Did Musk Abuse Visa Program -- And US Workers?

Joe Conason on Jan 3, 2025

Elon Musk's aggressive defense of the H-1B visa program -- which permits his companies Tesla and SpaceX to bring engineers and other workers from overseas -- has aroused fury among his erstwhile admirers on the far right. Despite his ongoing efforts to identify himself with the most extreme nationalists, xenophobes and racists both here and across Europe, they suspect that the world's richest man is driven not by love of his adopted country but by his lust for money.

Fresh evidence that Donald Trump's new best friend is motivated by greed rather than MAGA fervor has emerged via Electrek, a popular website that covers the electric vehicle and green energy industries (and has sometimes been accused of excessive solicitude for Musk and Tesla, or worse).

Electrek reported this week that after a massive wave of layoffs at Tesla last spring, the company replaced many of its higher-paid American employees with foreign workers holding H-1B visas. In the wake of Musk's bruising online feud with other Trump allies -- most prominently Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer -- a number of whistleblowers reportedly showed up to expose the EV giant's alleged mistreatment of Americans working there.

"Over the last few days, several current and former Tesla workers reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace US workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year," according to a story by its editor-in-chief, Fred Lambert, that led the website on Dec. 30.

Last April, Electrek reported that Tesla dismissed about 15,000 U.S. employees, mostly in Texas and California -- but then the company moved to fill those same jobs with imported labor at lower cost.

"Current and former Tesla employees said that many of the laid-off US workers were replaced by foreign workers using H-1B visas," the website reported on Dec. 30. "These claims are backed by US Department of Labor data, which show that Tesla requested over 2,000 H-1B visas during the time it was laying off US workers. ... Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay."

Lambert offered his own nuanced view of the controversy, which is that H-1B visas may well have a legitimate role in supporting U.S. tech industries but can also be abused -- which may be what Musk has been doing. He points out that the H-1B rules afford corporations like Tesla enormous power over the visa-holding workers, who can only remain here as long as they are employed by the firm that sponsored them. In other words, those workers have far less autonomy and clout than unionized worker in auto -- and we already know how much Musk hates unions.

One need not endorse the bigotry of Bannon and Loomer -- nor their ridiculous views on immigration -- to acknowledge that they are probably right about Musk and other bosses lining up to exploit MAGA "nationalism" for their own power and enrichment.

As for the president-elect, of course he has been on both sides of the H-1B debate, depending on whatever profits him at the moment. Various subsidiaries of the Trump Organization have hired thousands of foreign workers, using both the H-1B and related H-2B visa programs -- yet that didn't stop candidate Trump from denouncing those programs as "very bad" and "unfair" for American workers when he was first running for president in 2016.

Charlatans like Musk and Trump are fortunate that the MAGA herd tends to be ignorant and gullible -- which is why Republicans can pretend to support American workers and complain about the "globalists" and "elitists" who are quietly financing their campaigns.

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