Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) picked a fight with billionaire Elon Musk over the H-1B visa program on Thursday, saying the visas enrich wealthy business owners by pushing down workers’ wages.
“Elon Musk is wrong,” the Vermont senator posted on X, the social platform owned by Musk and formally known as Twitter. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”
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He added, “The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
H-1B visas allow U.S. tech companies to import skilled foreign workers, like software engineers, from abroad on a temporary basis. Use of the visas has divided Republicans in recent days, as H-1B defenders Musk and fellow Donald Trump adviser Vivek Ramaswamy have sparred with anti-immigration, “America First” conservatives on the issue.
Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur whom Trump tapped to co-lead his new “Department of Government Efficiency” with Musk, said last week on X that hiring guest workers through H-1B visas was necessary in part because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence.”
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“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote, drawing some rebukes from other conservatives.
Musk, the richest man in the world, claimed there is a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” that necessitates bringing foreign guest workers to the U.S. His company, Tesla, is among the largest beneficiaries of H-1B visas, along with Amazon, Google and other tech giants.
“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,” he posted on X in response to a critic.
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“Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” he added.
Tom Williams via Getty Images
Progressives like Sanders have criticized the H-1B program for years, saying it offers tech companies a way to undercut U.S.-born workers by paying below-market rates.
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In a 2020 paper on the system, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute described it as an important but “deeply flawed” program for attracting skilled workers, saying it enables U.S. companies to “legally underpay” foreign workers relative to their U.S. counterparts.
Although the program is meant to help employers find workers with specialized skills, the authors of that report found the largest employers used it “to fill a very large number of routine positions that require relatively little experience and ordinary skills.”
Sanders criticized Tesla’s reliance on the program, pointing out that the car manufacturer slashed some of its U.S. workforce last year.
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“If there really is a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, then why did Tesla lay-off over 7,500 American workers … while being approved to employ thousands of H-1B guest workers?” he said in a statement.