Deep Dive: Why MAGA 2.0 Hates Legal Immigration Too

Lemonada. Comments telling me, "You should bring back Patriot Act." People on the streets literally stop me and they yell in my face, "Please bring back your Netflix show." And I'm sorry, but I can't. Patriot Act was made by over 100 incredible people working around the clock. And today my company has eight people who are also incredible. And I will never replace any of you guys for AI, except you. You're gone. But every so often I get the itch, the deep dive itch, the insatiable urge to talk about a topic for 20 minutes that no one else is talking about. And lately, the one thing that keeps coming up in all of my WhatsApp threads is, you guessed it, H-1B visas. - Chaos and confusion for foreign workers who are in the U.S. on a special kind of visa known as an H-1B. - Significant changes to the H-1B visa program. - They're warning employees not to leave the United States or quickly return from overseas. - The H-1B visa system has been spammed with fraud basically, and that's driven down American wages. - H-1B visas are special visas granted to skilled foreign workers, mostly in STEM fields. I'm talking about science, tech, engineering, and math. And Indians fucking dominate that shit. You get a degree on all four, that's the brown EGOT, baby. Of the 85,000 new H-1B visas issued a year, about 70% of them go to Indians. And since their creation, they have been a critical rung on the ladder to citizenship. Here's the steps. Number one, get a STEM bachelor's degree in India. Two, use that degree to get into a U.S. grad school. Three, move to San Jose, work for Intel with an H-1B, then force your kids to participate in a Japanese internment camp called Kumon and repeat the cycle of violence and deny therapy to them. H-1Bs are a huge reason why Indians have become the most successful immigrant group in America. Over three quarters have at least a college degree and their median household income is almost double the national average. Then you got the H-1B heavy hitters. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet. For Indians and many others, the H-1B visa became the cornerstone of a promise in America. If you come in the right way, you too can achieve the American dream. But now, the H-1B is under attack because MAGA has suddenly become obsessed with hating them. - India milks the H-1B system dry. Replacing American workers in our own tech companies, undercutting wages, and they're laughing all the way to the bank. - Among the many ways H-1B workers harm Americans, it is of course taking American jobs. - This is just destruction of American jobs for corporate profit. - The only way to stop it for good is to end the H-1B program. - When you have 70% of the visas in the world from one region in one country, that's a mafia, folks. And this guy's like, "Bah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Then they'll go back and forth in English, and back into Indian or whatever. And I just see it everywhere. I mean, I can't, I'm just, everywhere I go, it's like mechanized forces of Indians marching around in charge, taking everything over. - You know, sometimes I'm afraid we're gonna lose the Civil War, and then I see how scared these guys are of a pre-med student named Sajjad. First, I thought this was just another Alex Jones aneurysm. You know, just another passing MAGA outrage, like a halftime show or a gay M&M. But as my team started peeling back the layers, I realized that understanding the H-1B issue is actually key to understanding the future of the Republican Party. And that future won't just impact South Asians or immigrants. It will impact everyone. So let me walk you through what's happening right now. Because at its core, what we are seeing is a battle over the most controversial word in American politics, the M word. Not MAGA, not Mamdani, merit. ♪ We ride away, no delay, stop day for day ♪ - Through the H-1B system, Indians have proven themselves to be exactly what Americans say they want immigrants to be. They want immigrants to be hardworking, patriotic, law-abiding taxpayers, and most Americans are cheering them on. A Gallup poll last year found that 79% of Americans say that immigration is a good thing for the country, and over four in 10 Americans say that high-skilled workers should get top priority for legal immigration. And let me just say, any honest job is highly skilled, okay? If people can be professional gamers, let's just put some respect on people who work in agriculture and food delivery. You're playing Counter-Strike 2. I know you think it takes hand-eye coordination, but so does drafting a cover letter for Wingstop. Now, it's not just Democrats who support legal immigration. For decades, Republicans have said, "Hey, as long as you come into this country legally, "you won't be judged on the color of your skin. "You will get judged." "You will be judged on your merit." The Republican Party has built its entire identity around merit. It was the core argument that took down affirmative action, and Republicans constantly, constantly talk about merit in their crusade against DEI. - In the United States, we believe in hard work and merit. - Merit only. - We will restore merit. - A