James' World 2

Weeks before President-elect Donald J. Trump is to take office, a major rift has emerged among his supporters over immigration and the place of foreign workers in the U.S. labor market.

The debate hinges on how much tolerance, if any, the incoming administration should have for skilled immigrants brought into the country on work visas.

The schism pits immigration hard-liners against many of the president-elect’s most prominent backers from the technology industry — among them Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who helped back Mr. Trump’s election efforts with more than a quarter of a billion dollars, and David Sacks, a venture capitalist picked to be czar for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency policy.

The tech industry has long relied on foreign skilled workers to help run its companies, a labor supply that critics say undercuts wages for American citizens.

The dispute, which late Thursday exploded online into acrimony, finger-pointing, and accusations of censorship, frames a policy quandary for Mr. Trump. The president-elect has in the past expressed a willingness to provide more work visas to skilled workers, but has also promised to close the border, deploy tariffs to create more jobs for American citizens, and severely restrict immigration.

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist, and fervent Trump loyalist, helped set off the altercation earlier this week by criticizing Mr. Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American venture capitalist, to be an adviser on artificial intelligence policy. In a post, she said she was concerned that Mr. Krishnan, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in India, would have influence on the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and mentioned “third-world invaders.”

“It’s alarming to see the number of career leftists who are now being appointed to serve in Trump’s admin when they share views that are in direct opposition to Trump’s America First agenda,” Ms. Loomer wrote on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk.

Ms. Loomer’s comments surfaced a simmering tension between longtime supporters of Mr. Trump, who embrace his virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his more recently acquired backers from the tech industry, many of whom have built or financed businesses that rely on the government’s H-1B visa program to hire skilled workers from abroad.

In response, Mr. Sacks called Ms. Loomer’s critiques “crude,” while Mr. Musk posted regularly this week about the lack of homegrown talent to fill all the needed positions within American technology companies.