Elon Musk: "Immigrants for me, but not for thee"

You may have heard that a fight has broken out on X/Twitter between the tech bros and MAGA loyalists over immigration. Folks like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and David Sacks want the U.S. to issue more H1-B visas for people (mainly from India) to work in their tech companies, while MAGA loyalists bought into Trump's fear-mongering about those "brown foreigners" ruining our country.

I'd like to focus on Musk's arguments because most accounts I've ready about the dust-up have missed an important point. Here's what one of his favorites posted as a summary of the argument:

So basically the right split into two factions, tech right and right right, and the tech right is like "hey we need h-1b visa people to do the jobs," and the right right was like "no you need to hire americans," and the tech right is like "but you guys are retarded," and the right right is like "well you don't train us," and the tech right is like "you can't outtrain being retarded," and while all this was going on we learned some people *really* don't like Indians.

Musk's response was: "That pretty much sums it up." In other words, he's cool with calling MAGA folks "retarded." 

When challenged by another person that there must be enough Americans to fill those jobs, here's how Musk responded:

That last paragraph sounds an awful lot like so-called "scientific racism," where group differences in things like intelligence are based on race. But of course, we already knew that Musk is a white supremacist. 

What I want to focus on is his statement that "there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America." He buttressed that argument by retweeting several articles about "the engineering talent shortage." 

What Musk doesn't want you to know is that the U.S. is currently facing labor shortages for construction workers, teachers, nurses, home care workers, firefighters, factory workers, farmworkers, police officers, etc. The biggest challenge our economy will face over the next decade is an overall labor shortage. 

Musk wants you to believe that the labor shortage affecting the tech industry is happening because not enough Americans are smart enough to fill those jobs. So he wants a special carve-out for his businesses to hire immigrants. But otherwise, he's totally cool with Trump's plan to deport 11 million immigrants that will cripple every other major industry. 

That's what happens when you make the richest man on the planet your unaccountable shadow-president.