meritocracy is the only fair way to run a society. - We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based. - Merit has been the key to Republicans' distinction between undocumented immigrants, aka bad hombres sneaking over the border, and legal immigrants, aka good hombres, with good education, doing important jobs. Now, Trump was very clear about this in his first term. - Instead of today's low-skill system, just a terrible system where anybody comes in, people that have never worked, people that are criminals, anybody comes in, we want a merit-based system. - Something changed in the MAGA extended universe between Trump 1.0 and 2.0, because the moment he was elected in 2024, a huge inter-MAGA fight broke out over H-1B visas and the Indians who have them. - A heated online debate among President-elect Donald Trump's supporters has exposed what's being called a MAGA civil war, - It's the tech billionaires versus the MAGA hardliners over the H-1B visa program. - Musk and Ramaswamy have defended the H-1B program, Musk posting recently that it's the reason he's in America. - Far-right activist Laura Loomer taking to X, launching a series of posts such as, "Our country was built by white Europeans, actually, "not third-world invaders from India." - I mean, actually, our country was built by third-world invaders looking for India? And now that we show up, now you're mad? I mean, we literally came with the spices that you were looking for. Think of it as a DoorDash that took 400 years. Now, the Republican battle over H-1Bs has two sides. On one side is the corporate tech MAGA, the ones who all lined up at Trump's inauguration and funneled money into his slush fund. They argue that H-1B visas are critical to allow them to hire the kind of top-tier talent that they need to make sure America remains a world leader in innovation. They have a strong case. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, and a recent report found that over half of U.S. startups valued at a billion dollars or more had at least one immigrant founder. Now, on the other side are the opponents to the H-1B, the nativist wing of MAGA. Now, when most people think of this group, they think of Steve Bannon, the guy who did for all of canvas jackets what Hillary Clinton did for the pantsuit. Bannon has been on one about H-1Bs for a long time. - The H-1B visa program is a total and complete scam from top to the bottom. The H-1Bs is a total and complete scam. This is all about paying one group a third of what you pay the other group with no benefits, and they're living 10 to a condo in Silicon Valley. - Dude, that's just living in the Bay. Every condo has 10 people. You gotta scan a QR code to take a shit, and the building used to be a library. Now, it's tempting to dismiss any argument coming from Steve Bannon and his bad faith, but when people complain about the H-1B system being abused, they're not totally wrong. The H-1B was created in the United States. It was created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 to fill specialized labor shortages, and it was sold with the promise that it would not displace American workers. - This bill provides for vital increases for entry on the basis of skills, infusing the ranks of our scientists and engineers. - This legislation protects American jobs. - But one congressman who helped draft the original bill, Bruce Morrison, later came out publicly against it in a 2017 60 Minutes piece, saying that it was being misused. - The H-1B has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans. - Why can't we just say we're going to give jobs to Americans first? - Well, that's what the statute says, but they put in a loophole, and the loophole says if you pay over $60,000, you can do that, and beside that, you don't have to try to find Americans. - So that loophole led to some companies using the H-1Bs to fire American workers and replace Replace them with cheaper ones. I was given the news that in 90 days, my job was over, and I had to train my replacement. It was the most humiliating and demoralizing thing I've ever gone through in my life. Goddamn. You make a middle-aged white guy tear up like that? You know what happens next. Can you believe that? You get laid off, and then they won't give you your severance pay unless you train the people that are replacing you. I mean, that's actually demeaning. Trump plugged all that H-1B rage directly into his 2016 campaign. And that fired worker, Leo Pereira, actually got up on stage at a Trump rally. I mean, that is the Mount Everest summit of white male grievance. The only place with more divorced dad energy is the actual summit of Mount Everest. Now, given all the anti-immigrant sentiment in MAGA, it is not surprising that the H-1B debate singled out the workers who get most of those visas. The Indians. The 60 Minutes piece that I just showed. I told you earlier, actually featured one of these Indians. Meet Rajesh. I have to take all of their knowledge, and basically I have to steal it. That's my job description. And the American worker is let go. Yeah, the American workers lose their job, and they also cry while leaving the job. What the fuck is happening? Why does Rajesh look like a B2B sass werewolf? Rajesh