Making America Great Again. That’s been the signature promise of Donald Trump since he descended a golden escalator at his eponymous garish tower in June 2015. Legions of beleaguered Americans who have increasingly been marginalized and disparaged in their own country embraced his message, hoping Trump would prove to be their patriotic messiah and restore some rights and protections that were once included with U.S. citizenship.
Being an American was once like the American Express card of yore, membership had its privileges.
Trump is still three weeks away from assuming office, but his most loyal supporters are fast learning that the corporate media got one thing right about Donald J. Trump: He’s a con man. And con men attract other con men like bees are attracted to honey. Two of Trump’s loudest buzzing bees are Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have demonstrated as much, if not more, disdain for Trump loyalists as Hillary Clinton.
Clinton famously derided Trump supporters as “deplorables.” Musk in recent days dismissed them as “contemptible fools” and “hateful, unrepentant racists” who will “absolutely be the downfall of the Republican Party if they are not removed.” Musk also endorsed an X comment from one of his bros suggesting Americans were too “retarded” to be hired for skilled jobs.
Musk also issued a warning to Trump supporters who oppose his position to favor lower cost tech workers from India than American citizens: “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF (emphasis Musk’s) in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Apologies for the vulgarity, but that’s the rhetoric of the X sewer where Musk spends considerable time and millions of his acolytes view him as an oracle of unrivaled wisdom.
Concern for racism — LHOL
Elon Musk feigning concern for racism, that’s rich. This is a guy who expressed support for Scott Adams’s statement that white people “should get the hell away” from Black people. Allegations about pervasive racism at the California Tesla plant contained in a lawsuit filed by the state’s civil rights regulator were so vile that the Los Angeles Times was compelled to post a reader advisory warning atop of its story. Musk reportedly slept under a desk at the factory when some of the allegations occurred, so he was presumably aware of them.
In October 2021, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay nearly $137 million to a Black elevator operator who accused the carmaker of ignoring racial abuse he faced while working at the automaker’s factory. The plaintiff alleged that Tesla employees drew swastikas and scratched a racial epithet in a bathroom stall and left drawings of derogatory caricatures of Black children around the factory. Despite repeated complaints, Tesla allegedly did little to address the behavior.
Musk’s H-1B visa tantrum
What’s sparked Musk’s latest tantrum is the online furor among Trump supporters who were outraged by Ramaswamy’s comment that U.S. companies, particularly Big Tech, must recruit foreign nationals to remain competitive. Musk and Ramaswamy want to remove limits on H-1B visas and have them dispensed like candy, allowing U.S. companies to recruit foreign workers with abandon.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” said smarmy Ramaswamy, who amassed his $1 billion net worth peddling drug patents and despite once deeming himself a worthy presidential candidate has settled for a nonpaying Trump job looking to cut U.S. government waste.
Musk and Ramaswamy would have you believe that there’s a great shortage of qualified American engineers capable of performing at the level Big Tech requires. The truth is that Big Tech hires foreign workers predominantly from India because they will work for less money and obediently follow orders to avoid losing their jobs and visas. Many American workers get passed over and fired as a result.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the 30 top H-1B employers hired 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 and laid off at least 85,000 workers that same year and early 2023. Thirteen of the top 30 H-1B employers were outsourcing firms EPI says underpay migrant workers and offshore U.S. jobs to countries where labor costs are much lower.
The EV trade publication electrek reported today that current and former Tesla workers told the publication that many of the 15,000 workers Tesla fired in April were replaced by foreign workers using H-1B visas. These claims appear supported by US Department of Labor data, which shows that Tesla requested over 2,000 H-1B visas during the time it was laying off US workers.
Most H-1B workers are employed in occupations like computer systems analysis and software development. Seventy-two percent of H1Bs awarded in 2023 went to citizens of India, and 12% were awarded to China’s citizens.
Here’s a list of the top companies using foreign H-1B labor to support their businesses. Tesla ranks No. 17.
The H-1B program was intended to attract the best and the brightest from other countries, which would suggest that most H-1B salaries would be at the high end of pay scales. Consultant Robert Sterling put together a chart making clear that’s not the case.
After Sterling posted on X a series of charts dispelling claims that H-1B visas are being used to attract the best and the brightest, Musk shamelessly replied, “I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.”
