Could this be the breaking point for the Trump-Musk bromance?

The president-elect’s die-hard Maga supporters are unconvinced by the first buddy’s insistence that US tech industries require an inexhaustible supply of young, skilled migrants from abroad – and the coming battle over work visas will prompt a mighty schism, say Anand Menon and Jonathan Portes

Civil war has broken out in the Trump camp. On one side, Elon Musk, unsuccessful presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and other tech entrepreneurs, many of them relatively recent recruits to the Republican Party. On the other, die-hard Maga supporters like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer.

The casus belli? The “H-1B” visa programme – loosely the equivalent of the UK’s skilled work visa.

For Musk and co, the software engineers and the like who arrive with H-1Bs, they are essential both to the success of their own businesses and the US’s economic future – concepts they seem to view as largely synonymous. For Maga, however, they represent just another element of the plot by elites to flood the US with immigrants, boosting corporate profits, and undercutting American wages, while at the same time “replacing” white Americans of European origin with mostly non-whites.

As so often with the politics of immigration, the economics soon became secondary. Ramaswamy sparked the controversy by claiming that Americans lacked the work ethic and hunger for success of newly arrived immigrants. The response was a flood of racist hate, directed both at him personally, Trump’s tech advisor Sriram Krishnan, and Indian-origin migrants to the US in general, who constitute by far the largest portion of those obtaining H-1B visas (Indians received some 78 per cent of all those issued in the year to 30 September 2023).

This, in turn, led to numerous Indian-Americans – about 40 per cent of whom likely voted for Trump, despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric, which they presumably thought applied only to irregular migrants, Latinos and Muslims – expressing their concern and dismay.

Meanwhile, Musk, defending the H-1B programme, called for the removal of “hateful, unrepentant racists” from the Republican Party, and, with characteristic subtlety, threatened to “f*** them in the face” – this just days after he endorsed the far-right “unrepentant racists” of the AfD in Germany.

He is nothing if not inconsistent – if only in defending his own commercial interests.

We’ve heard this story before. Vote Leave secured 52 per cent of the vote (marginally more than Trump) by appealing to those who wanted sharp reductions in migration. But at the same time, it promised business a system open to the “brightest and best” from the whole world – accepting tacitly that this would mean more non-European immigrants, in particular from India. This helped ensure that nearly 40 per cent of Indian-origin Brits voted for Brexit.

Hence the erratic nature of UK immigration policy over much of the last decade – perhaps best exemplified by Dominic Cummings. In 2022, he was happy to claim credit for the post-Brexit immigration system and argued that it had defused immigration as a political issue. Now, however, he seems to have suddenly remembered that it was entirely the responsibility of Boris Johnson, who wanted to “open the floodgates” to curry favour with the Financial Times.

The debates in the US and UK are uncannily similar. By far the largest proportion of UK skilled work visas go to Indians, with the IT and tech sector dominating. Indians also make up a substantial fraction of those coming on health and care visas – or as students. So there is no getting around to whom current calls to reduce legal migration for work and study are primarily aimed.

In both countries, moreover, the respectable wing of the anti-immigration lobby claims that visas supposedly reserved for skilled workers are often going to lower-paid migrants, undercutting native workers and letting exploitative employers get away without training or investing enough. These concerns aren’t unreasonable in principle – but the overall evidence in both the US and the UK is broadly positive, and some of the claims to the contrary simply ignore what the data and independent analysis tell us.

But, as in the US, the anti-immigration coalition on the right here also encompasses those whose motivation is not primarily economic: prominent Conservative MPs like Robert Jenrick are quite happy, when it suits them, to make openly ethno-nationalist arguments. And while much of the overt racism on the far right of British politics is directed at Muslims, Indians and Nigerians, should be under no illusion that they get a free pass.

And at the moment, the xenophobes seem to be winning the debate on the right of British politics. With the threat of Reform spooking the Tories (and much of Labour), nobody wants to be seen to be pro-immigration – even if the immigrants in question are Indian programmers and nurses.

But it’s far from clear how sustainable such a position is. Leaving aside the details of the migration system – while the UK system works better than the H1B, both are far from perfect – it’s pretty obvious that it is in the economic interests of both countries to attract younger, skilled migrants from English-speaking countries, whether or not they are white and Christian. And given its size and demographics, that means India above all.

In principle, it ought to be in the political interests of business-orientated, market-friendly parties, too – both because a relatively liberal approach to such migrants is in the interests of their traditional supporters in business, and because it allows them to expand their appeal to a new and steadily growing demographic.

Just as the Republicans are making progress among Indian voters, so, too, Indian Hindus in the UK – often well-off, and socially moderately conservative – are increasingly sympathetic to traditional Conservative values and, indeed, to the Conservative Party itself. Whether either the Republicans or the Conservatives still fit this description, however, remains an open question.

Anand Menon is the director of UK in a Changing Europe and King’s College London, and Jonathan Portes is a senior fellow of UK in a Changing Europe and King’s College London