By William Upton

A fierce debate has broken out between President-elect Donald J. Trump’s very recent tech industry supporters and his long-standing America First base. At the core of the disagreement is the subject of legal immigration—specifically, how Trump should handle so-called “high-skilled” foreign worker programs like the H1B visa.

One of the staunchest proponents of expanding the labor pool in this way is billionaire Elon Musk. In a Christmas Day post on X, Musk exclaimed America needs more than double the 160,000 semiconductor industry engineers said to be required by 2032.

“No, we need more like double that number yesterday! The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote, adding: “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.”

Additionally, Musk-allies and newly-named artificial intelligence (AI) advisors to President-elect Trump, David Sacks, and Sriram Krishnan, have both emerged as loud advocates for more legal immigration, expanding the high-skilled labor supply through changes to the H1B visa lottery.
A FLAWED MORALITY.

While bringing allegedly top talent from around the world to the United States sounds good on its face, this isn’t actually what H1B visas do.

The O-1 visa is actually the program used to grant legal work status to a foreign nation in the United States that is considered a ‘once-in-a-generation’ intellectual talent in a critical industrial sector.

H1B visas apply more to workers with skills that native-born Americans can easily learn through technical training programs or even collegiate classes. Think more programmer or mid-level software engineer than someone trained in semiconductor fabrication.

Even more concerning is that the big tech companies routinely abuse H1B visas as part of a scheme to suppress the wages of both American and foreign workers while maximizing shareholder profits.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice ramped up enforcement of visa rules after a pattern emerged in which tech companies artificially create the appearance of a domestic work shortage to increase their H1B allotments. This ultimately resulted in native-born workers being laid off and replaced two or threefold by cheaper foreign H1B workers.

H1Bs benefit tech companies on two key fronts:

First, on average, H1B workers are paid significantly less than their American-born counterparts. This effectively puts downward pressure on wages across the industry, meaning American workers also get paid less;

Secondly, because the visa is attached to the sponsor company, the foreign worker lacks the leverage afforded to American-born workers who can demand higher salaries by simply looking to take a job with a different firm.

…AND A COMPLETE SCAM.

Little data actually supports the tech industry’s claims of a worker shortage and a need to end H1B country caps. The data does suggest, however, that big tech is replacing qualified and capable American workers with cheaper foreign labor.

Between 2022 and 2024, Amazon laid off nearly 30,000 high-skilled workers. In the same period—though in compliance with federal law regarding when companies can request H1B visa workers—the online retail giant expanded its workforce by nearly 100,000 foreign workers.