What’s the best way to stir popular backlash against AI? Data centers have been at the core of the debate among both Democrats and Republicans, but some on the far-right have adopted a new term to better align their anti-AI views with President Donald Trump’s bigoted worldview. They’re saying AI is producing “algorithmic immigrants.”
Trump has spent the past decade demonizing immigrants, calling Mexicans rapists and refugees from Somalia “garbage.” And some in the MAGA camp who are against AI are trying to make the anti-AI stance their own by pivoting their anti-immigrant message into something more tech-focused.
That pivot was on display Wednesday night shortly before Trump took the stage in Dallas, Texas, for the so-called midterm convention held by Republicans. Joe Allen, an ally of former Trump advisor Steven Bannon, appeared for a debate against Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Their debate Wednesday was held across town from Trump’s speech during an event called FORUM, hosted by the new right-wing group The Foundation.
Allen said that Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI were using data centers to train replacements for American workers. “This is the greater replacement. It’s ephemeral algorithmic immigrants that will take your jobs or watch over your shoulder like some Han Chinese in a Tibetan kitchen doing a photobomb,” Allen said on stage Wednesday.
Allen isn’t altogether wrong about the idea that many employers are looking at AI as a way to replace human workers, even if his examples are extremely racist. A financial expert from JPMorgan recently admitted on CNBC that one of the reasons that the wages of workers have been stagnant is that bosses can now threaten workers with being replaced by AI. Even if that’s not true for most jobs (at least not yet), being able to hang that over the heads of workers allows employers to keep wages lower because people are afraid to ask for raises.
Allen called data centers “a constant humming reminder of a future they don’t believe in,” insisting that AI tech was delivering mass surveillance, mass manipulation, and a “slop infestation” in the culture. Lonsdale’s response to Allen’s criticism came across as anemic and cowardly, perhaps the worst of all worlds in a right-wing environment obsessed with dominance and getting “cucked.” He said that he’s “obsessed with civil liberties” as a founder of Palantir, a claim that was laughable on its face.
Lonsdale tried to claim that anti-AI and anti-surveillance rhetoric was part of a “psyop from the left,” an odd assertion in a debate with Steve Bannon’s right-hand man. Allen wasn’t having it, saying that he rejected the premise entirely and pointing to the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film The Conversation as just one historical example of fear about tech-based surveillance.
Allen, who at one point in the debate praised the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s writings, noted that the populist push against AI has anthropomorphized the tech, and he noted that some of that is good, in his eyes, because it could lead to some accountability. He couldn’t help but inject some weird psychosexual ideas about how AI might convince a wife that another man is better than her husband.
“If these were human beings operating out of a corporation and they were whispering into your child’s ear to kill himself. If they were whispering into your wife’s ear that ‘He should be making more money, and by the way, yeah, the other guy is probably going to be better.’ If they were continually monitoring and raking up your data footprint… if these human beings […] they would be charged, right?” said Allen.
It’s not illegal for a human being to tell a woman that she can do better and should leave her husband. But you generally get the idea of what he’s getting at. Allen used the term “algorithmic immigrant” five times on Wednesday.
Lonsdale asked Allen to explain what he really had against data centers, which led Allen to deliver a monologue about how Muslim immigrants were trying to radically transform America and AI needed to be treated with the same hostility.
“Why wouldn’t you want a mosque in your neighborhood? Well, because the people in there aren’t like me,” said Allen. “They don’t want the same future I do. Now, if you look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants.”
Allen asked rhetorically what danger the AI could pose: “Already, if you look at Hugging Face, they’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.”
He went on to say that data centers represent something that people don’t want: “They have been told that AI will replace their jobs or that they’ll be forced to become symbiotic in order to remain relevant. They’ve been told that AI is going to kill everyone. Well, who says that? The people making it.”
Allen also took issue with the White House’s use of AI imagery, noting Trump’s recent AI slop posts on Truth Social showing the president with robots, noting that it’s a dark vision which will inevitably be used domestically.
“The image of the future is aggressive, it’s dystopian,” said Allen, “and maybe that presently is pointed towards the Iranians, maybe that presently is pointed towards the Russians, but when American people see this, and they’re told that because they don’t want data centers, they’re going to be backward and poor, they imagine, and I think quite rationally so, that these robot dogs and these robot soldiers will not always be pointed outward.”
The term algorithmic immigrant doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and it remains to be seen whether a guy like Trump will try to adopt it from guys like Allen. But it’s interesting to see this attempt to turn MAGA’s grassroots firepower against AI into a form of xenophobia and America First nationalism.
Trump has tried to drum up fear about the U.S. losing against China in the AI race, but the average American simply doesn’t give a shit about that. More Americans would prefer a nuclear power plant be built in their community than an AI data center, according to recent polling from Gallup. Gizmodo wasn’t in the room for the Allen/Lonsdale debate, but it seems that crowd reaction was fairly even at the start and became more in favor of Allen by the end, based only on applause. Whatever attitudes people came to the debate with, they clearly liked what they heard from Allen.
Data centers are incredibly unpopular, and consumer-facing AI tech is most popular with the generations of Americans that are dying off. But we’re seeing this splintering of the messages used to rally against AI, something that is likely to continue as each side finds their talking points. It’s unclear whether “algorithmic immigrant” will become mainstream. But you can bet that the far right will continue to make an effort to pivot every issue into an argument about foreigners (digital or otherwise) taking your job.
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