Summary
Elon Musk faced backlash from his followers on X after advocating for importing “super talented engineers” to address a shortage in the U.S. tech industry.
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
Critics argued there’s sufficient U.S. talent being overlooked or underpaid, with some pointing to widespread tech layoffs.
Musk dismissed claims of low wages or training gaps, maintaining a need for exceptional engineering talent to advance innovation.
Super talented = extremely desperate foreigners who’ll work 90hr weeks for very low pay.
Just in case anyone needed a translation.
And who are really indentured servitude type slaves
I was “lucky” enough to be around during the dot-com meltdown and seeing H-1Bs still being used/abused, even as so many citizens were being cast away. This scam has been around for quite some time. The cap was 115K in 99 and 2000.
Perversely, when the bubble really started taking its toll, the cap was 195K from 2001-2003.
During much of this time period, you’d look around and see 200 people applying for one cruddy junior/intermediate type of software engineer position. Why the cap was not zeroed out in emergency legislation tells you all you need to know about anyone looking out for Americans who work for a living.
Companies claiming things are so dire that they just cannot find the local talent are so very full of it. If they were the least bit genuine, they’d be paying HIGHER wages to the people they do bring in on a visa and they’d be lobbying for permanent status, not this six year max thing.
Now if Elmo was talking about basically being a worldwide talent scout to bring people here with full citizenship status AND being paid top dollar, we’d be talking something different, but if he’s talking about more H-1Bs, it’s the same old shit as it ever was…
He didn’t explain to them that holders of H1B visas have to stay with the corporation that hires them or else they get deported. It’s semi-slavery. Conservatives would love it.
That’s the only way to keep salaries depressed, which is why they’re brought in. If they could switch jobs, there’d be competition among potential employers and the salaries would increase. The whole H1B scheme is a filthy racket. It depresses the wages of non-H1B workers, it exploits those on an H1B visa, and there’s a whole cottage industry of faking recruitment campaigns before showing that a company was “forced” to fill a critical skills shortage with an H1B holder. For example, the qualifications can be written so that only people on certain Indian of Chinese computer-science courses can have the required coursework. Not that the applicant necessarily took the course, though: there’s another cottage industry in India and in China of people doing exams on someone else’s behalf.
And then there’s industrial espionage…
Yep. What I don’t get is when people that are supposedly “nationalist” aren’t even patriotic enough to just open up immigration so that the talent pool stays HERE. It’s all about just short-term profits for private tyrannies and everyone else can apparently go fuck themselves, citizens included.
The ones that know about it already love it very much.
What I’m reading is that he wants Chinese or Indian engineers because they are as qualified as the next guy, they’re already used to insane hours and no holidays AND he can just pay them their original wage, which is peanuts compared to what US engineers make. Also once he’s done with them he can just deport them. What’s not to like?!
The broligarchs have always loved the H-1B fraud.
The future of the US
Musk replied. “OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process. HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
I’Ve BuRnEd OuT aLl ThE WiLlInG nErDs hErE aNd I nEeD tO bUy SoMe FrOm OvEr ThErE1!1!
Right-Wing bootlickers continue to learn they aren’t in the in-crowd they desperately seek to join.
Ya’ll are not reading between the lines here.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,”
The “AND super-motivated [sic]” is key here. By “super-motivated” he means working 80-100 hours for shit pay.
Yeah, both American citizens and H1Bs area getting tired of this shit.
On another vein, his government “positions” listing
“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” for “zero pay”.
Is code for, “I want corporate lackies for this job.” Corporations will pay it’s reps to “work” in these government positions and basically lobby. No one else will bother because normal people got mouths to feed.
It’s not really “between the lines” when he’s been straight up shouting exactly that for years. He’s been very vocal about it at least since he bought Twitter, “keeping only the most talented ones who really want to work” and it turned out that only the immigrants who can’t AFFORD to leave stayed for shit pay.
Another fun thing about H1B holders is that, in their home countries, there are often kickbacks and indenture schemes that mean that they’re spending the first year of their working life in the US paying back someone for “arranging” the work. So if they quit, they’re in debt to the mob, and if they don’t return, their families are at risk.
