On New Year’s Eve, America’s most prominent nativist declared that the nation needs more immigrants.
“We need competent people, we need smart people coming into our country,” President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, “we need a lot of people coming in.”
It may sound as though Trump was just visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. But it was actually extremely online white nationalists who triggered the president-elect’s rhetorical shift on immigration.
On December 22, Trump named the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as a senior adviser for artificial intelligence. The racist provocateur — and Trump insider — Laura Loomer condemned Krishnan’s selection because the Indian-American investor had recently called for increasing skilled immigration. In Loomer’s telling, Krishnan wants to let more “foreign students” come “to the US and take jobs that should be…