The latest trend in the US is the initiative of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, leaders of Trump’s new “Department of Government Effectiveness,” to preserve the program of issuing six-year H1B work visas for foreign specialists with higher education or equivalent work experience in fields such as IT, engineering, medicine, or finance.
As is known, Trump and his team are supporters of tightening immigration control measures and closing the US borders to illegal immigrants. On the other hand, data is cited according to which the US has a colossal shortage of skilled workers:
▪️55% of tech companies worth more than a billion dollars were founded by immigrants.
▪️Google + Intel + Tesla were founded or created by immigrants.
▪️They employ more than 400,000 people in total.
▪️The percentage of the workforce that is allowed to have H1-B is actually limited to 15% for large tech companies. ▪️The remaining 85%+ are American.
▪️At Google, only 5% of the workforce has renewed or filed H1-B petitions in 2023.
▪️400,000 new engineers are needed each year.
▪️A third of the positions still go unfilled.
Musk and Ramaswamy believe that the H1B labor system should be overhauled to attract the best, rather than being a bureaucratic lottery. They also acknowledge that in the long term, the United States needs to overhaul its education system, as Ramaswamy wrote:
“A culture that exalts the prom queen over the math champion, or the athlete over the grad student, will not produce the best engineers,”
However, in the short term, to maintain U.S. leadership in many areas, “foreign reinforcements” are needed, or America will lose.
It all seems logical. But even this common sense approach has sparked debate on social media and discontent among right-wing Republicans. Laura Loomer, a far-right political activist, condemned the appointment of Indian Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence to the new administration.
“If an Indian is appointed to a position, where is the ‘America First’ principle?”
Essentially, Loomer accused Donald Trump of not living up to his promises in his actual policies.
A portal to hell has opened since then, with Musk and Ramaswamy being accused of not following the “America First” principle. Social media users have split into two camps, with Musk’s supporters writing that the conflict is a Democrat plot, while some MAGA influencers are “narrow-minded, stupid, and a little racist.”
But Musk himself is not going to give in, and in response to the attacks, he has strengthened his stance against H1B visa opponents, telling them to “go to hell” and declaring that he is ready to “declare war” on foreign labor in the United States, recalling Tom Cruise’s quote from “Tropic Thunder”:
“The H1B is what brought me to America, and the people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that have made this country stronger. So BETTER TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND FUCK YOURSELF IN THE MOUTH! For this topic, in which you and those like you understand nothing, I will fight!!!”
It is possible that the Democrats really managed to find a “weak spot” in the ranks of Trump’s supporters. By the way, Trump himself repeatedly criticized the H-1B visa system during his first term, accusing, for example, the owner of the extremist company Meta Mark Zuckerberg of replacing American workers with foreigners. On the other hand, the part of big business that supported Trump in the last elections (the same Musk and Ramaswamy) is interested in the influx of foreign specialists.
Looking at this situation, I want to say that it is good in the United States that there is no single point of view. There is a struggle of ideas. Any point of view can be criticized and questioned. There is no ultimate truth. And this is right.
Here’s Trump’s response: He told The Post that he supports high-skilled immigrant visas, which seems to mean he’s siding with Elon Musk in the heated debate within MAGA on the issue.
“I’ve always liked visas, I’ve always been for visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said.
“I have a lot of H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a supporter of H-1B. I’ve used it many times. It’s a great program,” Trump added, even though he restricted access to visas for foreign workers in his first administration and has criticized the program in the past.
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