Edwards wrote: "High-profile supporters of President-elect Donald Trump are publicly fighting a “civil war” over the legal immigration of highly skilled workers.
Supporters of the decades-old H-1B visas say the program lets tech companies hire the tens of thousands of talented employees they need to stay at the cutting edge of a hypercompetitive global market. Anti-immigration hard-liners counter that the program is merely a way for employers to exploit foreign workers instead of paying higher wages and benefits to Americans.
“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,” Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote Friday on his social media site X before addressing fellow Trump supporters who last week had declared their opposition to the program.
“I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” he wrote.
What are H-1B visas?
H-1B visas let U.S. employers temporarily hire foreign workers in specialty occupations for which they cannot find qualified Americans to do the job, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Applicants usually have to have at least a bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in a specialty occupation and may work in the country for up to six years with the visa.
Last year, immigration officials issued 85,000 H-1B visas each year — 65,000 to first-time applicants and another 20,000 to those graduating with a master’s degree or doctorate from a U.S. college or university, according to the nonprofit American Immigration Council.
Technology companies have long relied on the visas to attract employees, including computer programmers and software engineers. For years, they have cited a lack of qualified workers for high-skilled jobs in the United States.
Amazon was the largest beneficiary of the program this fiscal year, with 3,871 new H-1B employees, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan organization National Foundation for American Policy. Other tech giants — Google, Meta, Apple and IBM — all rank among the top 10.
In contrast, H-2A visas are for agricultural labor and H-2Bs are for seasonal and short-term positions.
How did H-1B visas start?
The visas have roots in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, through which lawmakers ended the blanket exclusion of immigrations based on race while establishing criteria based in part on employment and work skills, said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
The H-1A and H-1B categories were created by President George H.W. Bush when he signed the Immigration Act of 1990. The law established H-1A visas for hiring nurses, a category that expired in 1995, but for more than three decades, H-1B visas have brought foreign-born, college-educated workers into America. Since 1990, those workers have increasingly come from China and India and fueled the tech industry, Chishti said.
What happened to them during Trump’s first administration?
In June 2020, during his last full year in office, Trump signed an executive order denying entry to H-1B visa holders with the exception of workers in the “food supply chain.” The country was in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and while the unemployment rate was falling from its April 2020 high of 14.7 percent, it remained at 11.1 percent during the worst unemployment crisis since the 1930s.
Even so, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several tech industry leaders at the time criticized the maneuver, citing similar reasons to what Musk and Ramaswamy are saying 4½ years later.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time that he was “disappointed” by the proclamation.
“Immigration has contributed immensely to America’s economic success, making it a global leader in tech, and also Google the company it is today. Disappointed by today’s proclamation — we’ll continue to stand with immigrants and work to expand opportunity for all,” Pichai wrote on what was then Twitter.
Why are prominent MAGA supporters opposing them?
A feud among Trump supporters started last week when far-right activist Laura Loomer blasted the president-elect for naming Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born tech entrepreneur and investor, as his senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence. Loomer cited Krishnan’s support for removing some caps on green cards and making it easier for skilled foreign workers to come to the United States. The policy, she wrote on X, is “in direct opposition” to Trump’s agenda.
Loomer’s criticism sparked what she characterized as a “civil war” among Trump supporters about the tech industry’s reliance on immigrant workers with H-1B visas. Opponents of the program, including former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, say the visa system lets companies exploit cheap foreign labor at the expense of Americans in need of work.
On Monday, Bannon continued his criticism of the program during his podcast, “The War Room,” dismissing Musk’s effort to “reform” what Bannon maligned as “a total and complete scam.”
“There’s no reformation — no reform,” Bannon said. “We want it gone. We demand that it’s gone.”
Why are Elon Musk and other tech CEOs championing the visa program?
Musk and other tech industry leaders said that while they would prefer to hire American workers, there aren’t enough of them to fill the staffing needs of companies such as SpaceX and Tesla.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote on X last week. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur who in 2024 ran for the Republican presidential nomination, argued on X that the visas are needed because the United States doesn’t produce workers who are skilled enough to keep American companies competitive.
“‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent,” said Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tapped to lead a nongovernmental commission on government efficiency.
What has Trump said about the program — then and now?
On Saturday, Trump sided with the tech industry titans who supported his campaign, saying he supports the H-1B program.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the New York Post in a phone interview, adding: “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”'
For the full read, visit The Washington Post.