By P.K.Balachandran/Daily Mirror

Colombo, December 30 – US President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) camp is now a house divided on racial, religious and doctrinal lines.

The fault lines are basically three: (1) Whites/Non-Whites; (2) Christian supremacists/Other religious groups; (3) Those who believe that to be deemed American one has to be native to the soil of America/ Those who believe that Americanness is based on citizenship and acceptance of certain core American values.  

These dichotomies play out on various issues, such as the recruitment of foreigners (especially Indians and Chinese) by high-tech industries under the H1-B work visa scheme, and the desirability of non-Christian immigrants contesting elections for top political offices.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy Indian origin tech entrepreneur, who tried to get the Republican party’s nomination for the US Presidential election in 2024, was a firm believer in the principles of MAGA such as the theory that a multi-racial recruitment policy or Wokeism was bad for America’s wellbeing and progress. To him, Wokeism was antithetical to the American system which rested on merit-based recruitment.

But come 2025, Ramaswamy , who is now bidding for the Governorship of Ohio, is feeling the pinch of racial profiling and discrimination. He is being bitterly opposed by White Christian “heritage” Americans, because he is a Hindu of Indian origin.

“I think I’m going to go to Ohio and the word that we are looking for is denial. We have to deny Vivek Ramaswamy the governorship. This is the only race I care about in ‘26. It’s the only one I care about,” declared Nick Fuentes, a White racist and anti-Semitic  campaigner.

Ramaswamy openly challenges the notion that heritage Americans are more American than those Americans of foreign origin.  

“Our lineage is not our strength. Our true strength is what unites us across diversity,” he told “AmericaFest”, a conservative conference organized by “Turning Point USA” founded by the slain Christian activist Charlie Kirk.

Ramaswamy who had written books and appeared on public platforms to denounce the left-wing multi-racial “woke” ideology, is now the favourite whipping boy of right-wing White racist ideologues, who argue that the US should be built on “blood and soil nationalism.”

The conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who is close to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, sat down for a “friendly interview” with Nick Fuentes. When the President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, refused to criticize Carlson for doing the interview, senior functionaries and board members at the conservative think tank resigned in protest.

Derogatory slurs that were once seen only in extreme, right-wing pockets of the internet, are becoming more mainstream, like claims that Indians are “stealing American jobs,” New York Times said.

US Vice President J.D.Vance had said in speech earlier that he was worried that if being an American simply meant adhering to an ideal, such as the Declaration of Independence, then American identity “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens.”

He further said, “Defining citizenship purely as adhering to the principles of the nation’s founding documents would exclude many on the right wing individuals who don’t subscribe to those principles and whose own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”

H1-B Visas

Anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly against South Asians, surged in 2023- 2024 when the US Presidential elections for the first time featured two Indian American candidates, Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, and a Black and South Asian Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.  Now, Vice President Vance’s wife, Usha, an Indian American and a practicing Hindu, has become a target.

“Stop AAPI Hate”, a group that monitors anti-Asian discrimination, said that posts on X that featured anti-Indian slurs garnered 280 million views over two months earlier this year.

Ben Shapiro, a conservative Jewish commentator, warned in a speech to the Heritage Foundation that “if conservatives do not stand up and draw lines, conservatism and the dream of America itself will cease to exist.”

According to a recent survey by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, almost a third of Republicans under the age of 50 openly express racist or antisemitic views, a finding based on a poll of about 2,800 mostly Republican voters.

Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of “Stop AAPI Hate”, said the anti-Indian rhetoric has been driven partly by President Trump’s bid  to limit H-1B visas, a program that has historically allowed 85,000 foreign tech professionals a year, two thirds of them being Indians.

For a lot of Gen Z conservatives, the H1-1B visa issue is a hot topic because of the Trump administration’s failure to generate jobs for heritage Americans. The “Zoomercons” ( as Gen Z conservatives are called) have vilified the H1-B visa program as “rigged” and “abused,” a “scam” perpetrated by the Republican Party’s corporate-friendly wing and Silicon Valley honchos. Young Americans with STEM degrees are getting “passed up for cheap foreign labour,” it is alleged.

Some Indians Also Against H1-B visas

Some Indians in the US also support the demand to end H1-B visas. Nalin Haley, son of the Indo-American Nikki Haley, who was the US  ambassador to UN during the first Trump administration, appeared on Fox News to call for a total ban on both the H-1B and legal immigration.

“We need to punish companies who are not putting American workers first, and are putting foreigners first,” Nalin Haley said.

Case For H1-B visas

But there are also MAGA Americans who see value in the H1-B visas as it brings good quality but cheaper labour and also yields profits. “New York Times” quotes Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University who focuses on immigration as saying that the benefits can include economic growth and innovation that leads to more jobs for US-born workers.

In a Harvard Youth Poll released recently, 48% of Americans aged 18 to 29 reported that immigration posed no threat to their job prospects, compared with 31% who felt that it did.

Trump Vacillates

Both Trump and Vance have been vacillating on these issues. Appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News, Trump defended the H1-B visa. “You have to bring in talent,” the President said. “You can’t take people off the unemployment line and say, ‘Go make missiles!”

However, despite signalling support for the program, the White House announced in September that it would impose a US$ 100,000-a-year fee on each visa given to skilled workers. However, it quickly clarified that the fee would instead be a one-time cost. A White House spokesperson then said that the $100,000 fee was a “significant first step to ensure American workers are no longer replaced by lower-wage foreign labour.”

Vice President JD Vance in a controversial July speech spoke against “importing millions and millions of low-wage serfs” and extolled the country and its heritage as “a distinctive place with a distinctive people.”

“In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” He received some of the loudest applause from the crowd when he told attendees that “by the grace of God we will always be a Christian nation.”

Like Trump Vance insulted Omar Fateh, a Minnesota state senator of Somali descent and criticized the party’s potential leaders, including Governor  Gavin Newsom of California.

He said that Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Black Democrat in Texas running for Senate, had a “street girl persona” that “is about as real as her nails.”

Ms. Crockett replied in a text message saying that “Republicans like JD Vance attack my nails and lashes because they can’t keep up with me when it comes to debating the issues. While JD Vance is talking about my looks, I’m talking about legislation. I’m talking about lowering the costs for groceries, utilities and health care.”

But Vance contradicted himself later. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests. Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement,” Vance said in the interview, which was published after his speech at Turning Point USA.

“Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re Black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting,” he added.

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USA, Donald Trump, MAGA, Race, Ideology, Origin, Qualification for being a true American,