William Upton | National Pulse | Dec 26, 2024
A fierce debate has broken out between President-elect Donald J. Trump’s very recent tech industry supporters and his long-standing America First base. At the core of the disagreement is the subject of legal immigration—specifically, how Trump should handle so-called “high-skilled” foreign worker programs like the H1B visa.
One of the staunchest proponents of expanding the labor pool in this way is billionaire Elon Musk. In a Christmas Day post on X, Musk exclaimed America needs more than double the 160,000 semiconductor industry engineers said to be required by 2032.
“No, we need more like double that number yesterday! The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote, adding: “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to wn.”
Additionally, Musk-allies and newly-named artificial intelligence (AI) advisors to President-elect Trump, David Sacks, and Sriram Krishnan, have both emerged as loud advocates for more legal immigration, expanding the high-skilled labor supply through changes to the H1B visa lottery.
A FLAWED MORALITY.
While bringing allegedly top talent from around the world to the United States sounds good on its face, this isn’t actually what H1B visas do.
The O-1 visa is actually the program used to grant legal work status to a foreign nation in the United States that is considered a ‘once-in-a-generation’ intellectual talent in a critical industrial sector.
H1B visas apply more to workers with skills that native-born Americans can easily learn through technical training programs or even collegiate classes. Think more programmer or mid-level software engineer than someone trained in semiconductor fabrication.
Even more concerning is that the big tech companies routinely abuse H1B visas as part of a scheme to suppress the wages of both American and foreign workers while maximizing shareholder profits.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice ramped up enforcement of visa rules after a pattern emerged in which tech companies artificially create the appearance of a domestic work shortage to increase their H1B allotments. This ultimately resulted in native-born workers being laid off and replaced two or threefold by cheaper foreign H1B workers.
H1Bs benefit tech companies on two key fronts:
- First, on average, H1B workers are paid significantly less than their American-born counterparts. This effectively puts downward pressure on wages across the industry, meaning American workers also get paid less;
- Secondly, because the visa is attached to the sponsor company, the foreign worker lacks the leverage afforded to American-born workers who can demand higher salaries by simply looking to take a job with a different firm.
@Adam
Actually, Trump opposed H-1b program during his first term, which is quite different category than just legal immigration which, as you noted, he has never opposed.
Rightly or wrongly, Trump has always said that he favored granting legal immigration permits to skilled workers whom American industry can use to increase production, provided needed services to Americans,etc. That has beenhis position for many years, and it is not realistic to expect him to change his mind now. Trump has always opposed illegal immigration, and permitting illegal immigrants to obtain employment in the U.S. But he has always claimed that he supports legal immigration by individuals who apply for immigration permits by the procedures specifyed by law (which menas a lot of paperwork), submit their applications in the proper locations (usually American consulates outside the United States) and who meet the legal requirements for temporary or permanent resident status. I don’t thinkhe will abandon his support for legal immigration by legal means.