Brunswick Beacon, 01.09.25
South African-born Elon Musk voided his U.S. student visa by never enrolling at Stanford, then overstayed it and worked here illegally, according to The Washington Post and admissions by Musk and his brother Kimball.
The company they worked for worried about them being deported. “We were illegal immigrants,” said Kimball. Musk admitted he had “no legal right to stay in the country.”
Musk eventually obtained an H-1B visa, allowing employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations. Enacted by Republican President George H. W. Bush, it’s the largest visa category, with 780,884 registered foreign workers.
Fresh off his failed attempt to shut down the government for Christmas, Musk ignited another firestorm when he pushed for more H-1B visas, citing “a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, high school valedictorian and co-chair with Musk of Trump’s newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), blamed “American culture [which] has venerated mediocrity over excellence. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign CEO, called Musk and Ramaswamy “sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley,” and urged Trump to deport H-1B workers, replace them with Americans, and make employers pay American workers reparations.
Musk replied, “Take a big step back and F— YOURSELF in the face,” adding, “those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party.”
In 2016, Trump called H-1B “very bad” and “unfair” to U.S. workers. “We shouldn’t have it,” Trump said. That was before Musk spent $277 million to elect Trump, who now says, "I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I've been a believer in H-1B. I’ve used it many times. It's a great program."
First with the budget, now with immigration, when the world’s richest man said, “Jump!” Trump asked, “How high?” As Bob Dylan sang, “Money doesn’t talk. It swears.”
Rich Cooper
Leland
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