Adam Lashinsky writes:

The spiteful bickering in recent days between Donald Trump’s Silicon Valley enablers and his MAGA acolytes is an unexpected reminder of how quickly the folks around the president-elect can put everything to the side while trying to hurt one another. Apparently preferring to sling insults rather than enjoy Christmas with their families, Trump’s anti-immigrant supporters spent much of the last week battling on X with his new tech-industry pals over the arcane issue of limited-term visas for highly skilled immigrants.

For now, Trump is siding with the Elon Musk camp. But those who think this is just a passing spat are ignoring a fundamental truth about the Silicon Valley plutocrats: They are a selfish bunch who have shown time and again that what interests them most is themselves.

The brouhaha started when Laura Loomer, a member of the MAGA faithful who in any other era would have been an irrelevant gadfly, took issue with the immigration-policy opinions of Sriram Krishnan, a little-known venture capitalist Trump has tapped to advise his administration on artificial intelligence.

An immigrant himself, Krishnan backs more immigration, particularly through H-1B visas, a vehicle that allows U.S. companies to more easily recruit well-credentialed foreigners. H-1Bs are a curio in the immigration bazaar: Compared with the masses of undocumented workers entering the United States, they are almost an afterthought. And though the program has been abused for years by some companies, the tool prevents few, if any, Americans from getting high-tech jobs.

Loomer and her ilk nevertheless alighted on H-1Bs as an example of a permissive immigration regime. She tossed in a bit of racism by highlighting the sanitation challenges of India, Krishnan’s birthplace, prompting Musk, also an immigrant, to weigh in at length in favor of supporting non-U.S. job seekers. Musk also showed his true colors in the debate by advocating a position so uncontroversial in Silicon Valley that it echoes what Apple CEO Tim Cook has been saying for years: Tech companies need to look abroad because of a paucity of qualified talent at home.

For context, it’s important to understand that self-interest is a foundational ethos in Silicon Valley, a place where boys who read science fiction in their bedrooms and then Ayn Rand in their college dorms grew up to be today’s Masters of the Universe. For years, the tech crowd tried its best to ignore Washington, barely acknowledging that their industry was built on government contracts — first to supply electronic componentry for Cold War defense, then to nurture the internet, which began as a government communications initiative. [Continue reading…]