Big Tech Has Entered The Chat

The immigration debate; how big government created Silicon Valley; and what to do with the tech bros

My book Nationalism: The Politics of Identity is now available on Amazon. If you enjoy my writings, please consider purchasing it and leaving a positive review.

---

If you’ve followed political discourse at all since Christmas, you won’t have missed the huge debate that unfolded on the issue of legal immigration to the United States. This was sparked by the appointment of Sriram Krishnan, a pro-immigration tech entrepreneur who was appointed as a senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence by the Trump team.

Amid criticism from figures like Laura Loomer over big tech’s promotion of immigration on H-1B visas, MAGA’s new allies in the tech world rushed to defend Krishnan as well as the “nation of immigrants” pitch in favour of a less restrictive immigration policy for corporations. This sparked an even bigger backlash from the majority of Trump supporters and right-wing influencers on X, who quickly realised the new “tech-right” had all the same assumptions about American identity and the good of legal immigration as they did when they were Democrats.

Although the debate was officially about the H-1B visa, this just became a vector for a more general debate on legal immigration, as it became clear there were two fundamentally different and at odds visions of what America is. The argument from the tech right, led by people like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and David Sacks, was the sportsball analogy that for America to have any chance of “winning”, particularly against its competitor China, corporations would need to be free to recruit “the best and the brightest” from around the world, with fewer restrictions on H-1B visas. Greg Johnson:

This is a totally disingenuous argument, because H-1B visas are not for recruiting the “best of the best.” We have a different visa for that: the O visa, which is a temporary non-immigrant worker visa for people of “extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics,” including movies and television. About 38,000 of these visas were granted in 2023. If we had a complete ban on immigration and mass deportation of illegals, I would have no problem with O visas.

H-1B visas are very different. Companies seek these for entry-level positions. They have to prove that they can’t find Americans for the job. But this is obviously bogus, because in many cases, companies have fired existing American workers (mostly white), then brought in H-1Bs, mostly from India, to replace them.

I think it’s safe to say the anti-immigration side of the debate has won out, with many issues around how the H-1B system is being used and abused by American corporations being exposed, and some of the louder advocates for a more open system walking back their claims and trying to reconcile with the MAGA base. Still, it pointed to a deep and fundamental rift, and while the immigration restrictionists may have won the debate on X, the people that matter seem to have their minds made up on this issue. When Donald Trump finally weighed in, he did so not on the side of his chorus of supporters who dominated the debate, but on the side of his tech-bro backers, praising H-1B visas in a New York post interview.

Still, I was pleased to see how much pushback there was on this issue, and I hope it’s a sign of things to come with Trump’s supporters now holding him to account on immigration for the next 4 years. Another thing that was pleasing was how bad the pro-immigration side proved to be at making a compelling case. Most of the loudest advocates for expanded legal immigration, like Richard Hanania and Ian Miles Cheong, are foreigners or immigrants themselves.

Vivek Ramaswamy, usually tactful in selling his vision of civic nationalism to Whites, produced a horrible piece of PR where he lectured Americans on the need to work and study harder if they didn’t want to be replaced by more studious Chinese and Indians.

Some of the new voices that entered the fray to give the perspective as beneficiaries of America’s immigration system turned out to be virulently anti-White. Indian influencers within and outside America responded to the ongoing debate by expressing derision for White Americans, deconstructing their national identity, and denying the achievements of their ancestors.

Typical of the kind of anti-White sentiment one often sees on social media, but now amplified to millions of Trump supporters who see the contempt these people hold for ordinary White Americans in the midst of an immigration debate.

Another lesson from the past few days is that Indian migration seems to have a unique ability to radicalise people against legal immigration and elicit anger over disrespectful attitudes to Whites. I won’t get into a discussion of why that is here, but I do recommend this recent article on the topic of India’s unique problems, the author of which I am planning to interview in the new year.

MAGA Awakened

There is a perpetual debate in nationalist circles on if it’s better for the more explicitly pro-immigration, anti-White side of the political duopoly to win elections, as this is more radicalising to White people concerned about immigration. This was hotly contested again this year, where many opposed to Trump from the right made the case that his victory would “put the right back to sleep” after years of growing pushback against immigration and wokeism under a leftist regime.

