Trump will be a disaster for the entire country, of course, but let me concentrate on his effect on my own area, that of high-tech. I see the following places where he’s most likely to damage the field: curtailing the flow of talent to the US by immigration restrictions, and encouraging financial crime in the high-tech sector.

First up: immigration and talent. The CEOs of Microsoft, Alphabet, IBM, Tesla, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, Adobe, Micron, and Zoom are all foreign-born. I actually work for an Irish CEO at a semiconductor company. Forbes estimates that about half of the high-tech firms in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. The American Immigration Council estimates that of the 10 million STEM workers in the US as of 2019, about a quarter are immigrants. I once found that 30% of the Nobel Science Prize winners who did their main work in the US were not born here, the highest proportion of all the countries who had won a significant number of Nobels.

Of those 2.5M immigrants, maybe a third, 750K, are here on H1-B visas, an oppressive company-controlled system. The tech-bro faction of Trumpism loves H1-Bs because they’re forced to work hard and work cheaply, since the visa is held by the company, not the individual. That fits with their feudalist attitudes. They’re trying to replace low-level workers with AI anyway, although that’s likely to go as badly as their attempts to robot-ize.

Regardless, a lot of the rest are on green cards, general work visas. They’re all at risk under Trump. I work with many people in this situation, as does all of high tech. They’ve come here to contribute their talents to US operations in return for pay, experience, and opportunity, and they are a major national asset. A lot of them find that they prefer the relatively open and tolerant US, since home may be Russia, or Iran, or China. If you were an enemy of the US, one of the best ways to destroy its international dominance would be to keep this talent out.

You might think that MAGA-ist hatred is directed mainly at lower-class immigrants, at the Central Americans and Caribbeans whose desperation keeps all the low-end wages low. That ignores the jealousy component of hate. East Asians and South Asians do very well in America, with much higher incomes and educations than MAGA whites. Hatred of them is the latest version of anti-Semitism, and has the same sources. They’re not taking the crummy jobs – they’re the doctors, lawyers, and engineers. They’re going to be particularly targeted, regardless of what the tech-bros want.

Second – Trump will enhance crime. There are several kinds of high-tech crime. The most obvious is crypto-currency, a tech that has found no legitimate uses, but is great for moving illegal money around. It is especially good for moving money out of China, which its government otherwise restricts, and that’s where most of the crypto mining happens. The crypto-crats were all in on Trump, since they fear the restrictions that decent regulation would bring. They also hope that the federal government will bless their field, perhaps by using crypto for government transactions, and so prop up their various frauds.

Another major type of high-tech crime is stock manipulation, something that Elon Musk is expert in. He was convicted of it by the SEC after he claimed that Tesla was going private, and settled for $40M and stepping down as chair in 2018. He has hated them ever since, and will do his best to defang them. Yet the problem is widespread in the Valley, ranging from the outright fraud of Theranos, to the eye-watering valuation of Nvidia today. It briefly eclipsed Apple as the most valuable company in the world at $3.4T, although it only has a quarter of Apple’s revenue. It alone accounts for much of the rise in the S&P 500 this year, and it’s all based on over-hyping AI. Trump will basically disable financial regulation, allowing scamsters to loot other investors.

The third major type is monopoly. Google is particularly guilty of this, what with controlling about half of the world’s advertising. They control the market for it, being both a buyer and seller. Amazon likewise has a lock on company exposure, what with requiring firms that sell on Amazon to not undercut its prices elsewhere, and to pay exorbitant fees. Both of them were about to lose to Lina Khan, the current head of the FTC appointed by Biden, and both of them will get away when she is replaced.

The hyping and the monopolies are why high tech has not delivered much recent years. They are driven to pump up each new idea to ludicrous levels: Large Language Models (AI), virtual reality (the Metaverse), and self-driving cars. There is value in each of these, but nowhere near as much as they claim. Ed Zitron has a nice term for it – the rot-com economy. They pretend to be innovators while their actual revenue comes from attention theft and vicious business practices.

Grifts are what has defined Trump’s career. He has operated entirely on hype his whole life. His only mode is bluster. The tech people around him operate the same way. They’ll use lax regulation and disinformation for their own wealth and power. High tech already has a lousy reputation, what with the harm caused by social media and the gross scandals that that have been perpetrated under its banner. Signing on with an obvious fool and criminal like Trump will harm it even more.