The warm and fuzzies that had grown between Donald Trump’s newfound Silicon Valley allies and his MAGA base during the election had all but gone cold by the time the once and future president’s Electoral College victory was certified this week. The long and short of it is that the base is only now realizing it is far more hawkish on immigration than the tech bros. But the president’s new allies are better funded and connected. That means they will likely be able to exert more influence over policy in the incoming administration. To borrow from the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones,” there’s “trouble ahead, trouble behind.”

One of the key beliefs held by the come-lately tech world Trump supporters is that illegal immigration is bad and legal immigration is good. That view is not unique to recent converts like Elon Musk, although it did seem to be on the way out for good at last, as a relic of the allegedly dead GOP consensus. The problem is that Musk, who very much falls into this camp as the richest man in the world, also happens to have been Trump’s biggest donor.

In an illustrative post on X that sparked backlash, Musk claimed that there is a “dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.” That’s not really accurate, and it’s interesting to hear him sound just like lobbyists who work to keep cheap labor from abroad flowing for employers. The truth is that Americans still have the right stuff; they’re just being systematically passed over. The MAGA base is right about that.

Conveniently, there has been a “skills gap” of STEM workers ever since employers realized they could hire foreign workers who are cheaper and more docile than their domestic counterparts. Though that myth has been repeatedly debunked and slayed, it never remains dead. It arises again and again to the top of immigration discourse. In 2022, Ron Hira, an Economic Policy Institute research associate and associate professor at Howard University, used Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data to try to kill it off once more.

Hira looked at BLS data on three key factors: employment projections, unemployment rates, and wages.

To start, he found that the number of people graduating with bachelor’s degrees in computer science, mathematics, and engineering outpaces job growth. It’s important to note that not every job related to math or computer science requires a four-year degree. In fact, many do not. “Comparing the most recent employment growth projections, from 2020 to 2030, with educational attainment in those fields right now indicates that roughly 569,000 of the 734,900 projected new jobs in computer and math industries will require a bachelor’s degree,” Hira wrote.

That projection translates into an annual average growth of 56,900 positions. That seems like a tall order for employers to fill. But the data says otherwise. Hira noted that “in 2020, the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in computer science alone was 97,047—40,147 more than the implied annual demand from the BLS projections.”

“This mismatch is even more pronounced for engineering,” he added, “where the number of degrees produced in a single academic year (148,120 in 2019–2020) exceeds not just the projected average annual growth, but the entire ten-year projected job growth from 2020 to 2030 (127,700).”

Hira also found that unemployment rates among STEM workers are unusually elevated, given their skills. In other words, there are many of them looking for work, which makes the argument that there is a shortage seem even more untenable. One can find countless stories of skilled, motivated Americans being handed pink slips by employers who have decided to replace them with cheaper foreign workers.

What about wages and wage growth? If there were actually a shortage, one would expect it to be reflected in higher pay and better compensation, as workers with these skills become more valuable. However, that is just not reflected in the data. In fact, between 2016 and 2021, “after accounting for inflation, real wage growth was minimal or negative: real wages for computer and mathematical occupations declined by 0.4% over the five-year period,” Hira wrote.

None of this is new. In 2020, Bloomberg’s Rachel Rosenthal published a data-heavy, definitive article with a headline that punched right to the point: “Tech Companies Want You to Believe America Has a Skills Gap.” In 2014, Michael S. Teitelbaum, who is a demographer and former vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, concluded that “alarms about widespread shortages or shortfalls in the number of US scientists and engineers are quite inconsistent with nearly all available evidence.”

Why, then, do we keep hearing about it? Good old-fashioned industry lobbying. Investigative reporter Lee Fang recently exposed one all too typical example.

Back in 2018, the Council on Foreign Relations published “Independent Task Force Report No. 76,” which focused on the challenges to the American workforce posed by artificial intelligence, robotics, and more. It argued that restricting “highly skilled” immigration would be harmful and, indeed, concluded that openness to that sort of immigration was essential to innovation. To that end, it called on the federal government to keep its hands off the visa programs used by employers to hire foreign workers.

It turns out that just before that report was published, task force chair John Engler, the former GOP governor of Michigan, had been hired as a lobbyist for “the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), an industry group founded in Delhi that advocates on behalf of India’s largest IT outsourcing firms,” Fang revealed.

That information was not disclosed anywhere in the report, though it obviously should have been. Organizations like NASSCOM exist to facilitate outsourcing that directly affects American workers. It’s a perfect snapshot of how the scam works. The discrete pay-off from an interest group meets the laundering of hifalutin “bipartisan” consensus around securing the prosperity of the nation through a prestigious institution.

But in the end, the legal immigration system in America has nothing to do with the “best and brightest” and boils down to a well-oiled machine that serves one master, and his name is greed.