Summary
Senator Bernie Sanders criticized Elon Musk over his support for the H-1B visa program, calling it a tool for corporations to replace good-paying American jobs with lower-wage foreign labor.
Sanders cited data showing U.S. companies laid off 85,000 American workers between 2022 and 2023 while hiring 34,000 H-1B visa holders, arguing this undermines U.S. competitiveness.
Musk, who credits the visa program for his success, defended it, stating he’s ready to “go to war” over the issue.
The debate has divided MAGA conservatives, exposing rifts within Trump’s coalition.
Put a hold on that popcorn. It’s not a civil war. Elon and Trump are in agreement. What’s happening is some MAGA supporters are going through the five stages of grief. They seem to be somewhere around anger and bargaining. Trump conned his supporters like he conned his employees before them. Now Trump supporters are working their way to accepting Trump was always going to enrich himself and billionaires at their expense.
Now would be a good time to start pulling people away from MAGA. People need an alternative. Taking the wealth of billionaires as well as the source of their wealth would be a good start. Not to mention systemic change to our government’s institutions.
Now would be a good time to start pulling people away from MAGA.
I don’t know a single maga who has the slightest chance at being turned. All the magas in my life are just people who I know are either 1) Willfully ignorant or 2) Hateful.
What I’m pulling them away from is any relationship with me and my family.
The same is pretty much true with my family as well. However thanks to the internet we have access to a larger subset of people than just our families.
Fair, and I appreciate the wisdom of both your original comment and this reply.
Nonetheless, after 4 to 8 years of trying to convince magas that they are victims of a grifter and members of a cult, I feel pessimistic about the number of peelable magas out there, my ability to do any peeling, and frankly the depth of motivation I feel to continue banging my head against the wall.
How about MANS.
Make America Not Suck.
Their whole shtick would jive with a thing called MANS too.
That’s the thing. It’s not enough to only be against something, although we still need to do that too. We have to be for something. We should definitely pick things we would be happy with too.
Thinking back to school, I had an ethics teacher ask the class what we thought the meaning of life is. The consensus from the class was whatever we believe. Then our teacher asked a follow up, in that case, what do we believe it means. No one had an answer.
We need to decide what we believe is important to us, what we value, and then figure out the most useful strategy to making that reality. We want to dismantle hierarchies, but that means thinking about what our lives would be without those hierarchies.
Right now, people are being told to imagine a world without certain groups of people, on the false promise that the elimination of people will improve their lives. We need to get people to imagine a world without certain classes of people. The elimination of class will give us economic freedom so that we will have the means to improve our lives.
Right now, people are being told to imagine a world without certain groups of people
You hit the nail on the head right there. It always boils down to focusing large groups of people against something, and for something, and often that something is people.
We need to fix the core concept of being against people. I actually like the concept of H1-B for example, it gives people in worse economic standing a leg-up.
However, setting up a system to game domestic work against foreign work, with the main focus being allowing the corpos to lie, and not pay fair wages, in exchange for slave labor isn’t a system.
It isn’t a system we should want to continue anyway. Immigration should be an opportunity for equality, not indentured servitude.
Good point. Here’s my pitch - Reboot America. Let’s turn it off and on again
Dismiss everyone. Hand out free food from strategic reserves, put a hold on all utility shutoffs and evictions, maybe cut some checks for people - let’s take some time, put everything on life support, and unfuck the system
How? Bottom up. Organize, take the local and state elections, call a constitutional convention. Let’s use the second to last option, the ripcord built into the Constitution for exactly this sort of situation
I don’t think it could happen fast enough to really matter, but I think it would get people moving in the right direction, and in the meantime apply pressure with a compelling but nonviolent threat
So now Bernie sanders is pulling a “they’re taking our jobs”? We are living in strange times.
Those immigrants are basically being worked as indentured slaves whose only way to remain in the US is to accept whatever bad deal the corpos throw at them. IF the immigrants were guaranteed the same wages with no dependency on their employers to stay in the US and look for fair work, he would have far less of a problem with it. On a level playing field immigration is okay, but if the corpos basically import slave labor it’s not.
