Summary
Tesla replaced many laid-off U.S. workers with foreign H-1B visa holders after a 2024 wave of layoffs affecting 15,000 employees.
These visas, tied to employer sponsorship, often lower compensation and give employers significant leverage over workers.
Critics argue this displaces U.S. employees, as senior engineers were replaced by lower-paid junior engineers.
CEO Elon Musk, while advocating for expanding H-1B visa caps, faces backlash, especially from conservatives, for “job-stealing” concerns.
Musk contends there’s a U.S. skill shortage, but critics highlight potential exploitation tied to Tesla’s demanding work culture and visa dependence.
These are the types of articles that really hurt trump. The ones that don’t even mention him.
For too many people if you take them to that final step of logic to where it’s the fault of something they like, they have an emotional reaction.
So as tempting as it is and as obvious as it seems, you gotta let people get to that last step on their own so they think it was their idea. If they think someone told them, they’ll disagree out of spite.
These are the types of articles that really hurt trump. The ones that don’t even mention him.
Why would an article on President Musk need to mention his vice president?
We are laughing but that probably was their agreement.
trump wants to not be in prison and wants money. The president title provides first, musk provides the 2nd. musk wants power.
If we’re looking for any consistency from trump, the one aspect would be his making snap decisions that benefit him in the moment without forethought to the consequences or who else it effects. Any agreement trump might have made with musk would be worth the entire value of the McDonald’s burger wrapper it was likely written on.
I skipped a week on politics and I am confused. Something like this feels like it would be the opposite of what Trump wants. Aren’t they bffs?
You missed the Republican civil war over H1B workers. The Alt Right and Maga want to get rid of it in their anti immigration push. The Tech Oligarchs depend on it. Trump sided with the Tech Oligarchs, possibly derailing his first year in office before he’s even started.
This next year is going to be both entertaining and terrifying all at once. Probably a lot of democrats sitting with popcorn.
It’s the opposite of MAGA and what they want, but trump sided with the billionaires and now MAGA is pissed at them both
Man, this sounds like it would be from the onion. He’s undoing himself.
Isn’t this supposed to be illegal? Used to be before you could hire someone on such a visa you had to prove that there was no US employee/candidate who can do that job role. Did that change? Or we’re just letting this guy openly break the law on a massive scale?
Employing undocumented immigrants is supposed to be illegal too but there they were at Mar-a-largo.
List jobs for pay so low no one will take it, or make standards impossible to meet, i.e. you need 5 years experience of this program that has only existed for 3. See no one in US qualifies gotta go overseas
The system was built to be abused, and it’s serving its purpose. It’s been like this for decades.
So what? He has presidential immunity.
I love how they want to make America great again by yet again undercutting us. Then on top of that using foreign labor as a means to strong arm those (and really any) employees even more.
What. 👏 An. 👏 Ass. 👏 Hole. 👏 Fuck you Musk.
We put out a job listing, had thousands of applicants, didn’t hire any of them, and then concluded no one in America wanted the position!
There is no skill shortage, the skill shortage is absolute bullshit. There is nothing you can learn in a College Classroom that they can’t teach you in the field 9 out of 10 times
It is what it has always been. A desire to fill six figure positions with people willing to do them for the minimum wage. (Protip: The exchange rate exists)
Not even just that, H1-Bs are about two steps shy of importing slave labor. Once you’re here in the US, you have to stay continually employed. If you don’t become a citizen or gain another type of visa, you get deported if you’re not working for a sponsoring company for more than 30 days. Companies continually use this to ensure compliance from workers who might otherwise complain about things like working conditions or pay or long hours.
The American Elite considers the poor lazy because we do not work for free.
H1B is just corporations trying to drive down tech wages. Things is, the “skilled workers” they get from other countries are often unskilled who just learn as best they can on the job. I deal with one of the big companies that supplies these workers and the vast majority of their personnel are “bodies.” You may have 1-2 fairly skilled people leading the team while the rest are folks who can follow a script if it’s written well enough… Zero critical thinking or depth of knowledge.
While the short term may seem beneficial on paper, you get what you pay for. You can’t fake your way without longer term problems showing up.
It’s also another form of job exporting like the manufacturing jobs that corporations got rid of, and we know what that did to the US.
I’m good with a massive reduction on H1B.
They want workers who can’t jumo to another company. If an H1B worker quits, they get deported.
It’s about indentured servitude.
I deal with one of the big companies that supplies these workers and the vast majority of their personnel are “bodies.”
InfoSys. My issue with these folks is that generally speaking they go into programming because it’s a lucrative career, not because they have even a mild interest in it as an activity. I’ve encountered a few exceptions to this in my career, but they’re extremely rare.
InfoSys. My issue with these folks is that generally speaking they go into programming because it’s a lucrative career, not because they have even a mild interest in it as an activity.
My experience with H-1Bs has been very much like that. Although during the dot-com bubble and again more recently, I’ve experienced more than a few citizens in the same camp, too. The same type of person that learned to spell HTML in a bid to make it rich during the dot-com bubble is now the same type that you see trying to LARP as a “front-end developer” in React or what have you. That’s if they aren’t trying to flex on people by talking about something like Rust or have debates about htmx, SPAs, or whatever the fuck, but not really producing working, well-tested code that meets the business need or what have you, even if it’s not in the language/framework of the Youtube channel they happen to be following…
I’ve noticed during a downturn/layoff session, they might not get rooted out right away, as some of the citizen programmers have priced themselves wayyyy under market probably because they know they are posing. But I think ultimately many of them do migrate to management, testing, documentation, or something else on the periphery of the actual work of programming. That, or leave the field entirely.