Happily, this theory has already shown itself to be false. Far from going back to sleep and blindly supporting Trump as he allowed the tech-right to set immigration policy, the MAGA base has revolted against recent converts like Musk and their renewed push for legal immigration.

Now that Kamala is out of the way, there isn’t an argument for critics to hold their nose and ignore statements like Trump’s “stapling green cards to diplomas”; with four years of a Republican White House, they have to deliver more than not being Kamala Harris.

I myself was surprised at how many MAGA influencers, many of whom have seemed almost unconditionally supportive of Elon until now, came out strongly with the right position on this. And I can see why, looking at Trump’s first term and how little pushback there was from his base on the failed promises of a border wall and mass-deportations, cynics would have expected this cycle to repeat. But what has changed in the 4 years since he left office is White populism becoming a much stronger current within the right-wing.

When I spent some of those years pointing this out and saying it was a good thing that figures like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk were now discussing Antiwhiteism and the Great Replacement, I was told I was “falling for a scam” or “putting all my faith” in them. But regardless of what their motivations for pushing these talking points were, it has helped normalise these views among conservatives. And now, it appears the whole Trump-aligned right is far better on these issues than I suspected. Rather than gloat about wasted energy on the GOP machine, this is a great opportunity for nationalists to help formulate and amplify a nativist opposition to Trump’s administration if it is indeed committed to the tech-right position on expansive immigration.

How big government made Silicon Valley

All week, proponents of the tech-right position have lambasted immigration restrictionists for wanting “DEI for White people” for not wanting native-born Americans to compete with the entire world in an open jobs market. It would be one thing if this refrain were coming from genuine open borders, state abolitionists, but it’s not. Typically, it’s coming from people who have made their fortune through Silicon Valley and their cheerleaders. And Silicon Valley, more than most areas of the American economy, has been a huge beneficiary of protectionism and economic nationalism.

Just take Elon Musk’s flagship company of Tesla: it has such market dominance on electric vehicles in the US only because of severe tariffs on electric vehicles from China. Chinese EV manufacturer BYD now outsells Tesla globally and is already outcompeting the US brand for market share in countries like Australia which have a fair market between the two.

Tesla has also benefited from the big government Inflation Reduction Act, which provide manufacturers like Tesla with tax credits to offset costs of producing electric vehicle batteries in the US.

This is just one example of the kind of public-private collaboration that drives US economic dominance, and Silicon Valley players have benefited more than most. If someone is convinced by those who attribute all of America’s success to “elite human capital” private innovation and free markets (a mythos the CEO’s are happy to embrace), they would probably be astonished by Silicon Valley’s own origin story. Silicon Valley innovation grew out of the fertile soil of a bonanza of taxpayer money, from a government eager to gain a competitive technological edge with the Soviet Union.

One of the companies most responsible for establishing Silicon Valley as a hub of technological innovation, as well as pioneering the production of commercial chips, was Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild was founded by “the traitorous eight” executives who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957. William Shockley is the man who, it is said, “put the silicon in ‘Silicon Valley.’” Shockley invented the transistor, revolutionising electronics and leading to him winning a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. He was also a racialist and eugenicist who spent the latter half of his life arguing for things like race differences in IQ and proposing a "Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan".

The US government was the key player in supporting the fledgling microchip industry; Fairchild’s first big customers were NASA and the US Air Force, who needed these chips for space-guidance systems and missile technology.

As the Space Race developed, NASA became the biggest customer for other Silicon Valley startups, and the flood of government money eventually allowed tech firms to produce chips cheap enough for commercial viability. As Fred Kaplan notes in 1959: The Year That Changed Everything:

It was government that created the large demand that facilitated mass production of the microchip…In 1961, a single chip cost $32. By 1971, thanks to the economies of large-scale production, the cost had plunged to $1.25. By 2000, after the consumer market had vastly expanded, the price of a much more powerful chip would be less than a nickel.

Fairchild’s founders would go on to make many other storied startups, including Intel, using a similar model of disrupting existing markets with the backing of a flood of government money.