Said Sterling of Trump’s response: “Quite the change in tone, eh? From F–K YOURSELF in the face to ‘easily fixed’!”
India’s inferior universities
India’s universities pale when compared to those in the U.S. On every global ranking of the best universities in the world I found, including this one and this one, not one India-based university made the top 25. Yet Goldman Sachs, which supposedly only hires graduates from the best schools, ranks 24th among companies with the most H-1B labor. I’m particularly galled by IBM’s No. 19 ranking, given that the U.S. based company employs more workers in India than it does in the U.S.
IBM, along with No. 1 ranked Amazon, No. 4 ranked Google, and No. 6 ranked Microsoft all do work for the U.S. military. I wonder how many foreign nationals are working on sensitive national security projects.
Notably, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Tesla were all founded by Americans who attended or dropped out of U.S. schools. Gwynne Shotwell, the COO of SpaceX who has overseen the growth of that Musk company, attended a U.S. university as did the company’s two lead engineers.
Musk’s double-sided mouth
As an example of how Musk talks out of both sides of his mouth, in recent days he penned a commentary in a German publication praising the The AfD party, which Newsweek reported is viewed by many as far right. Reuters reported that the AfD party at the national level has been classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as engaging in suspected extremism. Leading figures in the AfD party have warned against Germany’s “Africanisation”, called migrants “invasive species” and dismissed as “passport Germans” naturalized immigrants.
One of AfD’s core planks is opposition to the hiring of foreign workers, which some German companies say puts them at a major disadvantage competing on the global stage. Germany’s universities aren’t ranked in the top tier, so it’s understandable companies would need to attract foreign talent to remain competitive.
Tesla operates a giant car and battery plant in Germany, but Musk publicly declared Palo Alto in Silicon Valley as the company’s global engineering headquarters, so he doesn’t need to attract highly skilled labor in Germany. For all Musk’s feigned environmental concerns, the development of a Tesla gigafactory near Berlin reportedly resulted in the destruction of about 500,000 trees.
The building of Tesla’s German factory has been controversial and attracted significant protests, as well as prompting a debate about the trade-offs involved in developing a green economy. In Mexico, Musk’s plans for a massive factory in that country ran afoul of environmentalists who warned the region where Tesla planned to build it already suffered from a serious water shortage.
Trump so far has sided with Musk and Ramaswamy, saying he’s always been in favor of H-1B program. In fact, while campaigning for president, Trump said he wanted foreign nationals who graduated from U.S. schools to “automatically” receive green cards. The number of international students at U.S. colleges hit a record high in the 2023-24 academic year, growing 6.6% year over year to reach more than 1.1 million students. U.S. universities prefer foreign students because they are more likely than U.S. residents to pay a college’s full admission costs.
For all Trump’s MAGA talk, Trump’s own businesses sought to hire more foreign guest workers to perform mostly menial jobs in 2024 than any other year on record, according to a CNN review of government labor data. Companies linked to some of Trump’s top political backers and administration appointees also have been given the green light to use more guest workers.
Trump’s guest worker positions offer modest, above-minimum-wage pay. For example, bartenders and servers at Mar-a-Lago hired through the program this year make about $16 an hour with eligibility for overtime, raises and bonuses, according to government data.
By comparison, the starting wage at In-N-Out Burger in California, the most profitable food chain in America, is $22 to $23 an hour. I’m doubtful In-N-Out hires temporary foreign workers for restaurant positions because the company prefers to groom its entry-level employees for promotions leading to store manager positions paying more than $200,000 a year.
In-N-Out hasn’t hired any H-1B workers in years, even for its headquarters and technology jobs.
Americans should be mindful that while Trump views Musk as critical to making America great again, Xi Jinping, China’s leader whose goal is to make his country the dominant global power by 2050, reportedly views Musk as a “technology utopian with no political allegiance to any country.” That’s why Wi granted Musk unprecedented foreign privileges to allow Tesla to operate in China and help that country achieve global EV superiority, further abetting the efforts of Joe and Hunter Biden. Rest assured, Musk wouldn’t dare call Wi a “damp sock puppet” as he did President Biden and I’m doubtful China’s communist government would tolerate Musk’s vile potty mouth.
Xi strikes me as considerably more attuned to Musk’s lack of values and character than the person who will occupy the White House next month. Perhaps it’s because Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy are three peas in a pod.