Yeah, I’ve seen incredibly wide ranges of talent both in seeking out dirt-cheap labor in places like India or Pakistan via offshoring engagements - most of that range being on the very, very low-quality range. I was not convinced it was even the same people working on it from week to week. For one of the projects, the “design”, such as it was, was so bad that it was something that required a rewrite by skilled citizens. So they saved no money at all on that one.
A few - very few - of the people I’ve worked with that were H-1B were good enough, and like one or two that were pretty good. Nothing that needed to be sourced outside of the pool of citizens, though. Most of them struck me as people kind of still halfway through an undergrad program or maybe a boot camp in skill level and general knowledge of IT.
I’d welcome killing H-1B completely and taxing services for offshoring to a high enough extent to discourage it. People were told to get educated, get a degree, go to boot camp, and have a job with semblance of dignity. And the broligarchs and government work hand-in-glove to fuck over Americans that did the right thing while fucking over foreigners? To hell with that.
On the other hand, I think we should be pushing for more enterprising and smart people to come here, permanently. It’s good for those that want to come here, and it’s good for America, too, since they are likely to make things better here, both by contributing to the taxes. I think foreigners tend to start more businesses than natives, too. I think it’s exceedingly stupid and short-sighted to bring people here, exploit them, but also give them lots of on the job experience, then send them home afterwards? How is that the American dream?
I still think the brain drain donvict 1.0 started by scaring off foreign students is going to hurt us long term. We might not have felt the effects just yet, and now he’s going to have another chance to make it even worse. But abusing H-1Bs and screwing citizens is not going to address the brain drain problem.
I have been involved in 2 layoffs. The work did not disappear. The first time, I trained the imported / overseas staff who replaced us, and the 2nd time, I was retained to manage the contract. They did subpar work for pennies on the dollar. Everyone suffered, and nothing improved other than labor costs.
Even domestically, you’ll always find some dumbasses willing to sell their entire lives to make ends meet. I know after my layoff from an environmental monitoring company, all the work my region was doing got shifted to a single team down in Kentucky who was already doing 12hr days. They’re now doing 16-18hrs last I heard, 6 days a week because they’re covering 3 separate states with 4 people, for 2/3 of the hourly pay I was making.
This is a worker exploitation problem compounded by a short-term vs long-term thought process.
Only this time, it’s real!
“They” being some duplicitous Capitalist.
Why the need to specify “duplicitous”?
It’s a good SAT word
They have been doing it since the 90s, at least.
A company that lays off workers should be banned from hiring H1B workers for 10 years.
Shit, I’d take something even simpler, even a 1 year moratorium after a layoff.
I’d prefer killing the program entirely and opting for boosting immigration of talent to become permanent citizens.
But as a second option, I really like this idea. Any company that sheds workers and then is crying about how they cannot find the talent among citizens is so obviously full of shit.
While there are obvious benefits to bringing skilled workers into the US, people are divided on the issue because those workers are often paid less than US workers, putting negative pressure on compensation, especially in the tech industry, on top of the moral questions about holding visas over the heads of foreign workers.
This is a good summary of H-1B issues. I don’t think they’re bad in principle since bringing in talent is great for the economy, but in practice they can be abused and push down wages of American workers.
I think H1B should be reformed. We should still have set limit, but instead of picking people randomly to grant visas, the employers should have a bidding war and only grant visas for the employees that will receive the highest compensation. This will once again promote experts and also ensures they will be paid their true worth.
Also the window to be able to find another job should be extended, to allow them to switch if they get exploited.
This is a good summary of H-1B issues. I don’t think they’re bad in principle since bringing in talent is great for the economy, but in practice they can be abused and push down wages of American workers.
A fairly obvious workaround to the obvious problem inherent in the scam that is H-1B is to kill H-1B dead and work towards enabling people to emigrate here as permanent citizens and fill in this supposed need companies cry about.
Since the entire “problem” is mostly bullshit, that’s not what the moneyed interests are trying to do here. They want to break the back of the American engineer.
It feels like exploitation because it is
Is there any politician that actually stands up to tech? It’s like a cheat code that not even Trump is immune to. Nobody wants to be politician who says no to those nerds who use “innovation” as a weapon. Except most of the tech industry is rather useless but everyone is too afraid to be accused of being tech illiterate. We’re not losing anything by saying no to the 10000th buzzword salad tech company making yet another useless widget.
If anyone has watched the first season of Squid Game, this is precisely what the show has been making a point of. Both locals and foreigners are exploited by the owner-class. That being said, does Elon watch dystopian movies and shows and actually copies them for the lols?
Expanding the program is fine, but raise the fees. A lot. If there is a real talent shortage, companies should be willing to pay it right? /s
Instead of choosing randomly, make companies bid with the salary offers and grant visa to the highest ones. I think that would solve a lot of problems with it.
Also, if it’s not already done, I like the idea of publishing all companies that have H-1Bs, the number of them, the job titles, and their complete compensation information for each one.
I like it.
So much for make America great again…
This was sarcasm if anyone was wondering
Great for billionaires. Make workers desperate, scared, docile, and cheap.
Come on now, this is all parody. No one was upset about H1Bs until two minutes ago when musk started infighting with maga.
My first job straight out of college in the late 90s, I was making 35k a year (tech industry.) my boss was from France, H1B, making 30K, obvious reason is obvious.
This is what they mean by saying bring production to America. This is the plan for all workers because line go up. Yes, you.
