Summary
Elon Musk faced backlash from his followers on X after advocating for importing “super talented engineers” to address a shortage in the U.S. tech industry.
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
Critics argued there’s sufficient U.S. talent being overlooked or underpaid, with some pointing to widespread tech layoffs.
Musk dismissed claims of low wages or training gaps, maintaining a need for exceptional engineering talent to advance innovation.
Immigrants are in a more precarious position and are harder to get on board with unionisation efforts. The H1B visa specifically is designed specifically to undermine worker solidarity. If you’re on a H1B visa and you get fired, your visa is cancelled and you go back home, to be replaced by someone else. There’s similar incentives at play for undocumented migrants.
Any immigration that doesn’t include a full green card is bad for all workers.
I feel this is really the issue. In my own experience working in tech, I they HB1 staff does very well. And I know of a few that left to take jobs with other companies (who presumably also sponsored them) after 1-2 years, so the competition for fair pay was still there. They were also entirely men. I feel like it’s a way to make sure they get the people who don’t ask for too much, in terms of protection from labor practices and sexual harassment. With Amazon’s model being a complete PR and legal disaster currently. it seems to make sense.
It doesn’t need to be a green card, it could be time-limited, as long as it’s not locked to a single sponsor.
The big lie behind the H1B program is that the jobs cannot be filled by Americans. The way the jobs are advertised is carefully crafted to exclude Americans, requiring specific coursework and qualifications that are named differently from US equivalents.
I was in consulting and was a senior exec, I saw how the game was played. They should burn the whole shithouse down to the ground and start over. The way it works now benefits nobody but the billionaires, and billionaires should not exist until we are all rich.