Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. We still have three weeks until Donald Trump is sworn into his second term. There's no denying that with some genuine political canniness, Trump has cobbled together an unwieldy and in many respects somewhat unlikely political coalition.

And that coalition delivered him the first outright popular vote victory for a Republican since

George W. Bush in 2004. It's only the second time it has happened since the end of the Cold War.

Now Trump has to actually govern. And that is typically when all the internal contradictions

in any political coalition rise to the surface. We're not even to inauguration yet. And that is typically when all the internal contradictions in any political coalition rise to the

surface. We're not even to inauguration yet. And that factional fighting, I would argue, is bigger,

more glaring than almost any other I've ever witnessed in American politics. You're seeing that

right now in the battle over immigration, which has been exploding among the MAGA right.

Basically, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramoswami,

the tech overlords who appear to be running Trump's second-term agenda, rely on highly skilled

immigrants to power their enterprises. Those immigrants come to this country to work with an

H-1B visa, which provides terms that are extremely favorable to their employers and also an amazing

opportunity for the folks coming to work here. Folks basically have to stay at their job in

order to stay in the country. If they leave their position, they have two months to find a

new job or risk getting deported. So you can see why someone like Elon Musk likes them so much.

For example, this is not abstract, when Musk bought Twitter

and a huge percentage of the staff headed for the exits, Vice News reported on how Twitter employees

on visas can't just quit. The other side of the debate over the H-1B visa is the one that

folks like Stephen Miller and Stephen Bannon have been pushing for years,

that we should restrict, limit, perhaps, and all immigration in the U.S., legal and illegal, right?

Stuff at the border around asylum, but also H-1B visas.

I mean, just listen to the two of them on Bannon's old radio show back in March of 2016.

...