President-elect Donald Trump enthusiastically supported the highly coveted H-1B visa program on Saturday, which allows foreign workers in “specialty occupations” into the United States. Whether or not these visas should be sustained and increased has caused MAGA infighting as billionaire Elon Musk backs the program 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 told the New York Post’s Jon Levine.
The H-1B visa program allows employers to hire foreign workers “in specialty occupations or as fashion models.” Specialty occupations require the visa applicant to have at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent, per the Department of Labor. This type of visa is often used for workers in fields such as math, engineering, and technology—areas uniquely beneficial to CEOs like Musk, who came to the US as an international student and says he worked using an H-1B visa.
According to reporting from Forbes based on H-1B data, 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 approved for initial employment, more than double their 2023 number: 328.
Back when he was running for president for the first time, in 2016, Trump took a different 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 said at 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, including in his recent interview with the Post, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he often uses H-1B visas at his properties. Yet, according to reporting from the New York Times’s Ken Bensinger, “Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program,” and, instead, “he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program,” which is for workers like gardeners and housekeepers, “as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers.” Over the past 20 years, according to federal data, Trump’s companies have received approval to employ over 1,000 workers through these two H-2 programs.
And, a CNN review of government labor data found that Trump’s businesses sought to hire more foreign guest workers this year than any other year on record and gained approval to employ 209 —including cooks, housekeepers, servers, and desk clerks.
Musk, the richest person in the world, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on pro-Trump political action committees during the final months of the 2024 presidential election. This week, he’s been feuding with other high-profile MAGA defends about the visa program—spewing insults to naysayers on his social media site X, formerly Twitter.
“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,” Musk wrote on X, adding, “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
The MAGA infighting accelerated this week when Laura Loomer—the far-right anti-immigration activist who rode on Trump’s private plane to one of the presidential debates and wrote that, if Vice President Kamala Harris were to win the election, the White House would “smell like curry” and “speeches will be facilitated via a call center”—claimed that her, and others’, verification was taken away on X after railing against the H-1B visa program and Musk’s support for it.
“He’s not MAGA and he’s a drag on the Trump transition,” Loomer told the Times this week. “Elon wants everyone to think he’s a hero because he gave $250 million to the Trump campaign. But that’s not much of an investment if it allows him to become a trillionaire.”
Earlier this month, President-elect Trump similarly stood alongside Musk when the pair tanked bipartisan congressional budget negotiations heralded by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson—almost spurring a government shutdown. Musk was quick to celebrate the revised funding bill, which featured revisions that could benefit the billionaire in business.
Last week, Trump dismissed any suggestion that Musk was, in fact, the one pulling the strings in the upper echelons of government. At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Arizona, Trump addressed the claims, saying, “No, he’s not taking the presidency … that’s not happening.”
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