Elon Musk seeks overhaul of H-1B visa program amid rising controversy

Amid the controversy around the H-1B visa program, billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reiterated his support for the system, though saying the whole system of roping in skilled foreign workers to the US requires "major reforms". His statement comes after his DoGE colleague Vivek Ramaswamy defended the H-1B visa system but said the system is "badly broken".

Replying to a point a user (@RobertMSterling) made on X, a platform Musk owns, mega-billionaire Musk says he has been clear that "the program is broken and needs major reform".

The user commented that America needs to be a destination for the world’s most elite talent. "But the H-1B program isn’t the way to do that," he said.

Sterling downloaded five years of H-1B data from the U.S. Department of Labour website and said the program is massively popular with employers. "The program has a statutory limit of 85,000 visas per year, but employers routinely receive approval for more than 800k applications per year (868k, or 10x the limit, in 2024)," he alleged, only to be corrected by X's Community Notes, saying "statutory limit is still 85,000 visas per year".

He found out that the average salary for an H-1B is relatively low—slightly under $120k this year. He alleged that many of the companies that import H-1B tech workers en masse are all Indians, including Infosys (61K), Cognizant (93K), and TCS (60K), among others.

"The H-1B program isn't just Indian companies requesting visas for IT workers, though. The list of companies seeking visas for accountants is a who's who of the Big Four and other prominent accounting firms. EY is crushing the competition with 16k+ applications," he said.

Sterling says a casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. "This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals."

On this mega X thread, Musk replied, saying the H-1B visa program can be "easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically".

Musk's comments come after last week when he said it was important to bring elite engineering talent from abroad to make sure America keeps winning.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who along with Musk is set to head the Department of Justice in the upcoming Trump administration, has supported Musk, and said it's time for the US to shun "mediocrity over excellence".

"A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ... will not produce the best engineers," he said on X. He had earlier also said: “I’ve said it countless times in the last 2 years & will say it again: the H-1B system is badly broken & should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best (not a lottery), pro-competitive (no indentured service to one company), and de-bureaucratised.”

How the controversy erupted

The whole controversy around the rising number of immigrant workers in the U.S. erupted after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the induction of Indian American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author Sriram Krishnan as the senior White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence last week.

Sriram Krishnan has been appointed as the Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House of Science and Technology Policy. The move led to many of Trump's supporters calling for the upcoming government in the U.S. to prefer American citizens over foreign nationals.