Explainer: Why Sriram Krishnan’s White House entry shifted focus to immigrant work visas

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US President-elect Donald Trump's appointment of Indian-American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as Senior Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence (AI) last week has brought back the debate over US immigration policies.

After tech leaders and co-leads of the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy defended the existing visa system, Trump also expressed support for skilled foreign worker visas in a recent interview.

A war of words has broken on the issue with several MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters posting strongly worded posts on Musk-owned X platform (formerly Twitter) and calling out why Americans should be preferred over other foreign nationals.

What happened?

It all began when a prominent supporter of the MAGA political movement, Laura Loomer, opposed Trump's decision to appoint Krishnan to the White House on December 28 on X. She said Krishnan's past support for easing green card caps and simplifying the process for skilled foreign workers’ entry into the US contradicts Trump’s agenda.

The post on the microblogging site triggered a chain of reactions, in which the DOGE colleagues defended the move by Trump to appoint Krishnan.

While Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy say H-1B visas are required for bringing in highly skilled and hard-to-fill positions, data paints a different picture. This is because over 75 percent of the visas issued in the last five financial years under H-1B jobs pay less than $150,000, according to data from the US Department of Labor and crunched by Robert Sterling of EV Partners.

H-1B is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations such as science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and IT. Indian tech companies such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, HCL Technologies, and Wipro send their employees to the US on this visa.

Trump’s U-Turn

Trump’s recent comments sit at odds with his stance earlier.

“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the New York Post in an interview. Meanwhile, he had previously termed H1-B “very bad” and “unfair” for US workers.

Compare that with his comments on Saturday where he termed the H-1B visa as a “great program” again, adding that he is a “believer in H-1B” which has been used by his company.

Moreover, back in 2022, Trump’s company said an H-1B visa application was withdrawn.

“Major corporations profit off the abuse of the H-1B visa programme, and President Trump, like other US presidents, has demonstrated a lack of will to stand up to corporate benefactors,” Daniel Kotchen, partner at US-based Kotchen & Low LLP, had told Moneycontrol earlier.

Many in the tech world complain that there are plenty of shortcomings in the present H1-B visa rules including a lottery-based system.

Elon Musk’s stance

On December 29, Sterling went on to say that “America needs to be a destination for the world’s most elite talent. But the H-1B program isn’t the way to do that”.

Responding to Sterling, Musk suggested, “Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.”

“I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform,” Musk said.

To another user, Musk, who himself came on an H-1B visa from South Africa, said that the reason he and many critical people who have built SpaceX, Tesla and other major tech companies was because of H-1B visas. These companies went on to make America strong.

Musk then said he is ready to “go to war” on this issue.

Ramaswamy defended the visa

Ramaswamy has time and again defended bringing in skilled professionals, including through the H-1B visa route.

The US entrepreneur has even batted for an overhaul of the existing system to remove the inefficiencies.

Ramaswamy, who initially sought the Republican presidential nomination but withdrew to support former President Trump, said that direct Silicon Valley lobbying meant an employee would be “a slave” to the hiring company and couldn't switch to a different company.

“When it's lasted that long, you need to shut it down, start with a blank slate, and rebuild from scratch.”

On December 26, Ramaswamy took to X replying to MAGA supporters that the reason top tech companies hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over native Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit but culture.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he posted on the microblogging site owned by his DOGE colleague Musk.

He said the present culture celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad.

Ramaswamy believes Trump’s ascendency will hopefully mark the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if the culture fully wakes up. “A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence.” he wrote in a long X post.