President-elect Donald Trump enthusiastically supported the extremely coveted H-1B visa program on Saturday, which permits overseas staff in “specialty occupations” into the United States. Whether or not these visas ought to be sustained and elevated has precipitated MAGA infighting as billionaire Elon Musk backs this system to the dismay of hardline anti-immigration Trump supporters.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump advised the New York Post’s Jon Levine.
The H-1B visa program permits employers to rent overseas staff “in specialty occupations or as fashion models.” Specialty occupations require the visa applicant to have at the very least a bachelor’s diploma or its equal, per the Department of Labor. This kind of visa is commonly used for staff in fields similar to math, engineering, and know-how—areas uniquely helpful to CEOs like Musk, who got here to the US as a world scholar and says he labored utilizing an H-1B visa.
According to reporting from Forbes based mostly on H-1B information, Tesla, which Musk runs, “was among the leading employers of new foreign-born scientists and engineers in [fiscal year] 2024.” In FY 2024, Tesla had 742 H-1B petitions accepted for preliminary employment, greater than double their 2023 quantity: 328.
Back when he was working for president for the primary time, in 2016, Trump took a special stance on the H-1B program, calling it “very bad for workers” and saying that “we should end it.”
“We shouldn’t have it. Very very bad for workers. And second of all, I think it’s very important to say—well, I’m a businessman and I have to do what I have to do, and it’s sitting there waiting for you—but it’s very bad,” Trump stated on the time. “It’s very bad for business, in terms of, it’s very bad for our workers. It’s unfair for our workers. And we should end it.”
In this speech and elsewhere, together with in his latest interview with the Post, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he typically makes use of H-1B visas at his properties. Yet, based on reporting from the New York Times’s Ken Bensinger, “Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program,” and, as a substitute, “he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program,” which is for staff like gardeners and housekeepers, “as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers.” Over the previous 20 years, based on federal information, Trump’s firms have acquired approval to make use of over 1,000 staff by way of these two H-2 applications.
And, a CNN evaluate of presidency labor information discovered that Trump’s companies sought to rent extra overseas visitor staff this 12 months than another 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 this planet, spent over 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} on pro-Trump political motion committees in the course of the closing months of the 2024 presidential election. This week, he’s been feuding with different high-profile MAGA defends in regards to the visa program—spewing insults to naysayers on his social media web site X, previously Twitter.