The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O), vowed to go to "war" to defend the H-1B visa program for foreign tech workers late on Friday amid a dispute between President-elect Donald Trump's longtime supporters and his most recently acquired backers from the tech industry.
In a post on social media platform X, Musk
said "The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who
built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is
because of H1B."
"I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you
cannot possibly comprehend," he added.
Of course Musk will. He didn't get to become the President-in-waiting by being accomodating and
Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in South Africa, has
held an H-1B visa, and his electric-car company Tesla obtained 724 of the visas
this year. H-1B visas are typically for three-year periods, though holders can
extend them or apply for green cards.
For Musk, this is personal- personal power and finances. He has no particular affection for foreign-born individuals nor a heartfelt belief in a melting pot or the American mosaic. Thirteen months ago, Musk "tweeted his fervent agreement with an antisemitic tweet" when a tweet posted on X
read: “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
The billionaire owner and CTO of X, formerly Twitter, responded the same evening: “You have said the actual truth.” In another reply, he wrote: “I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind.” Musk has feuded with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) before, threatening to sue over its accounting of hate speech on his social media network....
Musk’s racial politics have been trending in this direction for months. In October, he wrote in response to a tweet mourning the melting down of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee: “They absolutely want your extinction.” Replying to a tweet from @libsoftiktok, who he restored to X, which read: “Racism against white people is the only kind of discrimination that’s allowed,” Musk wrote last week: “It’s messed up and needs to stop.”
Defending himself from being criticized for his antagonism toward American workers, Musk tweeted in part (emphasis his)
OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process.
HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.
Shorter Musk: "Immigrants are superior to American workers and we should make it easier to hire them, especially when I do."
But Ramaswamy, reading from the same hmymnal but singing a different hymn, took this in a somewhat different direction, decrying a culture he believes promotes mediocrity over excellence, the "prom queen over the math olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian."
He's wrong for attacking "normalcy," especially in a culture beset by increasing rates of suicide.However, he's right about the prom queen/math olympiad champ and the jock/valedictorian
Ramaswamy is a little skeezy himself, obviously, and his tweet was all over the place, not unlike this post. Musk, though, is focused: focused on his own financial interests and has earned the condemnation of individuals who have learned, less than a month before he- uh, er, Donald Trump- is inaugurated.
And in news from West Palm Beach, Florida, Donald Trump now has sided with Elon Musk over the ex-President's base, which had thought that Trump was with them on immigration. Siding with Musk is not surprising, however; Donald Trump has no incentive to offend the incoming President.
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