Right now H-1B visas are being used to play the foreign working class against the domestic working class, this is precisely what he argues against.
“The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make,” Sanders added.
So now Bernie sanders is pulling a “they’re taking our jobs”?
Honestly can’t tell if serious
What if I told you that illegal immigrants are essentially slaves, and far cheaper to hire than visa holders?
What if I told you, “no shit sherlock”.
Aren’t these separate issues? I won’t pretend to know much about this, but it does seem like some companies are taking advantage of H-1B employees.
That’s the point Bernie is making, American companies are firing American workers to hire H-1B at much lower wages.
Never did I imagine living in a dimension that this was not so glaringly obvious that it needed to be said… [clocks room] We’re fucked.
He’s been consistent on these issues for a while. “Open borders? That’s a Koch brothers proposal.”
Sanders cited data showing U.S. companies laid off 85,000 American workers between 2022 and 2023 while hiring 34,000 H-1B visa holders, arguing this undermines U.S. competitiveness.
He’s against 85k americans getting fired, and being replaced by LESS immigrants.
He took off the mitts to throw fucking hands!
smarter choice to attack elon, trump wont be with us that much longer in the grand scheme of things. good chance he passes in office. one way or another
Lets hope that massive pile of breathing human excrement passes his last mushy liquid mound of stool in his depends while sitting in the oval Office. Jd Vance is also disgusting but he had half a spine when he told the truth that trump is America’s hitler. Sold out his morals pretty quick to be American hitler’s vp though
I’m honestly shocked his brain hasn’t been devoured by syphilis yet, I guess he’s listening to the experts around him juuust enough to take the abx, but if he’s got sodium or other diet restrictions no way he’s following them.
I’m constantly surprised that he hasn’t farted himself to death 🤔
That’s how I want to go out.
Trump farting you to death‽
No Bernie let them fight. “Never Interfere With an Enemy While He’s in the Process of Destroying Himself.”
I think the expression is “Don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
I generally agree with you but I think there’s an exception to every rule, I mean, he just dumped gas on the MAGA dumpster fire. What’s wrong with that?
Also, love me some barqs my dude.
Oh he’s absolutely letting them fight, he’s just stoking them up more playing into the big issue splitting the republican party in two.
Yes it’s perfect.
It’s more like throwing a pork chop into the middle of a dog fight and running away lol
I’m worried this gives them a common enemy.
The Judean Peoples Front!
As much as I hate to say it, it gives them a powerful enemy.
To me it feels like he threw a sealed gas can into a fire
Strong disagree. Keep them riled up. Make sure musk isn’t able to distract them.
Bernie always was MAGA but not for the slogan but actually to improve people’s lives.
Well take away the “again” because America never had what he wants.
We did have a 90% tax bracket… and Roe v. Wade, and Presidents who were presumably accountable to the justice system, and elections that people generally accepted the outcome, and much less toxic disconnect between political parties, and media that wasn’t all owned by a handful of billionaires, and we had the Fairness Doctrine, and Citizens United.
So yah getting back to that basic level of functionality would be nice actually.
Whenever I think of “MAGA” I think of the strong middle class that characterized post-war America and wonder wtf these people are actually doing.
I hear you, but that strong post-war middle class was overwhelmingly white due to our racist systems. As much as I like the things you’ve mentioned, we need to stop looking at our past and look at the future.
Those programs, while imperfectly implemented, also showed that they really did improve the lives of the people who were able to gain the advantages of them. We need to look to what those programs did well and fix and rework what those programs did poorly.
Cool so we’ll do it again but for everyone this time it’ll be rad
Yeah but who do we take the stuff from then?
The billionaires?
90% was the top rate, in practice the rich during that time paid less tax than today because they had huge loopholes
Top 1% paid only 16.9% of their income in tax compared to 25.9% now (of the total amount, you can be in a higher bracket and your total percentage will always be lower than your bracket)
US has a lot of dark history for sure, but being middle class wasn’t as bad as it is right now.
Is anyone middle class anymore? I mean like doctors and lawyers sure, but for the average worker it’s out of reach.
