Summary
Senator Bernie Sanders criticized Elon Musk’s support for the H-1B visa program, arguing it prioritizes cheaper foreign labor over skilled American workers, contrary to Musk’s claims that the program seeks “the best and brightest.”
Sanders highlighted Tesla’s layoffs of thousands of American workers while hiring H-1B visa holders for lower wages in non-specialized roles.
He called for major reforms to prevent corporations from exploiting the program for cost-cutting.
The debate over H-1B visas has divided political allies, with Trump recently endorsing the program despite prior restrictions during his presidency.
And who is doing even moderate enforcement of this? I’ve been in IT for decades; it is wildly abused.
Tesla’s H1-B employees are public knowledge - he’s paying H1-B senior engineers 70k a year, which is a pittance compared to market rates. He’s also hiring entry level engineers and claiming they’re “highly paid specialists he couldn’t hire domestically”, which is hilarious given the number of layoffs in tech recently - the candidates are clearly there.
Tesla and SpaceX are famous for being low paid sweatshops in the engineering world, and H1-B labor is helping lower those wages and QoL for workers. Fuck Musky.
Then there are the people that were basically trapped at Xitter after that asshole bought it…lots of people left if they could, because, well, duh, almost anyone would; the H-1Bs, famously, were stuck.
Yeeep. My boss was an engineering exec at Twitter for 8 years, he quit when Musky was an asshole to him in a meeting. Pretty unreal some of the stories he had.
Re: H-1B, the data is all available for everyone seeing this: https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employer-data-hub
Go make yourselves sad.