Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) picked a battle with billionaire Elon Musk over the H-1B visa program on Thursday, saying the visas enrich rich enterprise house owners by pushing down staff’ wages.
“Elon Musk is wrong,” the Vermont senator posted on X, the social platform owned by Musk and formally referred to as Twitter. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”
He added, “The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
H-1B visas enable U.S. tech corporations to import expert overseas staff, like software program engineers, from overseas on a short lived foundation. Use of the visas has divided Republicans in current days, as H-1B defenders Musk and fellow Donald Trump adviser Vivek Ramaswamy have sparred with anti-immigration, “America First” conservatives on the problem.
Ramaswamy, the rich entrepreneur whom Trump tapped to co-lead his new “Department of Government Efficiency” with Musk, mentioned final week on X that hiring visitor staff by H-1B visas was mandatory partially as a result of “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence.”
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote, drawing some rebukes from different conservatives.
Musk, the richest man on the planet, claimed there’s a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” that necessitates bringing overseas visitor staff to the U.S. His firm, Tesla, is among the many largest beneficiaries of H-1B visas, together with Amazon, Google and different tech giants.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he posted on X in response to a critic.
“Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” he added.
Tom Williams by way of Getty Photographs
Progressives like Sanders have criticized the H-1B program for years, saying it affords tech corporations a strategy to undercut U.S.-born staff by paying below-market charges.
In a 2020 paper on the system, the left-leaning Financial Coverage Institute described it as an necessary however “deeply flawed” program for attracting expert staff, saying it permits U.S. corporations to “legally underpay” overseas staff relative to their U.S. counterparts.
Though this system is supposed to assist employers discover staff with specialised expertise, the authors of that report discovered the biggest employers used it “to fill a very large number of routine positions that require relatively little experience and ordinary skills.”
The Countdown To Trump Is On
Already contributed? Log in to cover these messages.
Sanders criticized Tesla’s reliance on this system, declaring that the automotive producer slashed a few of its U.S. workforce final yr.
“If there really is a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, then why did Tesla lay-off over 7,500 American workers … while being approved to employ thousands of H-1B guest workers?” he mentioned in a press release.
