President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming government waste-cutters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are catching heat from conservatives for the tech industry’s use of foreign-born workers.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramasway, who will lead Mr. Trump’s informal Department of Government Efficiency, defended the use of H-1B visas, arguing that the high-tech companies they operated needed to import workers to function.
Silicon Valley has benefited from the visa program, which gives visas to specialized foreign workers. Mr. Musk, who was born in South Africa, held an H1-B before becoming a U.S. citizen.
Mr. Musk argued that America needs to double the number of engineers and that the number of “super talented” and “super motivated” engineers in the U.S. was “far too low.” He compared the H-1B visa program to a sports team bringing in new talent “to keep winning.”
His electric vehicle company, Tesla, snatched up more than 700 of the visas this year.
“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 win,” Mr. Musk said on social media.
It is an issue where Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy, whose parents immigrated from India, clash with Mr. Trump and his supporters.
Conservative commentator Laura Loomer blasted the duo on X and later accused Mr. Musk, who owns the social media platform, of censoring her account.
“I have been more loyal to President Trump and his agenda than ANYONE. And I have only been punished for it,” Ms. Loomer said on X. “Pay attention MAGA. This is how you will all be treated now that Big Tech has infiltrated MAGA. ’President Musk’ is starting to look real.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he increased the wage requirement for H-1B visas far higher than what is typically paid to U.S. workers for the same jobs. The rule was blocked by a federal court.
Mr. Trump also attempted to narrow the definition of “specialty occupations” that qualify for the visas. He also temporarily suspended H-1B visas in 2020.
President Biden reversed changes Mr. Trump made to the program.
How the president-elect may change the program during his second term, if at all, is not clear. But Mr. Trump said on the “All-In Podcast” that he wanted foreign-born students graduating from American universities to “automatically” get green cards with their diplomas.
A member of the Trump-Vance transition team pointed The Washington Times to a post on X from Stephen Miller, who Mr. Trump has tapped as his deputy chief of staff for policy and who entered the online discourse by sharing a transcript of remarks the president-elect made on Independence Day in 2020.
The speech underneath Mount Rushmore, particularly the remarks highlighted by Mr. Miller, focused on America’s culture, which resulted in the harnessing of electricity, splitting of the atom and moon landing, among other accomplishments.
“Americans must never lose sight of this miraculous story,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “You should never lose sight of it, because nobody has ever done it like we have done it.”
Still, Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters came out swinging against Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy, who further fueled the social media firestorm by calling the issue a cultural problem that has “venerated mediocrity” in the U.S.
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ’native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation),” Mr. Ramaswamy said on X. “A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.”
He argued that a “culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” His comments struck a nerve with conservatives, including former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is also is a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from India.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have,” Ms. Haley said on X. “We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