The Minuteman program was a godsend for us. The military was willing to pay high prices for performance. How does the small company compete against the giant TI or Motorola? It has to have something unique. And then it has to have an outlet. Certainly, the military market was very important for us.

— Charlie Sporck of Fairchild Semiconductor

The Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, has since become the major source of government funding for Silicon Valley innovation. The most famous DARPA invention is of course the internet, but this government agency is responsible for many of the innovations that inaugurated the digital age, including GPS and the modern Graphical User Interface. DARPA also became the major source of funding for top computer science programs like Stanford’s, which trained a future generation of tech leaders. While it was Sergei Brin and Larry Page who wrote the algorithm that created Google, they did so under funding from the Digital Library Initiative, a multi-agency programme of the big government agencies of the National Science Foundation, NASA and DARPA.

Just as Tesla today benefits from a comprehensive system of tariffs and government subsidies to retain a domestic edge over China, the Silicon Valley players of the 1980s were saved by government intervention against Asia’s then economic giant of Japan. Big government bureaucrats signed the Semiconductor Trade Agreement (1986) with Japan to protect American semiconductor companies from their Japanese rivals undercutting them and winning in the free market. When the US government remained dissatisfied with the implementation of the agreement a year later, it imposed a 100% tariff on on Japanese semiconductors, a retaliation that “ranks among the most dramatic events of postwar U.S. trade policy.”

All this is to say that the kind of people that lead the tech-right owe quite a lot to economic nationalism, protectionism and expansive government spending. Yet the benficiaries of this system turn around and call economic nationalism for any other part of the US economy welfareism, communistic, or race-based DEI.

Making peace with the tech bros

A few days into the H-1B debate, Elon Musk responded to an exposé of the flaws of the system by clarifying that he wants the program to be much more restricted. The 2024 election showed it has been a huge boon for the right materially to have the service of the emerging tech-right, but the immigration debate has shown a fundamental conflict of interests between these people, most of whom were Democrats until the last 4 years, and the natural MAGA base. Given that one side has all the money, the President and Vice-President’s ear, and the platforms this debate is happening on, simply bullying them into submission probably isn’t the most reliable long-term strategy.

Is there a way to marry the tech-right, who care about innovation and liberty free of DEI, leftist social engineering and stringent immigration restrictions with the nativist right, who care about maintaining the demographic and cultural integrity of their country? Here, I will call on a great Irish invention of Special Economic Zones.

An article in The Guardian newspaper, Shannon – a tiny Irish town inspires China’s economic boom, tells the story of how an Irish government policy of establishing a “special economic zone” in Shannon in 1959 was the catalyst for China’s dramatic economic boom in the late 20th century. Brendan O’Regan, the manager of Shannon Airport, was a lifelong innovator who invented the concept of the airport duty-free shop, and established the world's first at Shannon. He then pioneered the “Shannon Free Zone”, an international business park and the world’s first ever free trade zone, attracting companies like Lufthansa and Intel.

When China’s then Premier, Wen Jiabao, visited the site in County Clare in 2005:

It was like a religious pilgrimage for the then Chinese premier and arguably the world’s second most powerful man. He was the latest in a long line of high-level Chinese dignitaries to come and pay their respects to the site on the west coast of Ireland where they believe China’s rise to superpower status really began.

This is because, the article claims, Shannon’s model inspired a senior minister in the Chinese government Jiang Zemin to take the concept of SEZ’s to Deng Xiaoping after attending a three-week training programme in Shannon on how to set up an industrial free zone.

As soon as there had been rapprochement with China, the assumption in the West was that as they opened up to the world economically, political liberalisation would follow. This was a reasonable assumption, given that it had been a pretty universal pattern everywhere else. The challenge for Deng and his reformist colleagues was how to modernise and gain the rewards of the global marketplace without becoming globalist.

The Special Economic Zones established in 1980 — Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen — allowed China to benefit from pockets of highly developed, more lightly regulated centers of industry and innovation. They also served as laboratories for experiments in economic policy without having to radically alter the course of the national economy or have the affects of liberalisation spread across the country.

