Musk, Ramaswamy Defend Foreign Worker Visas Amid Social Media Backlash

‘If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be,’ Musk wrote.

After Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy made posts on the social platform X this week endorsing an expansion of the visa program for hiring foreign-born highly skilled workers, the two tech billionaires faced backlash from supporters of President-elect Donald Trump over how that program would operate within the new administration’s immigration agenda.

Musk and Ramaswamy, who are set to lead Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency next year, celebrated companies using H-1B visas to hire workers, which is a program that allows employers to hire nonimmigrant foreign-born workers in specialty occupations, giving those workers access to a visa as a condition of their job position.

The two argued that tech companies, including Musk’s, rely on foreign workers for operations, setting off a debate among Trump’s supporters on Musk’s social media platform X. While the president-elect had restricted access to foreign worker visas in his first term and has criticized them in past statements, his 2024 campaign suggested an openness to granting some H-1B visas to foreign-born workers who graduate from a U.S.-based university.

Musk suggested in a Dec. 25 post on X that the United States needed to “double” its number of engineers working as the country is short of “super talented engineers” with the number of “super motivated” people in the country being far too low.

“Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win,” Musk wrote, adding that his companies would “prefer to hire Americans … as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process” in another post the same day.

“I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk said in a post on Thursday. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”

Ramaswamy, who is a first-generation U.S. citizen after his parents immigrated from India, chimed in to defend Musk and U.S. companies that look overseas for labor, criticizing American culture for its veneration of “mediocrity over excellence” by citing popular American sitcoms as evidence.

“That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” Ramaswamy wrote in a Thursday post. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Ramaswamy said a culture that celebrates “Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”

Many Trump supporters, including former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), immediately criticized Musk and Ramaswamy for their statements, suggesting that an expansion of the H-1B program would undermine the president-elect’s new administration’s push to prioritize American workers.

“We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender—and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline,” Gaetz wrote in a Thursday post. “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”

Former U.N. Ambassador and presidential candidate Nikki Haley also criticized the remarks, calling on Trump to focus on American workers over those who are foreign-born.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote in a Thursday post. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

Several Democrats, however, defended Musk and Ramaswamy’s comments on the H-1B program.

“Both [Elon Musk] and [Vivek Ramaswamy] are correct we should welcome elite engineers and amazing innovators from everywhere to deploy their talents here to make America more prosperous,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wrote in a Thursday post. “But welcoming hard-working people [with] skills in farming, construction, hospitality also benefits us.”

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.), who immigrated from India, also defended the foreign worker visa program in a Friday post.

“Attracting legal, talented immigrants to the United States benefits everyone, and the system must be streamlined and reformed,” Thanedar wrote.

The H-1B visa program offers U.S. nonimmigrant worker status to 65,000 highly skilled workers every year to fill specific jobs. It also grants another 20,000 visas to foreign-born workers who have completed advanced degrees in the United States. Musk immigrated to the United States as a foreign student and later achieved his work status with a H-1B visa.

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