By Nandita Bose
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ:) and SpaceX, vowed to go to “warfare” to defend the H-1B visa program for international tech staff late on Friday amid a dispute between President-elect Donald Trump’s longtime supporters and his most not too long ago acquired backers from the tech trade.
In a submit on social media platform X, Musk mentioned “The explanation I am in America together with so many vital individuals who constructed SpaceX, Tesla and a whole lot of different firms that made America robust is due to H1B.”
“I’ll go to warfare on this challenge the likes of which you can not presumably comprehend,” he added.
Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in South Africa, has held an H-1B visa, and his electric-car firm Tesla obtained 724 of the visas this yr. H-1B visas are usually for three-year intervals, although holders can lengthen them or apply for inexperienced playing cards.
Musk’s tweet was directed at Trump’s supporters and immigration hardliners, who’ve more and more pushed for the H-1B visa program to be scrapped amid a heated debate over immigration and the place of expert immigrants and international staff introduced into the nation on work visas.
Trump has to this point remained silent on the problem. The Trump transition didn’t reply to a request for touch upon Musk’s tweets and the H-1B visa debate.
Prior to now, Trump has expressed a willingness to offer extra work visas to expert staff. He has additionally promised to deport all immigrants who’re within the U.S. illegally, deploy tariffs to assist create extra jobs for Americans and severely limit immigration.
The difficulty highlights how tech leaders like Musk — who has taken an essential position within the presidential transition, advising on key personnel and coverage areas — at the moment are drawing scrutiny from his base.
The U.S. tech trade depends on the federal government’s H-1B visa program to rent international expert staff to assist run its firms, a labor power that critics say undercuts wages for Americans.
The altercation was set off earlier this week by far-right activists who criticized Trump’s number of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American enterprise capitalist, to be an adviser on synthetic intelligence, saying he would have affect on the Trump administration’s immigration insurance policies.
On Friday, Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump confidante, critiqued “massive tech oligarchs” for supporting the H-1B program and forged immigration as a risk to Western civilization.
In response, Musk and plenty of different tech billionaires drew a line between what they view as authorized immigration and unlawful immigration.
Musk has spent greater than 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} serving to Trump get elected president in November. He has posted recurrently this week concerning the lack of homegrown expertise to fill all of the wanted positions inside American tech firms.
