This Idea Threatened to Tear MAGA Apart. Trump Just Picked a Side—and It May Come Back to Haunt Him

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Shortly after President Donald Trump’s electoral victory in November, the coalition that returned him to power began tearing itself apart over a once esoteric issue: the H-1B visa. As the foundation of a temporary-guest program that brought highly skilled foreign-born workers into the United States—overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, tech engineers from India—the H-1B had become the most visible symbol of an intensifying ideological rift. On one side, the Silicon Valley executives who’d newly embraced Trump, advised his transition, and ran companies that depend on this immigrant labor; on the other side, the racist MAGA base that wanted to slow down all immigration altogether (especially from so-called third world countries).

In an effort to please both factions, Trump has attempted various compromises, including a “ban” on birthright citizenship for the children of H-1B workers. (That order remains blocked in court nationwide.) But Trump delivered a clear victory to his restrictionist base on Friday, when he signed an executive order requiring that visa applicants and incoming H-1B workers each pay the U.S. government a $100,000 fee, effective as of Sunday.

The order’s vague language made it unclear whether this was an annual fee, or whether visa holders already employed stateside but located outside the country at that moment—perhaps to visit family in India and China—would be barred from reentry sans six-figure check. A stray comment from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appeared to confirm those fears. As such, America’s white-collar sector panicked, with tech and finance stalwarts like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Goldman Sachs dispatching emergency alerts to their immigrant workforces and asking them to either stay put in the U.S. or return before Sunday. Trump administration officials gave vocal reassurances that this was a one-time fee and did not apply to current visa holders; nevertheless, some workers canceled imminent vacations and instigated dramatic scenes by requesting that their already departed flights immediately turn around and land back on U.S. soil. In turn, anonymous bigots on 4chan organized a “Clog the Toilet” operation, jacking up the costs of returning flights from India by registering en masse for seats but stalling just before checkout.

By Sunday evening, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had issued an FAQ on the executive order, formally clarifying that the $100,000 charge would not apply to those who already possessed visas, had applied for one before Sunday, or were paying renewal fees. Immigrants whose timing adhered to those specifications would face no curbs on international travel, the FAQ clarified, and future H-1B applicants may be exempt from the fee if they work in specialized fields like medicine. (If this were to come into effect, such applicants would not be exempted from the usual H-1B charges, including $780 from an employee’s corporate sponsor and $215 from the worker themselves for entering the lottery system, which randomly decides who will earn one of the tens of thousands of H-1B openings offered each year.)

Still, the fallout has endured, and not just thanks to fears that Trump’s aggressive immigration forces won’t hold back in targeting legally settled foreign workers. (See also: the Korean visa-holder illegally swept up in this month’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on a Georgia-based Hyundai factory.) The $100,000 price tag is just the latest plank of an immigration policy that shuts off American borders to everyone except for the wealthiest. (Trump also rolled out his long-teased $1 million “gold card” on Friday, replacing the previous green-card application system with a visa fast-track based only on the ability to pay.)

But the private sector wants to retain the ability to recruit skilled labor from abroad. Many H-1B applicants are bright Indian students who have not found employment in the subcontinent worthy of their education, and often do not have the means to turn over such heaping visa sums. When looking for jobs abroad, they more often than not fill in slots where American industry has a need for capable workers and a shortage of homegrown talent: rural hospitals, low-capital tech startups, consultant shops in need of global business experience, venture capital firms seeking new entrepreneurs, artificial intelligence firms knuckling down on advancing their competitive edges. After announcing yet another “strategic partnership” between their firms on a Monday CNBC appearance, the CEOs of OpenAI and Nvidia insisted that the U.S. needs to bring in “the brightest minds” and “smartest people,” while refusing to specifically criticize Trump’s move.

Others have been more direct. The otherwise Trump-friendly TV billionaire Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary lamented to Fox Business that the H-1B charge would “hurt innovation long-term” and “push these really talented people into other countries.” Venture capitalist Alan Patricof, known for his early investments in startups like Apple, Audible, and Venmo, told the New York Times that “there is not a single company that I have invested in the last 10 years that could afford to pay” the $100,000 for each incoming foreign employee. The multinational investment bank Jefferies wrote that the fee would “constrain talent supply in the U.S.,” and the dean of Cornell Tech declared that this will “hurt the American tech ecosystem,” noting that the H-1B visa already contains stringent requirements to ensure that a hire from abroad “won’t adversely affect similarly employed U.S. workers.”

As with the global tariffs (which have become a point of major contention between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in spite of their onetime friendship), the H-1B changes are highly unlikely to spur employment opportunities for U.S.-born Americans, no matter the MAGA-world claims to the contrary. Bloomberg notes that major banks like JPMorganChase, which rely heavily on India-based “global capability centers” for international operations, will be incentivized to lean more upon these foreign employment networks—in essence, outsourcing more of those basic jobs. Silicon Valley companies are suddenly overhauling their short-term business plans and, counterintuitively, looking to hire more abroad, whether in India or from Canada and Mexico. (Canada, in turn, is hoping to capitalize on an opportunity to revitalize its own tech industry with new foreign workers dissuaded from the U.S.)

But even if American tech and finance titans employ more folks in India itself, instead of poaching them abroad, that will do little to ease a long-simmering rift between the two nations that Trump has escalated with his bellicosity. From deploying cruel means of deporting hundreds of Indian Americans to overexaggerating his role in brokering a cease-fire between India and Pakistan in May (a humdinger he repeated this week in his address to the United Nations), to imposing tariffs of up to 50 percent on Indian imports, to his conflicted messaging on whether America welcomes its skilled guest workers, Trump has been a reliable antagonist to India, and its people are quite upset about this. These moves will hurt India’s business and economy, certainly—and they’ll also backfire on Trump, whose purported desire for American supremacy in fields like A.I., trade, and geopolitical strength against China will be undermined by his undermining of India. The legitimate criticisms that the U.S. could make of India (regarding its oppressive, authoritarian government) or of the H-1B program (that it can subject its beneficiaries to poor working conditions and leave them in uniquely vulnerable situations) have been left behind in favor of unproductive, provocative nonsense.

In one sense, Trump has already done the seemingly impossible: push India closer to its longtime adversary China out of a shared sense of sheer economic necessity. So much for American interests.

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