I’d love to see the entire program scrapped. It’s such bullshit, and always has been. If there is some real talent that is just somehow so rare it cannot be found here, then give people full citizenship after they’ve been scouted for and found. With absolutely ZERO strings attached to any company. If they are so very rare and such high caliber that Americans are somehow lacking, then why on Earth wouldn’t we want them to STAY here and thrive and contribute long-term to this country? Hell, they might even found a company or two…
Instead, we have them stay here six years max on the H-1B and paid less than Americans. WTF? I thought these people are so sought after and so rare, etc…we are going to send them away after six years?
Scrapping the whole system would force us to finally fix our education system and stop intentionally raising unskilled people who leave college with $100k of debt and are still unqualified for a job.
Thank you
Almost all of the HB-1 sponsors in my workplace are making 100k+. That may be lower than the average pay for that position in some cases, but it’s definitely not starving anyone.
“import” like it’s livestock. Strategically avoiding the word “migration”, too.
Human Commodities
I believe it was a CEO of British Airways that referred to passengers as “self-loading cargo”, so it’s not like it’s new that the haves see the have-nots as a resource to be managed.
Lol the airline industry has some pretty good terms, my personal favorite is “wet lease”.
Mine is See You Next Tuesday.
He’s so fucking stupid. It’s exhausting.
Well, I’m not sure I’d call it stupid, exactly. He wants indentured servants, cheap. It’s about accruing more power and wealth to himself.
Now, our government should be set up to STOP unregulated capitalism like this, but at this point, it’s been captured by the capitalists, and they are basically there to give a huge assist to capitalists instead.
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Bit of both, Mysk didn’t even complete his college degree. Being born into money does not, by default, correlate to intelligence
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So you want TWO Trumps?!
Well, not in this case. In this case, Musk is absolutely right. Probably what he would actually be if he hadn’t gone full to the weird dark side.
Yeah, when you import your slaves you can pay them less and they’re more subservient because they don’t want to be deported. It also drives down the wages for US citizens that perform the same jobs. News flash, there are plenty of good software engineers in America. They just aren’t going to work 60 hours a week for 60k a year while the company they work for posts billions in profit each year.
If you need my skill and time to make a million dollars, I better be getting at least 15-20% of that profit. Employers can obviously afford to pay it if they can give a CEO that barely does shit 250 mil plus stock options
Don’t forget that (using his words) he himself was an illegal alien that overstayed his student visa and started to work in his first startup with invalid status. Kick him out and ban him from re entry, no exceptions!
He didn’t “overstay” his visa. The minute he set foot on US soil, he dropped out of the college he enrolled in and leveraged his father’s connections to land that startup job. When your family owns an emerald mine, they might not be US citizens, but they’re definitely going to make friends with US citizens, and those are the people you schmooze.
When you enter the US under student visa (F1) and you drop out of college, your status become invalid and you have to leave the country in 30 days even if the visa sticker on the passport says “valid until next year”
With all the resources their family had, there were more “legal” ways to buy access to the country, like creating a fake company with fake employees
Yeah, rule of law applies to everyone, regardless of what those mouthpieces on the Supreme Court might claim.
The Muskrat wants cheap engineers that will work like China’s 9-9-6.
Well he saw that the only people willing to work at Twitter were extremely desperate to stay in the country
Do I really need to login just to view a comment?
why, would you rather have a less shitty internet?
Is there a Nitter for Bluesky yet? [googles]
Not sure which comment you wanted…
For that comment, yes. It appears that the author has limited it to signed-in users only. This is one way to ensure that the Bluesky moderation tools are applied to everyone who might view / screenshot / interact with the post in question.
This is one way to ensure that the Bluesky moderation tools are applied to everyone who might view / screenshot / interact with the post in question.
What mod tools? Shouldn’t need a login to view or screenshot. Interaction should require an account but I see no reason for the others.
Completely agree. This a grab for leads by Bluesky. Not exactly something I like to see in social media platform outreach tactics…
So a bullshit excuse
Globalism for me but not for thee
Musk is currently fighting with Laura Loomer over this and even pretended to be someone else in order to argue with her over Twitter Spaces and it is very, very funny to watch.
christ it should be a rule to never post links to sites that require accounts or logins when sharing information about a discussion without also providing screenshots or a non-account mirror.
Christ, it should be a rule never to be this pissy with people sharing information. Here’s a screenshot. Of an audio post. Not sure how much help that’s going to be, so I guess you can just read about it on Mediaite or Raw Story in a few days.
Christ, it should be a rule that you post the transcript from a professional stenographer of any audio clips that get posted from a site with mandatory logins.
Not sure if there is something better…
