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There’s a division in President-elect Donald Trump’s political movement and fraternity over 0one of the centrepieces of his presidential campaign.
The Telegraph online in an editorial reports that how the Make America Great Again movement settles the debate could impact thousands of Indians every year.
Mr Trump will be sworn in on January 20.
However, some of his important allies, like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are arguing that undocumented migrants are the problem and that a tougher border and stricter immigration rules are the solution.
However, MAGA (Make America Great Again) has always also attracted supporters who lean more openly towards white supremacist sentiments and argue that there is a greater conspiracy afoot to effectively replace while Americans with people of colour. In a climate of intense economic uncertainty and job insecurity, the fear of immigrants – even highly skilled individuals on legitimate visas – replacing American citizens in the workforce is a potent potion for political rabble-rousers.
So, there is a division between those who support a harsh crackdown on undocumented migrants but support visas for high-skilled foreigners and those who want jobs to mostly be the preserve of Americans. This could be a challenging gulf for Mr Trump to bridge.
The HIB program is the crux of the split. The program allows US employers to hire foreign workers in high-skill occupations where there is a shortage of trained domestic labour. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and other tech-driven industries count on these visas to bring bright young minds in engineering and finance to the US.
Indians win a majority of these visas. But the scheme has for long also been plagued with criticism that tech companies and recruitment firms have gamed it to secure visas they need. American companies have also been accused of replacing American workers with lower-paid Indian employees.
So far, Mr Trump has backed the HIB scheme and had said earlier that he would make immigration easier for high-skilled foreign graduates of US universities However, ignoring the harder, anti-immigrant sentiments in his movement would not be easy.
