• Pro-Trump tech leaders and MAGA loyalists clash over how to overhaul U.S. immigration.
• The debate between the two groups over highly skilled immigration has intensified in recent days.
• The debate came after Trump appointed an Indian-born tech leader as senior policy adviser.

President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters in Silicon Valley are at odds with his MAGA supporters on a key issue: immigration.

In recent days, Elon Musk and others in the tech sector have increasingly expressed support for visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled workers from abroad. The move has galvanized Trump supporters to advocate for stricter immigration rules.

The latest debate came after Trump offered Sriram Krishnan, a Chennai-born Indian-American investor, a role as senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence – a move that drew intense criticism online.

Krishnan, who recently led the expansion of venture capital firm A16z’s in London, previously lived in the US, where he held positions at Microsoft, Twitter and Meta from 2005.

Criticism largely came from anonymous accounts online – one X post asked if anyone voted “for this Indian to rule America,” prompting a defense from Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks.

They also sparked a broader debate about the merits of the H-1B visa, which is commonly used to employ skilled workers from other countries.

Tech leaders like Musk, who have been deeply critical of illegal immigration, have used the saga to defend immigration prioritizing the placement of highly skilled foreign workers in American companies.

On Thursday, Musk said his priority was to attract top engineering talent legally – it was “essential that America continues to win.”

“Viewing America as a professional sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to continue winning is the correct mental construction,” he wrote on X.

Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s co-head of the Ministry of Government Efficiency, also went to “for far too long I have worshiped mediocrity over excellence.”

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympian or the athlete over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote in a nearly 400-word post.

In a later post, he said immigration rules should be reformed more effectively to funnel talent to the United States. The H-1B system is not effective, he said, and “should be replaced by one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also weighed in, offering a solution to keep the “best and brightest” foreign students in the U.S. after they graduate: “Can we give every degree earned from an American university a U.S. Add green card?”

The pro-immigrant messages have not been well received by all Trump members.

Former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, whom Trump briefly proposed as his attorney general, wrote an X post on Thursday saying numbers should step down from the tech sector.

When Republicans welcomed them, he said, “We didn’t ask them to develop an immigration policy.”

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

Where Trump will land on this issue remains to be seen. Immigration lawyers have warned tech workers that a “storm” is brewing with the arrival of a second Trump term and have advised those who left the country to return before it is too late.

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