works at a major Wall Street bank on an H-1B visa. To protect his job and personal safety, he asked that we change his appearance. It's a name. Okay, here's the thing they're not telling Rajesh. That makeup is not going to protect him. He still looks super Indian. But eventually, Indian James Harden tried to make it clear that he's not the villain here. You must know that when most native-born Americans see this going on, they blame you. Yes, but I'm not the enemy. The main villains are the Indian companies and their American corporate clients. They are exploiting us. Now, unfortunately, that disclaimer didn't get through those 3D-printed jowls. Because in the nine years since that 60 Minutes interview, anti-Indian hate has only gone up. My own friends are literally DMing me. They're like, hey, dude, I don't know what's going on. This might be just an online thing. I might be spending too much time on Reddit. But I think a lot of people might hate Indians. Yo, as an Indian guy, I'm actually confused. Why do people hate us? It feels like racism against Indians has reached a whole new level. I'm not even exaggerating. Like, I've never seen this much Indian hate in my life. So I just woke up and I opened Twitter. Biggest mistake. You're not imagining it. Recent research found that about half of Indian Americans reported experiencing some kind of hate in the previous year. And during the 2024 election cycle on platforms like Twitter and 4chan, anti-South Asian slurs doubled. Oh, and if you want to fact-check that claim, try wishing your followers on Twitter a happy Diwali and see what the fuck happens. That platform has become an absolute sewer of anti-Indian hate. Now, the irony is that Twitter is owned by someone who immigrated on an H-1B visa. Elon Musk. Although when you're a white South African, it's not immigrating. It's not doing so much as it is fleeing the scene of the crime. Now, I get why legal Indian immigrants got swept up into this wave of racist MAGA hate. MAGA, they don't really do nuance. They just know that foreigners, bad. But weirdly, one of the people with the most nuanced take on this entire issue is Donald Trump. If you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent. Well, we have plenty of talent. No, you don't. No, you don't. We don't have talented people here? No, you don't have certain talents. The way he said, "No, you don't. No, you don't." You know exactly what he meant. He's like, "Americans are idiots. Laura, they're fucking morons." Trump has actually been caught in the middle of this MAGA civil war, mainly because he makes a clear and consistent distinction between legal and illegal immigration. I want a lot of people to come into our country, but I want them to come in legally. We want them to come into our country, but we want them to come in legally. They have to come in legally, and if they come in legally, we want them. You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card. He wants the nerds, folks. Trump wants 2017 Kumail Nanjiani, not 2025 Kumail. Trump's embrace of legal immigration has been key to his support in the Indian community. But I don't need to tell you Indians fuck with Trump. We've got some of the biggest names in the Republican Party. I'm talking Vivek, Usha, Nikki, and Khloe. Who, even though he was born here, still has enough green card energy to be running a merch side hustle on BasedApparel.com, which features shirts for the drunk Little League dad and the undercover cop arresting him. Republican support for legal immigration was held up as proof that this was not a racist party and that America was not a racist country. I am not standing here because of the color of my skin. I'm standing here because I earned my right on this stage. Martin Luther King was right. That you get ahead in America not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions. Take it from me, the first minority female governor in history, America is not a racist country. Here's the crazy part. That crowd is just learning that she's a minority now. They're like, wait, this broad's Italian? Now, for the Indians who support legal immigration and the H-1B, their bet on Donald Trump seemed to pass. He tightened a few regulations on H-1Bs during his first term, but he held off from making any big direct attacks on H-1Bs. Until suddenly, last fall, that changed. Major changes coming to the H-1B worker visa program after President Trump signed a proclamation that he says will ask companies to pay $100,000 a year for skilled worker visa applicants coming to the United States. The administration says it's been exploited to replace American workers with employees who are paid less. If you're going to train somebody, you're going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land. Train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs. That coked out Marty Supreme background actor is Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who is a staunch opponent of immigration. Unless it's immigrating himself to Little St. James. Oh, yeah. Howard was all up in the Epstein files. Now, remember that interview with Laura Ingraham where Trump was defending H-1Bs? That interview happened after. After the $100,000 fee was