Donald Trump’s mandate is clear: end immigration.
The president-elect has yet to take office, but his supporters are already intuiting that we are about to get more of the same, or worse.
Polls consistently show majorities across the board want to a hard stop to migration, including legal immigration. Aside from the enormous pressure millions of immigrants are putting on public services and real estate prices, the majority of new employment opportunities produced by Joe Biden’s attempt at a “New Deal” have gone to foreigners.
On the issue of mass deportations, most observers and insiders agree we will instead see business as usual. As usual, Trump has been deploying a rhetorical sleight of hand to get the mass media chirping — in recent news cycles, making empty, impossible threats to end birthright citizenship — to cover up the fact that his administration plans to, at best, return to the Obama norm on enforcement.
The Brookings Institute estimates that if Trump returns to the same policies of his first administration, close to six million new immigrants will be imported to the country by the end of his term. Lower than the record eight million under Biden’s administration, but not nearly what Trump’s supporters are expecting.
But there is reason to believe Trump will not merely go back to his first term’s policies. Trump’s second administration is being strongly influenced by Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, who have been one of America’s most vocal lobbies for drastic increases in legal immigration.
Last summer, Trump, who has repeatedly suggested letting in a lot of people “legally” in off the cuff interviews elsewhere, developed this idea to his new “Crypto and AI Czar” David Sacks. In the podcast, Trump vowed that his administration will seek to give automatic residency permits to any foreign student who graduates from an American university or two-year college. For context: during the period of 2023-24, the US hosted 1.1 million foreign students, the majority of them from India and China. Under Trump’s plan, we can safely forecast that many more will pour into our universities to enjoy this fast track to a green card.
While voters and “informal advisors” like Kris Kobach draw up fantasy immigration agendas, lobbyists and donors who actually have Trump’s ear are pushing the eager to be used new president to increase legal immigration to record highs. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk both support substantial increases in legal immigration, with Musk recently starting a “debate” in support of a green card giveaway.
As highly visible Trump promoters, Musk and Ramaswamy have been shy about publicly floating an exact number for how many more legal immigrants they want during the campaign season, but some numbers thrown around by advocates for increasing this type of migration range from two to five million per year.
Sniffing around on the periphery are other open borders activists, such as Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta recently donated $1 million dollars to Trump’s inauguration. A rogue’s gallery of wealthy Indian and Jewish tech capitalists laser focused on massively expanding the pool of cheap labor are coming out on top in the scrum in Trump’s orbit.
In the think-tank sphere, groups like the Stimson Center, Council on Foreign Relations, and others have made the case that America cannot compete with China, Russia and Iran in the imperial Great Game unless it imports millions of Indian engineers.
These concerns are merited. Russia produces 454,436 engineers annually, while the United States produces 237,826 (Iran is virtually tied with the US for third). This helps explain why American military planners are baffled by technology such as Russia’s hypersonic Oreshnik missile or the construction of the Crimea Bridge, which has been referred to as an engineering marvel.
There are several solutions to this gap in building and innovation. One is to train Americans, especially the country’s talented but institutionally discriminated against white population, in STEM. Additionally, talented and intelligent people in America are often pulled into non-productive fields such as law and finance due to the fact that these are far more profitable and socially prestigious than being a scientist or engineer. Another potential fix is to give up on the idea of being a world hegemonic empire and learn to live in a multipolar world. But America’s elites are closed off to these perspectives, so their answer appears to be to simply bring all of India, whose engineers are of low quality, to the US.
Political cogs appear to be quietly moving in this direction. In an interview with Daniel Horowitz last month, Republican Congressman Chip Roy hinted that he was working on a behind-the-scenes bipartisan immigration deal that would trade some immigration enforcement against illegal aliens for a huge increase in legal immigration.
If what Trump is telegraphing comes to fruition, the GOP and Silicon Valley’s solution to Biden’s open southern border will be to fly the aliens in, legally.
