Bernie Sanders Slams Elon Musk’s Greedy Motive for Backing Immigration
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has thrown himself into the H-1B visa feud between Elon Musk and the far-right’s MAGA acolytes.
Musk and some of Donald Trump’s more ardent supporters have gone head-to-head over the last several weeks, with the world’s richest man arguing that the work visa program offers a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the United States. Opponents of the immigration program—and Musk’s position—claim that the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies to hire American labor. Some of the most vocal opponents are people such as “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who probably aren’t happy that some of the visa recipients aren’t white.
But on Thursday, Sanders pointed out a quiet, fundamental catch to the Silicon Valley leader’s argument: Musk’s business interests dramatically benefit from open access to inhumanely cheap labor.
“Elon Musk is wrong,” Sanders posted on X. “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.
“The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make,” he said.
In a formal statement, Sanders’s office noted that in 2022 and 2023, “the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers.
“There are estimates that as many as 33 percent of all new Information Technology jobs in America are being filled by guest workers,” the statement reads. “Further, according to Census Bureau data, there are millions of Americans with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math who are not currently employed in those professions.”
The H-1B visa program has an annual cap set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to data from the American Immigration Council.
