This week, Donald Trump picked Indian-American entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan as Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence. Each Trump cabinet nomination has incited divisive debates on social media. The venture capitalist’s incoming move met with a similar backlash, especially from Laura Loomer.
The president-elect’s announcement also name-dropped the Bay Area Venture capitalist David Sacks, confirming that he and Krishnan would basically function as a team during the incoming second term. “Working closely with David Sacks, Sriram will focus on ensuring continued American leadership in A.I., and help shape and coordinate A.I. policy across Government, including working with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sriram started his career at Microsoft as a founding member of Windows Azure,” Trump added in the official statement.
It hadn’t even been that long since the updates emerged that Sacks, Trump’s pick for AI and crypto czar, jumped in to back his teammate against the far-right commentator’s disapproval.
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Laura Loomer fumes at Sriram Krishnan’s Trump admin nomination
Condemning the “disturbing” appointment of Krishnan as part of the Trump administration 2.0, Loomer wrote on X, “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.”
Lambasting the move that according to her does not stand by an “America First policy,” she alleged that Sriram Krishnan’s appointment would work against Trump’s immigration control agenda as the Indian American member in his cabinet “wants to REMOVE all restrictions on green card caps in the United States so that foreign students (which makes up 78% of the employees in Silicon Valley) can come to the US and take jobs that should be given to American STEM students.”
David Sacks and Elon Musk support Sriram Krishnan’s call to remove country caps for green cards
David Sacks quickly pushed his counter-argument as a “Point of clarification” on the Elon Musk-led SNS platform. Loomer’s incendiary reaction alluded to Krishnan’s November 14 tweet: “Anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge.” Defending his claims, Sacks dismissed the political activist’s theory, saying, “He said he wants to remove *country* caps on green cards. Right now, every country in the world gets allocated the same number of green cards, no matter how many qualified applicants it has.”
Further explaining what Krishnan was addressing in the old post, the fellow Trump 2.0 nominee went on, “So applicants from India have an 11 year wait whereas applicants from many other countries have no wait at all. Sriram still supports skills-based criteria for receiving a green card, not making the program unlimited. In fact, he wants to make the program entirely merit-based. Supporting a limited number of highly skilled immigrants is still a prevalent view on the right.” Defending Krishnan’s understanding of the issue, Sacks concluded with the assertion, “Sriram is definitely not a ‘career leftist.’”
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Elon Musk eventually backed the explanation with the succinct reply, “Makes sense.”
Loomer and Sacks’ X face-off regarding the country cap narrative aptly summed up the pervasive argument surrounding this issue.
What is Country Cap: How Indians suffer because of it
According to the National Immigration Forum, the Immigration Act of 1990 dictated that “each country is allotted 7 percent of the available green cards for both family-based and employment-based immigrants. This means that every country has a maximum number of 44,100 family-based immigrants and 14,700 employment-based immigrants for each fiscal year.”
However, this uniformity of available quotas poses a major inconvenience for countries boasting higher populations than others, such as India, China and Mexico.
As per the Worldometer’s December 24 reading, the Marshall Islands have a population of 36,930, whereas India boasts an incomparably larger population of 1.4 billion. Nevertheless, the number of allocated green cards remains the same for both countries. Ultimately, people wanting to immigrate to the US from nations as heavily populated as India have to bear the brunt of enormous backlogs. In some cases, this leaves applicants with no choice but to wait for decades from when they submit their application to when a green card finally becomes available.
According to the Annual Report of Immigrant Visa Applicants in the Family-Sponsored and Employment-Based Preferences Registered at the National Visa Center as of November 1, 2020, US Dep’t of State, the green card backlog report of the year for the three most adversely affected countries looked something like:
- Mexico: 1,224,062
- Philippines: 318,481
- India: 309,758
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Moreover, workers already employed in the US, thanks to employment visas but still waiting on their green card arrival, have a restricted ability to work and travel. They’re inevitably burdened with the responsibility of continuously renewing their temporary status until the green card is theirs.
Krishnan, Sacks, and Musk have thus emerged as prominent figures emphasising the need to attract skilled immigrants to make significant contributions to the US economy. International dreamers may view their unstable employment status as a major red flag driving a highly skilled workforce away from the US. This is all because the disproportionate rate of green card approvals and the exacerbating backlogs for countries with massive populations remain unaddressed.
