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MAGA Civil War Pits Ignorati Against Technorati
America needs immigrants but don’t tell MAGA cultists that
I’ve watched with amusement the ongoing civil war in MAGA world. This has played out over the last few days, as the MAGA alliance of the Technorati (tech bros) and the Ignorati (alt-righters and nativists) have gone to war with each other.
The issue that sparked the war was H1-B visas. These allow American companies to recruit high-tech workers. The oligarchs, such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are in favor of these visas because they argue it allows Americans to hire the world’s best minds.
However, the Ignorati, MAGA knuckle draggers who want to ban all forms of immigration, argue Americans should be hired for those jobs.
Harvesting the World’s Best Minds
Both parties are partially right. Musk and Ramaswamy are right in saying that for American companies to stay competitive, they need to hire the world’s best minds. But here’s the dirty little secret. This has been going on for a long time. NASA was built by mass importing former Nazi scientists. And many of the innovations in the science world come from immigrants. Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, is a Russian native, and Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo, is a native of Taiwan.