President-elect Donald Trump enthusiastically supported the highly coveted H-1B visa program on Saturday, which permits overseas staff in “specialty occupations” into the USA. Whether or not or not these visas ought to be sustained and elevated has brought about MAGA infighting as billionaire Elon Musk backs this system to the dismay of hardline anti-immigration Trump supporters.
“I’ve at all times preferred the visas, I’ve at all times been in favor of the visas. That’s why now we have them,” Trump instructed the New York Post’s Jon Levine.
The H-1B visa program permits employers to rent overseas staff “in specialty occupations or as trend fashions.” Specialty occupations require the visa applicant to have at the least a bachelor’s diploma or its equal, per the Department of Labor. One of these visa is usually used for staff in fields equivalent to math, engineering, and expertise—areas uniquely useful to CEOs like Musk, who got here to the US as a global pupil and says he worked utilizing an H-1B visa.
In keeping with reporting from Forbes based mostly on H-1B information, Tesla, which Musk runs, “was among the many main employers of recent foreign-born scientists and engineers in [fiscal year] 2024.” In FY 2024, Tesla had 742 H-1B petitions permitted for preliminary employment, greater than double their 2023 quantity: 328.
Again when he was operating for president for the primary time, in 2016, Trump took a unique stance on the H-1B program, calling it “very dangerous for staff” and saying that “we must always finish it.”
“We shouldn’t have it. Very very dangerous for staff. And second of all, I feel it’s essential to say—properly, I’m a businessman and I’ve to do what I’ve to do, and it’s sitting there ready for you—but it surely’s very dangerous,” Trump said on the time. “It’s very dangerous for enterprise, by way of, it’s very dangerous for our staff. It’s unfair for our staff. And we must always finish it.”
On this speech and elsewhere, together with in his current interview with the Submit, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he typically makes use of H-1B visas at his properties. But, in keeping with reporting from the New York Occasions’s Ken Bensinger, “Trump seems to have solely sparingly used the H-1B visa program,” and, as an alternative, “he has been a frequent and longtime consumer of the equally named, however starkly totally different, H-2B visa program,” which is for staff like gardeners and housekeepers, “in addition to the H-2A program, which is for agricultural staff.” Over the previous 20 years, in keeping with federal information, Trump’s firms have acquired approval to make use of over 1,000 staff by these two H-2 packages.
And, a CNN review of presidency labor information discovered that Trump’s companies sought to rent extra overseas visitor staff this 12 months than every other 12 months on file and gained approval to make use of 209 —together with cooks, housekeepers, servers, and desk clerks.
Musk, the richest individual on the planet, spent over 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} on pro-Trump political motion committees through the closing months of the 2024 presidential election. This week, he’s been feuding with different high-profile MAGA defends concerning the visa program—spewing insults to naysayers on his social media web site X, previously Twitter.