Perhaps there are parallels to draw to today, where the ascendant MAGA movement wants to keep flighty techno-utopians onside without turning the whole country into San Francisco. And this is why I would like to propose a remedy that should satisfy all parties involved.

B.A.S.E.D.

Bay Area Special Economic District (B.A.S.E.D.) is my proposed Special Economic Zone for the United States. The idea is simple: designate an area of the Bay Area including Silicon Valley as a new special economic zone subject to a host of special economic and immigration law exemptions. The specifics will be for the planners to decide, but could include corporate and other tax exemptions for startups to encourage a culture of entrepreneurialism; a special corporate tax rate which could be used to incentivise US corporations that have moved their offices elsewhere to relocate back to America (something the Trump team has signalled will be a priority); more lax zoning laws; and of course, a less restrictive immigration policy than the rest of the country.

The important point will be that the immigrants that come to work in the Special Economic District will be limited to it, and can’t relocate themselves or their family members anywhere else in the US (they can, of course, be free to travel the rest of the US as tourists and bring their Bay Area money with them).

Needless to say, a prerequisite to this policy would be the scrapping of birthright citizenship and a clear understanding that inhabitants of the zone will never be Americans. The corporations and cosmopolitan tech-bros can be free of an immigration policy as stringent as what America needs right now, and populists can be assured their cosmopolitan contagion won’t spread to the rest of the country.

I realise this is an ambitious proposal (though if the most powerful businessmen in America get behind it, anything is possible), and perhaps California will provide too many regulatory and beuraucratic hurdles to achieve something so ambitious. Since it seems Trump already has his sights set on Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, perhaps this expansionist mindset could instead be turned to a more modest gain in Baja, Mexico.

If the US were to put boots on the ground in Mexico to tackle the Cartels as newly designated terorist organisations, the pretext for disengagement and securing the territory could be a portion of the Baja Peninsula to be turned into a North American Dubai for the tech bros to have their way with. We can even keep the B.A.S.E.D. acronym for the development of the Baja Area Special Economic District, and there are probably some sweeteners that can be thrown in for Mexico in exchange. Ambitious, but probably more realistic than Greenland or Canada.

And if California, north or south of the border, can’t be the space for the Special Economic Designation, the tech-right can look to El Salvador and their favourite populist leader Nayib Bukele to find somewhere more accommodating. In 2019, there was a little reported story of how the Chinese government had offered $7,000 to families in Isla Perico, an island located in El Salvador, to relocate and make way for a new Chinese Special Economic Zone, with plans for a $3 billion development project.

No doubt, Bukele would be excited about the opportunities offered by devoting a piece of his country’s real estate to a project like this involving the best minds of Silicon Valley, and this would be far preferable to the US Security State than its great rival China securing more influence in the region. Another little Central American country, Honduras, attempted something similar with its creation of Prospera, a charter city on a small island off its coast designed to be a “Zone for Employment and Economic Development” as a way to generate economic prosperity for the struggling statelet.

Another proposal I've seen is "Net Zero" migration, creating a new visa category that requires paying another naturalised citizen to repatriate to their country of origin. Such an arrangement would address corporate concerns about being able to attract talent while addressing patriotic concerns about demographic change. Qualifying naturalised citizens could sign up with what their citizenship is worth to them, and somebody looking to move to America would be able to purchase it. Big Tech loves market-oriented win-win solutions, right?

Maybe these proposals sound fantastical, but the point is that in a country as big as the US, where Whites are already approaching minority status, there can be decentralised solutions to these problems that foster innovation and bring out the best in “elite human capital” without turning our countries into giant call-centers.

This is indeed quite a compromise from where the populist right is now in demanding these jobs go to native born Americans, but I think in the future it could prove a worthy sacrifice to lose a little on that front if it means not making nationalists the chief enemy of the tech right before the easier victories against the left have even been attained. The billionaires in the Special Economic District can rest easy watching the mass deportations and scrapping of H-1B visas happening on the mainland knowing it’s a debate that doesn’t involve them, and they can continue to direct their money and influence to rolling back wokeism and the civil rights regime, further allowing racially conscious people to self-segregate and form their own little special districts on the continent, further rolling back enforced diversity. A true win-win solution.