Bernie Sanders accuses Musk of seeking cheaper, not brainier, immigrant labor with H-1B visas

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders weighed in on the H-1B visa controversy Thursday, accusing Elon Musk of defending the program because the labor is “cheaper,” not brainier, than the American labor force, as the tech billionaire has argued. Musk has argued that foreign labor tends to be more highly skilled, and last week endorsed a post on X that denigrated American workers with a slur, calling them “re***ded.” Sanders wrote on X Thursday: “Elon Musk is wrong. 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,” Sanders added. The Vermont Senator publicly disagreed with Elon Musk of defending the H-1B visa program to hire ‘cheaper’ labor After citing Census Bureau figures and other data, Sanders seemed to challenge Musk directly by asking about Tesla’s hiring practices: “If there is really a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, why did Tesla lay off over 7,500 American workers this year – including many software developers and engineers at its factory in Austin, Texas – while being approved to employ thousands of H-1B guest workers?” Sanders then wondered why Tesla employed “H-1B guest workers as associate accountants for as little as $58,000, associate mechanical engineers for as little as $70,000 a year, and associate material planners for as little as $80,000 a year?” He said: “Those don’t sound like highly specialized jobs that are for the top 0.1 percent as Musk claimed this week.” open image in gallery Elon Musk has been defensive of the H-1B visa program, which Trump also announced support for over the weekend as an online debate about the visa program raged on Like Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have argued, Sanders said, the U.S. needs a “highly skilled and well-educated workforce.” But to do that, the country shouldn’t be bringing in “cheap labor from abroad,” but should be hiring “qualified American workers first and to make certain that we have an education system that produces the kind of workforce that our country needs for the jobs of the future,” he said.