Summary
Senator Bernie Sanders criticized Elon Musk over his support for the H-1B visa program, calling it a tool for corporations to replace good-paying American jobs with lower-wage foreign labor.
Sanders cited data showing U.S. companies laid off 85,000 American workers between 2022 and 2023 while hiring 34,000 H-1B visa holders, arguing this undermines U.S. competitiveness.
Musk, who credits the visa program for his success, defended it, stating he’s ready to “go to war” over the issue.
The debate has divided MAGA conservatives, exposing rifts within Trump’s coalition.
That’s pretty obvious to anyone who has to work with H1Bs. They are far from technical experts, but they know enough in their one very limited breadth of knowledge that they can do certain things quickly and for extremely cheap.
Then they use the far more expensive FTE engineers to fix things obviously outside their scope of expertise. This is the part that is still “too” expensive for Musk. The “bet” is that with a sufficient number of H1-Bs you can have enough to have each one contribute their limited expertise and interface with the work of another H1-B.
The optimization, if my numbers are right - is that you should need 2-3 H1-Bs to replace a single more entry-level FTE engineer. 3-5 H1-Bs could replace a Senior Software Engineer in some cases.
The goal is to get these H1-Bs here, basically get them to do grunt work, and give them education materials to shore up what they lack. In a free market, this would make them far more valuable, but the H1-Bs are locked into their price point. Dissenters get blacklisted and deported.
There are H1Bs of every level, even experts in their field. You clearly don’t work in tech and just regurgitate what you see others write
I’ll copy the same response I gave below. Essentially, the H1-B program is intended for that. That is not how it is being used.
My dad came on a H1B and he was very well paid when he got his green card. I’d say that makes him an expert sys admin
I’m not going to argue he wasn’t an expert. The program is designed for them. The problem isnt people like him. In fact, the problem isn’t any of the workers I’ve worked with either.
The problem is that outsourcing staffing agencies use the H1-B visa to hire out to bigger companies looking for a cheap fast way to get things working.
By law, the employer sponsoring an H1-B holder has to pay competitive wages for the work they will do. The staffing agencies do that by paying the people they bring in pretty low and similar wages. Of course, the agencies pocket the difference from the contract and what they are actually paying these workers. In practice, even those wages are lower than what an FTE should get paid.
It has a compounding effect on people who are permanent residents or citizens: it’s an effective way to suppress wages artificially for a lot of these jobs. And of course, many of these H1-B holders get the boot right at the end of 4 or 5 years because then things get dicey about sponsoring them for permanent residence, and that is when costs start really going up.
We really don’t need to expand the H1-B cap, and it is in desperate need of stricter regulation.
The reason this topic is one that “sounds” like one that “both the left and right” agree on is that it’s for entirely different reasons. The right comes at it from the racist “they took r jerbs” aspect, and the left comes at it from the anti-capitalistic exploitation aspect.
You don’t have to look further than who advocates for expanding the H1-B program.
Well said, truly.
You’ve just exposed your bias lmao. Thank god you daddy gave you an anecdote so you can totally speak with confidence about shit you don’t understand.
Those of us that ACTUALLY work with H1Bs…. We see what’s happening.
I’m glad your daddy wasn’t used and abused but that is NOT a common experience. Go ask the twit H1Bs that were forced to stick around for Elon’s takeover. Read the thoughts and feelings of devs who escaped that shit show. It’s not rare, Sanders is right H1B visas are horribly abused for cheap controllable labor.
H1B visas are SUPPOSED to be for jobs that no American can actually fill. Anything else IS ABUSE of the system and damaging to the American economy, not to mention unfair to the actual H1B workers.
Yeah, I’m biased because I would be getting bombed in my apartment right now if we couldn’t immigrate
I work with h1bs, I’m in tech. There are incredibly sharp people who come on this visa
Interesting perspective, but also a little derogatory or at a minimum…overly prescriptive about the folks coming here on those visas?
I’ve known multiple PhDs here on H1-B as well, and while the exploitative nature of their living status depending on their employment is always there and a problem, and I’m sure they were underpaid compared against a US citizen equivalent - the pay was nowhere near the fractions you’re describing, and several of them were far more knowledgeable about their areas of study than any citizens I met at the company.
One of them probably has top-100 understanding of his field globally, if I were to guesstimate. Let’s not portray all H1-B recipients as fundamentally less qualified than Americans. Not only is it overly reductive, our increasingly poor educational performance compared against e.g. China and India are starting to reverse that idea in a lotta cases, too.
Edit to add: I should say I also met one who was a fraud at best and a spy at worst. Totally clueless about his supposed “field”. I understand some parts of the world have issues with corruption and buying of degrees, but I know little about it.
You aren’t wrong on that part. That’s what the H1-B program is designed for. In practice, corporations have exploited the intent of it and instead used it to select very narrowly trained software developers, it workers, and technicians instead of Ph. ds, inventors of specific techniques, or experts with rare and niche technology.
Out of 30 or so I have worked with, I have only worked with one true expert. He was an optics dude who knew specific techniques for using TI DLP to create 3 dimensional images on a transparent plane (I think it was just acrylic). In what I could observe, it was not obvious that he was being exploited, and if I remember right, he was compensated to the limits of the visa, and only brought back on his terms.
You must be fucking joking if you seriously think that every single one of those tens of thousands of H1Bs were actual experts at the top do their game to the point where no American worker could fill the position otherwise.
You must be joking if you think even 3/4ths of them meet that criteria.
Oh but thank god you know a few H1B PHDs. That little anecdote changes everything.
You seem to have chosen only a few of the words in my comment to read. Feel free to read the rest, or fuck right off with your ridiculous nonsense, your call. Blocking you regardless so enjoy whatever you choose I guess.