announced, which means Trump didn't want to do this. He had avoided this issue for a decade. So why would Donald Trump, the man who never bends the knee, bend the knee now? It wasn't Steve Bannon or Laura Loomer or your boomer dad. He's had them on lock since 2016. What Trump was really after was fresh blood. The kids. No, I'm not talking about the kids on Epstein Island. I'm talking about a new insurgent wing of Republicans who couldn't. They can't even vote in 2016 who see the H-1B visa battle as a fight over the future of the conservative movement because they are the future of the conservative movement. I am talking about Gen Z conservatives, the Zoomer cons, and I am going to introduce you to a few of its rising stars right after this break. Until last fall, Charlie Kirk was the indisputable leader of Gen Z conservatives. He spent years unifying them under his organization, Turning Point USA. Before his assassination, Kirk constantly railed against H-1Bs. One of his final tweets was, Enough already. We're full. And just a few weeks before that, he made a post summarizing his list of demands for the Republican Party, which has since become kind of a Zoomer con vision board. First, we have Natalie First, we have Natalie First, we have Natalie Natalie Winters, the 24-year-old protege of Steve Bannon and the White House correspondent for his War Room podcast. Last year, Natalie got a splashy girl boss profile in the New York Times, Yas Queen, and she regularly says this stuff about Indian people. They're not the best and brightest. They're the worst and they're the most attached to the culture that they're coming from, and they have nothing American about them. And frankly, they have a fake diploma from a fake Indian university where the person sitting next to them is probably a robocaller scamming you. Come on, Natalie. We have fake diplomas here in America, too. They're called poli-sci degrees, and we both have them. Welcome to the grift. Next, we have Brett Cooper. Brett is a homeschooled former child actor whose Hollywood career ended when she refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine. She was recently hired as a correspondent for Fox News and hosts her own show on YouTube. Like Natalie, Brett also got a splashy girl boss profile in the New York Times last year, and she says stuff like this about immigrants. And through their toxic empathy, both the left and the right, as you've seen in this episode, have helped overrun our country with refugees. And migrants that do not assimilate and, quite frankly, hate it here. And we also can't just pause immigration from third world countries. Law and order must return and be respected, and remigration, yes, in fact, is necessary. And you know what? These people can make their travels home just that much easier with a noble all-in-one carry-on. And guys, this luggage will help you, too. Wow. That ad segue makes me so depressed. I think I need to go to Whole Foods and enjoy some of their excellent seasonal produce. Now, if you want to know who the audience for this kind of content is, and how they feel about Indians, You can meet them at any Turning Point USA event. In fact, my man Vivek did that last year and got a very quick lesson in what conservative values mean to Zoomercons. You call yourself a Hindu, but you also call yourself Christian. I don't call myself Christian. I call myself a Hindu. Do you think it's inappropriate for someone who's a Hindu to be, say, a U.S. president? No, I think it's not wild. Christianity is the one truth. Jesus Christ is God, and there is no other God. He's a part of the Holy Trinity, and any other God is a demon, and it's false. Damn. Those kids are ripping him apart. Feels like I'm watching a Christian reboot of Weapons. Now, Vivek clearly did not fully understand the Turning Point audience. But you know who did? J.D. Vance. My man was smart enough to know that if you want to please the Turning Point crowd, you take your Indian wife and you throw that woman right under the bus. Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. Do I hope eventually? That she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I honestly do wish that. Because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way. Now, you would think scenes like this would scare off any young Indian-Americans from the right, right? Well, meet Nalen Haley, half-Indian, half-white, quarter-zip. Nalen is the son of Nikki Haley, a.k.a. Namrata Nikki Randhawa. Look at their faces together. You can just picture him shouting at his mom, Mom! You cannot pause an online game! Now, last year, Nalen got a splashy profile in the Wall Street Journal, and he says stuff like this about H-1B visas. We need to ban H-1B visas, make sure corporations are hiring a certain number of Americans, and make sure they act in the interest of the American people. Nalen, what happened? Did a Mexican steal your barstool internship? Now, I think it's important to pause here and genuinely listen to what Nalen's been saying, because it will help you understand why Gen Z conservatives have taken such a hard stance against H-1B visas and illegal immigration. The reaction to the economic issues that my generation sees ahead of them is