The US House member Mike Lawler attempted on Sunday to tease out two pressing issues facing the new Congress beginning in 2025, telling an American political talkshow that this was not the moment for his fellow Republicans to have a “food fight” over leadership in Capitol Hill and that the country “needs an immigration system that works”.

Both issues have dominated political headlines in recent days, as potential policy splits become apparent between far-right congressional Republicans and the executive team being assembled for their party leader Donald Trump’s second presidency beginning in January.

Lawler told ABC’s This Week that the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, should be re-elected despite Republican infighting over whether he should keep the position after his handling of negotiations over a government funding bill.

“Mike Johnson inherited a disaster when Matt Gaetz and several of my colleagues teamed up with 208 Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy, which will go down as the single stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in politics,” Lawler said, referring to the spectacle of mutinous Republicans led by Gaetz in the fall of 2023 taking the speaker’s gavel away from McCarthy.

McCarthy left Congress months after his removal. Gaetz also left Congress in November in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the House ethics committee from releasing a report which found “substantial evidence” that he paid for sex with a minor, among other serious violations of congressional rules and laws in his home state of Florida.

“Removing Mike Johnson would equally be as stupid,” Lawler – a New York representative – remarked. “The fact is that these folks are playing with fire, and if they think they’re somehow going to get a more conservative speaker, they’re kidding themselves.”

Lawler said: “We can’t get anything done unless we have a speaker” – including certifying Trump’s victory in the November election, which is scheduled to take place in early January.

“So, to waste time over a nonsensical intramural food fight is a joke. And I think my colleagues, if they didn’t learn anything from the [outgoing] Congress, it should be that we absolutely do not need a fight over the speakership,” Lawler said.

Lawler won a key New York congressional race in November by a 57% to 41% margin, affording him a significant platform within the party. On Sunday, he also used that platform to weigh in on immigration as the party attempts to reconcile a hard-line, anti-immigration faction with the economic need for both high- and low-skilled workers in various industries.

That conflict broke out into the open last week when Trump’s most prominent backers from the tech industry – including SpaceX, Tesla and X’s Elon Musk and the AI-crypto czar David Sacks – clashed with the ultra-right Trump supporter Laura Loomer after she made reference to “third-world invaders” purportedly taking desirable jobs from those born in the US.

On Sunday, Lawler weighed in on the side of the tech leaders like Musk, who himself had dismissed far-right proponents of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (Maga) faction “contemptible fools” and “unrepentant racists”.

“We need immigration,” Lawler said. Mentioning that his wife is an immigrant, he added: “We need an immigration system that works, that is legal, and I fundamentally believe that you need to have a system that is focused on our economic needs as a country and a more merit-based immigration system than anything else.

“I have been through this process with her. It is a fundamentally broken system.”

The New York Republican also pointed out that H-1B visas, which often go to skilled tech programmers and are being fought over, amount to just 65,000 visas with an additional 20,000 for applicants with master’s degrees.

The visas, he said, are “critical to our economy, and as President Trump said, it’s a program he’s used over the years for his businesses, and it’s something that has obviously been beneficial to our economy”.

The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna of California, who is seeking common ground with the so-called “department of government efficiency” that Trump wants Musk to lead, said on Sunday that the debate over H-1B visas for the tech industry was missing the point. If the US did not celebrate “the talent and genius and skills of people of diverse backgrounds” while also seeking to limit undocumented immigrants, the country would not lead the world in Nobel laureates in physics, medicine and chemistry, Khanna said.

“If there was some problem with the culture we wouldn’t be the world’s greatest economy of 30 trillion,” Khanna told Fox News.

But Khanna also argued that the H-1B system keeps foreign workers in limbo because they are less able to negotiate salary and benefits compared with domestic hires – and they are hurt by unfair labor conditions.

The system, he said, “needs major reform – and if you don’t see that either you don’t understand what’s happening or you’re not being truthful.”

The larger question, Khanna added, was not over H-1Bs and getting into “epic fights on social media” – but how the US had lost existing industries to foreign competition.

“The real challenge in America is, how did we lose steel? How did we lose aluminum? How did we allow for de-industrialization?” Khanna said. “You want to bring back new jobs, you need to have the investment in reindustrialization of America in places left out. And that’s what we should be talking about.”