with the Republican party. The reality is that industry loves, in fact needs, the cheap labor that immigrants — both legal and illegal — supply.
It is an open secret that while Republicans will exploit the fear of the brown invasion that immigration wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the huge supply of jobs on this side of the border. Every state that implemented strict anti-immigrant policies — or sometimes even talked loudly about it — have suffered immediate economic consequences. The original ‘industry and business’ wing of the Republican party doesn’t want anything done about immigration because it hurts their supply of cheap labor that isn’t going to complain about pay or conditions.
Remember when wages actually started rising for first time in years Jerome Powell flat out said “Employers are having difficulties filling job openings, and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years,” [] “By moderating demand, we could see vacancies come down, and as a result [] that would give us a chance to have lower—to get inflation—to get wages down.”
The bare-knuckle capitalists have managed to keep the Federal Minimum Wage unchanged for 15 years, college graduates buried under loan shark levels of debt and undercut ‘unskilled’ labor with immigrants, but skilled tech workers represent a class of workers with high pay and high job mobility. So even while ‘tech giants’ make a staggering amount of money off the work of highly paid programmers they still resent having to pay workers anything near their worth or to have to work to keep them happy.
Elon Musk actually said "There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley," after he fired 85% of Twitter’s engineering staff. This is just “no one wants to work anymore” for highly paid tech workers. There is plenty of talent in the marketplace but maybe they just don’t want to work for a guy that runs a ‘nazi bar’ social media site and fires workers indiscriminately.
The reality is that using H-1B visas for high tech companies is exactly the same mechanism. Your presence in this country is tied to your H-1B visa and losing your job means having to find another job willing to support your visa status almost immediately. H-1B visas give those robber barons what they are looking for but the visa fight is just the most visible part of the fight.
Despite Trump whipping up racist populism against immigrants the real power behind the Republican party want none of it. The cheapest possible labor means more profit that will flow upward and they have no regard for the future that leaves for their workers. I don’t have any hope that the ‘working class’ people who voted for deportations will see any contradiction between what was promised and what happens, but weirder things have happened.
