The H-1B visa is having a celebrity moment, and it may never be the same.

Created in 1990 and intended for skilled foreign workers, the visa had until recently remained little known outside Silicon Valley, where technology companies use it to employ tens of thousands.

Then late last month, Florida conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, a high-profile supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, attacked employment of Indian tech workers in the U.S., sparking a cascade of public spats and vitriolic punditry that catapulted the H-1B into a sudden spotlight and exposed a rift over immigration inside Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.

“You have, it appears, within the Trump MAGA movement what you might describe as a nativist wing: sort of raise the walls and pull up the drawbridge,” said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Economic Institute at the Bay Area Council, which represents businesses including major tech companies Google, Meta and Apple.

“Now you also have this interesting phenomenon of a significant number of prominent Silicon Valley people being active in the (Trump) campaign and now active as the new administration sets up,” Randolph said. “Their views are not the same necessarily as those of the nativist wing.”

Each year, 85,000 new H-1B visas are issued by lottery, up from the original 65,000 but down from a high of 195,000 in the early 2000s. The federal government sets minimum wages for H-1B workers based on local pay and job type. Part of a family of temporary work-and-residency permits designed to fill employer needs that includes the H-2A for farm workers, the H-1B is widely used as a path to a green card, although per-country quotas mean years-long waits for citizens of India, who make up the majority of H-1B holders.

Amid the furor ignited by Loomer on social media platform X, Bay Area venture capitalist and Trump tech adviser David Sacks, along with Trump “government efficiency” adviser Elon Musk and Trump himself all came out in support of the visa. Trump in the past had criticized the H-1B and sought to reform it, and his first administration dramatically boosted denial rates. Musk, after his vehement support last month for the H-1B drew powerful blowback from the right wing — including a threat to “rip your face off” by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon — said the visa needs fixing. Sacks urged unity and argued against expanding the H-1B program.

Any changes in Trump’s second term to the H-1B — held by some 600,000 foreign workers in the U.S. — would take outsized effect in Silicon Valley, where Google, Meta and Apple are among the top users of the visa. Last year, Google received approval for some 5,300 new and continuing H-1Bs, according to federal government data. Meta received nearly 5,000 approvals, Apple close to 4,000, Intel about 2,500 and Oracle more than 2,000. Seattle’s Amazon topped the list, with more than 11,000. Nearly 80,000 workers were approved last year for about 10,000 California companies.

The H-1B has proven widely divisive, sparking lawsuits over proposed rule changes and, most prominently, allegations of replacement of U.S. workers by visa holders. Among Democrats, the visa pits organized labor against Big Tech donors, and it forces Republicans to juggle the interests of major corporations with many constituents’ opposition to immigration.

The schism in MAGA over a visa seen in Silicon Valley as key to the technology industry’s innovation and success comes as the tech industry has gained unprecedented proximity to U.S. levers of power.

Musk — CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X — has been tapped by Trump to slash federal spending. Bay Area venture capitalists Sacks and Marc Andreessen are already playing key roles in guiding the incoming administration on tech. All three have benefited from the H-1B. Musk’s Tesla received close to 1,800 H-1B approvals last year. Andreessen sits on Meta’s board, and invests through his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz in companies with significant numbers of H-1B workers, including payments-processor Stripe, which received more than 250 approvals last year. Sacks’ VC company Craft Ventures includes in its investment portfolio companies collectively employing hundreds of H-1B holders.

Trump, an immigration hardliner who in 2016 assailed use of the H-1B as a “cheap labor program” was quoted last month in the New York Post calling the H-1B program “great.”

That statement was “an unforced error,” said John Miano, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reduced immigration.

“Why go out and upset a large segment of your base?” Miano said.

He was skeptical of Musk’s call to reform the H-1B program.

“The program isn’t reformable,” Miano said. “The program is designed to replace Americans with cheap foreign workers.”

Tech giants use the visa to secure some of the world’s top talent, but many also employ lower-skilled, lower-paid H-1B workers through staffing companies, most of them India-based. The staffing companies, which obtain the lion’s share of the visas, have been blamed for trying to game the H-1B allocation system, and have been implicated in the replacement of U.S. workers by holders of the visa.

Last year, India-based Infosys came right behind Amazon with more than 8,000 H-1B approvals, while India-founded and New Jersey-based Cognizant received about 8,000, and India-based Tata received more than 7,000, federal data show.

Industry groups, including the Consumer Technology Association, that represent Silicon Valley’s major tech companies push to expand the annual cap of 85,000 new H-1B visas, which are described by the Department of Labor as an aid to employers “who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce.”

A 2020 report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that 60% of H-1B jobs certified by the U.S. Labor Department were for wage levels “well below” average local pay, and that Google, Apple and Meta are among those that “pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage.” Those companies did not respond this week to requests for comment.

That employers continue to bring in tens of thousands of new H-1B tech workers every year while the tech industry lays off thousands of workers calls into question whether the visa is being used for its original purpose, said Ron Hira, a Howard University political science professor and co-author of the policy report.

Republican rifts and divisions on the H-1B among Democrats — between advocates for workers and those tied to the tech industry and Wall Street — make the visa a bi-partisan “workers-versus-elites” issue, Hira said.

Musk asserted on X that the “broken” H-1B program could be easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost, “making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas.”

But approving the visa for only high-paying jobs could undermine a key use of the H-1B program: bringing in highly skilled workers like scientists, who may not be highly paid, Randolph of the Bay Area Council said.

Proposed changes to the H-1B program under Trump’s first administration were introduced late and never took effect, Hira noted. Whether the program is modified in the second Trump era, Hira said, “really depends on who’s in charge in the White House or who’s pushing things in the White House.”