despair. Hopelessness. They don't see any way out. The average first-time homebuyer in America is 40 years old now. 40. You have to have a degree for everything now. Like, even if you want to work at McDonald's, you have to get a degree. It's pushing people into debt when they don't need to be. Whatever you think of Nalen, he is articulating some very real frustrations, of his generation. Housing unaffordability is real. Credential inflation is real. The student debt crisis is real. The economic insecurity that virtually every college grad faces is real. But Nalen's solution for this isn't debt forgiveness, or rent control, or taxing the rich. He wants to solve all of this by completely stopping legal immigration. And this is where it's important to pay attention. Because what we're seeing here is a new evolution for MAGA. The playbook for MAGA 1.0 is very simple. Hey, your life sucks? Cool. Blame refugees and blame illegals. Let's keep it real here. Refugees and undocumented immigrants aren't taking the jobs that most Americans really want. And they definitely aren't competing for the Zillow listings that every American is slobbering over. Gen Z MAGA understands this. What they're saying is, look, we're not competing for jobs and houses with the boat browns. We're losing out to the Air India landing in SFO browns, a.k.a. the legal immigrants. But exorbitant housing prices, crippling student debt, massive inequality. These are big structural problems that 60,000 dudes a year from Bangalore aren't creating. Also, I thought this whole thing was about merit. Even MAGA's Gen Z godfather, Charlie Kirk, preached about how important the M word is. I believe when you're hiring for an organization, or for a company, or for whatever you are doing, you should prioritize merit. But if America is all about letting the best rise to the top, how do you justify shutting down legal immigration? I mean, that's anti-competitive. And that's when I started listening more closely to Natalie Winters. Immigration is both an economic issue, but also a cultural issue, right? We want to deport these people, not just because they're depriving Americans of their wages, of their jobs, but also what they're doing to the cultural fabric, what they're doing to these neighborhoods. Got it. So there's something about foreign cultures that is bad for America. Now, what exactly is it about those cultures that Natalie finds so offensive? Should we be studying, you know, 25? Five hours a day, eight days, you know, increase the length of the day so all we can do is study. That's not what this country was founded on, if you look at the history of us. Got it. So you don't like lazy immigrants. Totally get that. But you also don't like immigrants who work hard. So here's what I'm saying. Gen Z conservatives, like the rest of Gen Z, are struggling economically. They feel like they deserve a decent job with a decent wage and to still have time to live a life. The problem is, if they said that, they'd start to sound like these fucking losers. Workers throughout the country are seeing their family life fall apart as they are forced to spend more and more time at work. My vision is not limited to the homes that we live in or the childcare that we're making universal. It's also a vision where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression. We don't have to live like this anymore. We can make a new world a better country where we can fight for the dignity of all people. So instead of appealing to a sense of solidarity and fighting for economic security and dignity for all Americans, MAGA is appealing to a zero-sum mentality and saying, if we kick out the boat Browns and the airport Browns, well, guess what? We'll have more to ourselves. And this reveals what MAGA really means when it says merit. Yeah, you earn it through hard work and education. But if you're born here, and your parents were born here, you get extra merit points for being a heritage American. It's basically Kendall Roy at the end of Succession screaming, "I'm the eldest boy!" You can call this racial entitlement, you can call it white nationalism, but I call it white valedictorianism. We all know this. The valedictorian in every school, if you go on grades alone, is the Chinese kid. It's always the Chinese kid, it will always be the Chinese kid, but MAGA's like, "No! Just keep going down the list. Go through the Chinese kid, the Vietnamese kid, the Korean kid, the Indian kid, the Pakistani kid, the Bengali kid, back to the Chinese kid, just keep fucking going until you get to the white one." The 13th place guy, that's the valedictorian. As much as MAGA and Republicans claim they want merit, they don't. As much as they claim they just want to hire the best, most hardworking immigrants, they don't. What they really want is a preferential treatment for being heritage Americans. They're not enforcing meritocracy. They're enforcing hierarchy. Almost like a caste system. Which is the most Indian thing they could be doing. Have you subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet? You can listen completely ad-free and get access to exclusive bonus content you won't hear anywhere else. 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