Tech workers are one of the few groups that can get a 4 year degree, work hard and be able to afford a house, health insurance, a few cars, annual vacations, education for their kids and have a decent retirement. Granted, it’s not all of tech and it isn’t guaranteed, but it’s fucked that everyone who works can’t get this basic shit (car as basic shit is debatable but much of the US is designed around cars). But Phony Stark is desperate to knock the techies down a peg or two because I guess he needs more money to fund his king of mars fantasy? What a fucking dick.
He’s intentionally reducing the opportunities for well-paid work in the country. What an asshole. The whole immigration process needs to be streamlined so people don’t even need to deal with this H1B indentured servitude bullshit.
Visas being tied to an employer and getting only 1-3 months to get a new job if you get laid off is fucking awful. If we had the same number of tech workers here on visas but they had real mobility then it would be an entirely different story.
And to add insult to injury, Elmo didn’t even follow the visa rules when he started in the US. If he weren’t a billionaire he could legit get deported for breaking immigration laws in the past.
I don’t know man I think now would be the perfect time for aoc to take the opposite side of bernie and then both sides of musk vs maga can point and say they are working with the dems
He should. They’re a few facts away from him being their actual representative candidate.
Elon credits this for his success? As in he successfully got one after being here illegally?
I read it as him saying Tesla, SpaceX, etc. couldn’t have succeeded without H1-B visa workers.
That’s pretty obvious to anyone who has to work with H1Bs. They are far from technical experts, but they know enough in their one very limited breadth of knowledge that they can do certain things quickly and for extremely cheap.
Then they use the far more expensive FTE engineers to fix things obviously outside their scope of expertise. This is the part that is still “too” expensive for Musk. The “bet” is that with a sufficient number of H1-Bs you can have enough to have each one contribute their limited expertise and interface with the work of another H1-B.
The optimization, if my numbers are right - is that you should need 2-3 H1-Bs to replace a single more entry-level FTE engineer. 3-5 H1-Bs could replace a Senior Software Engineer in some cases.
The goal is to get these H1-Bs here, basically get them to do grunt work, and give them education materials to shore up what they lack. In a free market, this would make them far more valuable, but the H1-Bs are locked into their price point. Dissenters get blacklisted and deported.
There are H1Bs of every level, even experts in their field. You clearly don’t work in tech and just regurgitate what you see others write
I’ll copy the same response I gave below. Essentially, the H1-B program is intended for that. That is not how it is being used.
You aren’t wrong on that part. That’s what the H1-B program is designed for. In practice, corporations have exploited the intent of it and instead used it to select very narrowly trained software developers, it workers, and technicians instead of Ph. ds, inventors of specific techniques, or experts with rare and niche technology.
Out of 30 or so I have worked with, I have only worked with one true expert. He was an optics dude who knew specific techniques for using TI DLP to create 3 dimensional images on a transparent plane (I think it was just acrylic). In what I could observe, it was not obvious that he was being exploited, and if I remember right, he was compensated to the limits of the visa, and only brought back on his terms.
My dad came on a H1B and he was very well paid when he got his green card. I’d say that makes him an expert sys admin
You’ve just exposed your bias lmao. Thank god you daddy gave you an anecdote so you can totally speak with confidence about shit you don’t understand.
Those of us that ACTUALLY work with H1Bs…. We see what’s happening.
I’m glad your daddy wasn’t used and abused but that is NOT a common experience. Go ask the twit H1Bs that were forced to stick around for Elon’s takeover. Read the thoughts and feelings of devs who escaped that shit show. It’s not rare, Sanders is right H1B visas are horribly abused for cheap controllable labor.
H1B visas are SUPPOSED to be for jobs that no American can actually fill. Anything else IS ABUSE of the system and damaging to the American economy, not to mention unfair to the actual H1B workers.
Yeah, I’m biased because I would be getting bombed in my apartment right now if we couldn’t immigrate
I work with h1bs, I’m in tech. There are incredibly sharp people who come on this visa
I’m not going to argue he wasn’t an expert. The program is designed for them. The problem isnt people like him. In fact, the problem isn’t any of the workers I’ve worked with either.
The problem is that outsourcing staffing agencies use the H1-B visa to hire out to bigger companies looking for a cheap fast way to get things working.
