TOI correspondent from Washington: There was something deliciously awkward and ironic about US President Donald Trump’s celebration of American technological greatness in the White House on Thursday. Of the six technology titans who received the nation’s highest science and tech honours from the MAGA boss, five were born outside the United States. The sole exception was Michael Dell, the Texas-born founder of Dell Technologies.If the MAGA movement’s proposition is that America does not need foreigners to make America great, the White House assembled a plush rebuttal — complete with medals, billionaires, and a presidential seal of approval. At the ceremony, titled “Science: A New Golden Age,” Trump presented the National Medal of Science to Tesla’s Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.The honours recognised extraordinary contributions to computing, semiconductors, artificial intelligence and space exploration. They also offered an inadvertent reminder of a longstanding truth about Silicon Valley and the wider American tech industry: US sci- tech primacy has been built not merely on American ingenuity, but on its ability to attract, educate and retain talent from around the world. That is a slightly inconvenient message for an administration determined to make foreign workers villains in its political narrative.Nobody had a more surreal day on this front than Satya Nadella. In the morning, vice-president JD Vance was unloading on Microsoft, accusing it of abusing employment-based immigration programs while laying off American workers. Vance cited 6,000 US job cuts alongside 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards, announcing that the administration was suspending the company from the program used to sponsor permanent residency for eligible foreign workers. Microsoft disputed the implication that its visa filings represented a wholesale replacement of American employees, saying most were for existing workers.Hours later, there was Nadella in the White House, receiving a presidential medal for helping build one of America’s most consequential technology companies — from a shambolic administration that managed, in a single working day, to put Microsoft in the immigration penalty box and its chief executive on the national innovation podium. The citation for Nadella praised his “transformative leadership of a critical American technology company, which led to its rejuvenation for a new era of cloud computing,” and his role in building “the hyperscale infrastructure that enabled the training and global deployment of American super intelligence.”It was a substantial tribute to the Hyderabad-born executive’s transformation of Microsoft into a cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence powerhouse. It was also a reminder that the company’s leadership, like much of the talent sustaining Silicon Valley, does not conform neatly to an America-first immigration script.Vance’s argument is that foreign workers can displace Americans and become vulnerable to employers because their immigration status is tied to their jobs. While tech executives acknowledge that concern deserves scrutiny where companies exploit visa programmes, a blanket hostility to foreign talent is a rather different proposition — particularly when the administration simultaneously celebrates executives whose achievements have helped make American companies global leaders. “A foreign worker is a problem when applying for a green card but a national treasure when collecting a medal,” one industry insider remarked tartly after the event, asserting that foreign-born tech leaders don’t arrive in the US as geniuses; America is what makes them.Jensen Huang and Lisa Su supplied another irony, this time with a geopolitical edge. Cousins once removed, both were born in Taiwan. Huang has built Nvidia into the dominant force in AI computing, while Su has led AMD’s revival as a formidable competitor in high-performance processors. Their achievements illustrate how Taiwan-born engineering talent has helped shape the technologies on which America’s economic and strategic ambitions increasingly depend.Their recognition comes against the backdrop of Trump’s outreach to Beijing, including his recent high-profile engagement with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Some foreign-policy analysts worry that a transactional approach to relations with China, or concessions made in pursuit of a broader accommodation, could weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security. While the medal ceremony did not itself signal any change in US policy towards Taiwan, the juxtaposition was striking: Washington was celebrating two Taiwanese-born executives whose work is central to the global semiconductor industry even as the future of Taiwan remains one of the most consequential questions in US-China relations. Like Nadella, Huang and Su are living illustrations of how global talent reinforce American power. None of that fits comfortably into the MAGA proposition that national greatness can be secured by shutting the door on immigrants.Meanwhile, Sergei Brin and Elon Musk offered another reminder of the complicated origins of American tech success. Brin, born in Moscow in the erstwhile Soviet Union, emigrated to the U.S when he was a child, and went on to co-found Google, helping transform how the world searches for and organises information. Musk, meanwhile, was born in South Africa before moving to America and eventually becoming a US citizen. Through Tesla and SpaceX, he has helped reshape electric vehicles, commercial spaceflight and satellite communications. His relationship with Trump has had its own spectacular ruptures and reconciliations, making his presence at the ceremony — on a day he has been lashing out at India and its business leadership — another reminder that the administration’s relationship with tech leaders is rarely short of drama.