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.
Bernie Sanders
accuses Musk of seeking cheaper immigrant labor with H-1B visasspeaks the plain truth, as usualRight? How do you accuse someone of something they say they are doing while doing it in public and not even trying to act like they aren’t doing it?
Like if Musk was stabbing a guy on a street corner while shouting, “Everybody look at me stabbing this guy!” and Bernie was like, “He should not be stabbing that guy!” and then the news article was like “Bernie Sanders accuses Musk of holding a knife that was repeatedly and forcefully placed inside another person.”
Bernie, you’re a beautiful human being. Never stop fighting. You’ll never win, but never stop fighting.
Yeah, that’s the entire point of the H-1B scam. Drive down wages, get cheap, compliant foreign workers and keep the citizens in line. Don’t want skilled workers getting too uppity, you know. They have to know their place.
the low wage immigrants that earn significantly higher than even the median American wage, and where it is literally required to pay above the “prevailing wage” for workers doing similar jobs…
and lying about who’s able to get an H-1B with “dog-trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers”
H-1B has obvious flaws (like the difficulty in switching jobs and lack of pathway towards permanent residence) but his main criticisms of them in his statement show ignorance at best, other than the obvious one being that the megacorps do use them to get exploitable workers and there should be better protections for workers.
the low wage immigrants that earn significantly higher than even the median American wage, and where it is literally required to pay above the “prevailing wage” for workers doing similar jobs…
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.