By law, the employer sponsoring an H1-B holder has to pay competitive wages for the work they will do. The staffing agencies do that by paying the people they bring in pretty low and similar wages. Of course, the agencies pocket the difference from the contract and what they are actually paying these workers. In practice, even those wages are lower than what an FTE should get paid.
It has a compounding effect on people who are permanent residents or citizens: it’s an effective way to suppress wages artificially for a lot of these jobs. And of course, many of these H1-B holders get the boot right at the end of 4 or 5 years because then things get dicey about sponsoring them for permanent residence, and that is when costs start really going up.
We really don’t need to expand the H1-B cap, and it is in desperate need of stricter regulation.
The reason this topic is one that “sounds” like one that “both the left and right” agree on is that it’s for entirely different reasons. The right comes at it from the racist “they took r jerbs” aspect, and the left comes at it from the anti-capitalistic exploitation aspect.
You don’t have to look further than who advocates for expanding the H1-B program.
Well said, truly.
Interesting perspective, but also a little derogatory or at a minimum…overly prescriptive about the folks coming here on those visas?
I’ve known multiple PhDs here on H1-B as well, and while the exploitative nature of their living status depending on their employment is always there and a problem, and I’m sure they were underpaid compared against a US citizen equivalent - the pay was nowhere near the fractions you’re describing, and several of them were far more knowledgeable about their areas of study than any citizens I met at the company.
One of them probably has top-100 understanding of his field globally, if I were to guesstimate. Let’s not portray all H1-B recipients as fundamentally less qualified than Americans. Not only is it overly reductive, our increasingly poor educational performance compared against e.g. China and India are starting to reverse that idea in a lotta cases, too.
Edit to add: I should say I also met one who was a fraud at best and a spy at worst. Totally clueless about his supposed “field”. I understand some parts of the world have issues with corruption and buying of degrees, but I know little about it.
You must be fucking joking if you seriously think that every single one of those tens of thousands of H1Bs were actual experts at the top do their game to the point where no American worker could fill the position otherwise.
You must be joking if you think even 3/4ths of them meet that criteria.
Oh but thank god you know a few H1B PHDs. That little anecdote changes everything.
You seem to have chosen only a few of the words in my comment to read. Feel free to read the rest, or fuck right off with your ridiculous nonsense, your call. Blocking you regardless so enjoy whatever you choose I guess.
You aren’t wrong on that part. That’s what the H1-B program is designed for. In practice, corporations have exploited the intent of it and instead used it to select very narrowly trained software developers, it workers, and technicians instead of Ph. ds, inventors of specific techniques, or experts with rare and niche technology.
Out of 30 or so I have worked with, I have only worked with one true expert. He was an optics dude who knew specific techniques for using TI DLP to create 3 dimensional images on a transparent plane (I think it was just acrylic). In what I could observe, it was not obvious that he was being exploited, and if I remember right, he was compensated to the limits of the visa, and only brought back on his terms.
Werner von Braun?
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That’s because Elon isn’t supporting H1B out of his love for immigrants or immigration. He’s supporting it because he knows he can pay them less. He’s a capitalist douchebag selling out the country to lowest bidder
You’re the one dancing to this capitalist’s tune
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Bernie had his chance and so did the rest of the paid off Democrats
gloves on both sides are off and even if Democrats magically win the next election nothing will change
once Bernie dies someone else will be appointed to be the single nutjob that appears to be on the side of the citizens all for show
Moron alert
checks history
Troll account disregard 👍
I’ll bash on the the DNC leadership any day of the week but I don’t know what you’re trying to blame Bernie for.
And they’re calling him a Democrat, minimizing his incredible achievement of getting and staying elected to national office as an independent.
Look at Bernie’s entire life of fighting this shit and say that again.
No one is ever pure enough for Verdant Banana’s purity test. But you’d think they would at least take time to be happy that Harris lost considering how hard they tried to make that happen.
Speaking of people being paid off…
Bernie Sanders left the Democratic Party in 2020 and is an independent. If you’re going to bash someone for their affiliations, at least check first.
And he only went from I to D in 2016 to run on the D ticket.
Pretty sure that’d be AOC…
