(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Musk fired American workers and hired foreigners with H-1B visas [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-12-30 Elon Musk came to America on a student visa. Worked here illegally. And started some companies (not Tesla). Now he wants to give other foreigners their bite at the American apple by removing the cap on H-1B visas . Therefore allowing American companies to hire as many foreigners for ‘specialty occupations’ as they want. A rational thinker will question how this policy goal is consistent with MAGA's ‘America First’ fundamentalism. It isn’t. But Musk did not buy a President to promote political consistency. He funded Trump — and turned Twitter into a GOP propaganda mill — not to benefit the American worker, but to make more money. How do we know? He said so himself. After the self-appointed spokespeople for the base — social media luminaries such as Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer — accused Musk of being a deviant from America First MAGA orthodoxy, the Me First, South African tweeted his feelings about the foreigner-benefitting visa program. His take was potty-mouthed and un-nuanced. Here is the tweet: 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. 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. Musk proves his conservatism by lying. As noted above, he did not come here on an H-1B visa. He overstayed a run-of-the-mill student visa. Unsurprisingly, his false origin story is not the only deception Musk propagates about the H-1B visa program. He, along with his side-kick Vivek Ramaswamy, have claimed they cannot fill their tech positions with Americans because US citizens are lazy dumbasses who celebrate sports stars and prom queens over math Olympians This hostile un-American sophistry has enough superficial appeal that cud-chewing nationalists like MT Greene have signed off on giving these jobs to non-Americans. However, actions speak louder than words. When Tesla needed to shed jobs, it fired American workers. Now that they need new employees (shouldn’t they give the Biden administration credit for an economy that created the necessity?) they are looking abroad for new hires. Why? Because foreigners are cheaper. And they are bound to their employers by the H-1B visa rules. No job-hopping or holding out for a raise for these indentured servants. An article on the website Electrek explains Over the last week, Elon Musk has been promoting the increase of H-1B visas, which are used to bring foreign workers into the US for “specialty occupations.” Qualified foreign workers need to be sponsored by a company to get the visa, which lasts three years, extendable to six years, after which the holder needs to reapply. The visa holder must maintain employment at the visa sponsor to retain the work visa. The worker would have to leave the country if the employment ends for whatever reason. This has led to some criticism as it gives tremendous power to the employer and can lead to a modern version of indentured servitude. The article goes into detail: Over the last few days, several current and former Tesla workers reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace US workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year. We reported that roughly US 15,000 employees were let go at Tesla around April 2024. Every department was affected, but the layoffs were concentrated in Texas and California, where Tesla has more workers than anywhere else. Current and former Tesla employees said that many of the laid-off US workers were replaced by foreign workers using H-1B visas. These claims are backed by US Department of Labor data, which show that Tesla requested over 2,000 H-1B visas during the time it was laying off US workers (via Reddit): To reiterate, Tesla wants more H-1B visas, not because it cannot find qualified American applicants, but because foreigners are cheaper. Electrek explains: Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay. MAGA is like a religion. It can get people to believe in something for which there is no evidence. In this case that Trump, his ear-whisperers, and the rest of his team, give a shit about most Americans. Not that all religion is bad. What the individual does on their Sabbath is no one’s business but their own. But when blind faith leads to voters electing candidates whose policies would drive down all wages, curtail OT, increase child labor, remove worker protections, promote pollution and climate change, lead to an unregulated food supply and undertested drugs, favor some demographics over another, and subject America to Christian nationalistic, theocratic fascism then the independent voters who swung The election to Trump need to start paying attention. If they do they will soon discover that the incoming administration is not pro-America. A historical parallel in US automotive history offers food for thought. In 1914, Henry Ford offered his assembly line workers $5 a day * — double the going wage. It wasn’t generosity. A cost-benefit analysis showed it was cheaper to raise pay than suffer a ruinous turnover rate. A century later, another car mogul realized he could pay less than the going rate if he hired foreigners over Americans. Especially, as these foreigners were barred from taking another job — that’s the turnover problem solved. *Note: The $5 a day came with strings. To be eligible, applicants had to have lived in Detroit for six months. And workers had to: abstain from alcohol not be physically abusive toward their families not take in boarders keep homes clean contribute to a savings account In addition, inspectors from the company would go to the workers' homes to see the living conditions and if workers were following the requirements. I suspect Ford, a detestable man and notorious antisemite, would have been a MAGA to his core. A Big Brother government enforcing rules on the proles while the plutocrats were untroubled by taxes and regulation — what’s not to like? 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