THE SET-UP: Remember when Elon hosted an incredibly long conversation with Trump? It feels like a lifetime ago, but it was August … right before Elon went all-in on Trump’s candidacy.
On that score, it was a turning point.
In terms of what they said, though, it was anything but memorable. It was a tedious snoozefest. But there was one thing that stood out. It came during a discussion of layoffs and unions. Trump was glowing in his praise for Elon’s clinical ruthlessness:
"You're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, you just say: ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike - I won't mention the name of the company - but they go on strike. And you say: 'That's okay, you’re all gone.'"
Given the report below by Electrek it appears that his ruthlessness is a function of his ability to replenish staff with imported workers he can control. - jp
TITLE: Tesla replaced laid off US workers with foreign workers using H-1B visas that Musk want to increase
https://electrek.co/2024/12/30/tesla-replaced-laid-off-us-workers-with-foreign-workers-using-h-1b-visas-that-musk-want-to-increase/
EXCERPTS: Over the last week, Elon Musk has been promoting the increase of H-1B visas, which are used to bring foreign workers into the US for “specialty occupations.”
Qualified foreign workers need to be sponsored by a company to get the visa, which lasts three years, extendable to six years, after which the holder needs to reapply.
The visa holder must maintain employment at the visa sponsor to retain the work visa. The worker would have to leave the country if the employment ends for whatever reason. This has led to some criticism as it gives tremendous power to the employer and can lead to a modern version of indentured servitude.
Tesla has been a big user of those visas, and its CEO, Elon Musk, has been using his newfound political influence to promote increasing the cap of H-1B visas. He received significant pushback from his new friends on the right side of the political spectrum in the US, who see this visa as being used to steal jobs from Americans.
Over the last few days, several current and former Tesla workers reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace US workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year.
We reported that roughly US 15,000 employees were let go at Tesla around April 2024. Every department was affected, but the layoffs were concentrated in Texas and California, where Tesla has more workers than anywhere else.
Current and former Tesla employees said that many of the laid-off US workers were replaced by foreign workers using H-1B visas.
These claims are backed by US Department of Labor data, which show that Tesla requested over 2,000 H-1B visas during the time it was laying off US workers (via Reddit):
Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay.
The problem [at Tesla] stems from the employer’s weight over the workers as a sponsor of their visas. Elon is famously hard on workers, and he doesn’t like the traditional 40-hour workweek. He often pushes Tesla employees to work 60 to 80 hours per week.
Many Tesla employees have happily done this for years, and the main motivator has been the belief in Tesla’s mission to accelerate the advent of electric transport in order to curb climate change.
Some people still believe in this mission, but Elon has eroded it over the last few years by shifting focus on self-driving and advocating for removing EV incentives in the US. It is becoming harder to make people believe that Tesla’s main goal is to accelerate the advent of EVs when its CEO is talking more about Tesla becoming “the most valuable company in the world” than its impact on climate change. And let’s not forget that he has spent a tremendous amount of effort and money over the last year to get deniers of the human impact on climate change elected.
But he has found another effective way to motivate workers to work harder and for longer hours: hold a visa over their head.
TITLE: As MAGA attacks Indian tech workers and H1B visas, a debate about racism plays out on social media
https://scroll.in/article/1077333/as-maga-attacks-indian-tech-workers-will-trump-change-his-position-on-legal-immigration
EXCERPTS: Marketers are familiar with a consumer behavior theory called the country-of-origin effect. In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Why you aren’t buying Venezuelan chocolate,” marketing academic Rohit Deshpande outlines how stereotypes associated with countries can affect consumer perceptions of products from there. There is a reason that we seek Swiss watches, German cars and French wine, and not Italian beer, Bangladeshi cellphones or Norwegian spices.
Country stereotypes however, are not static, and conscious efforts by brands can change stereotypes over the years.
Japanese and Korean automobile brands, for example, were poorly regarded by American consumers in the ’70s and ’80s, but conscious actions like continuous product development, providing superior after-sales service, upscale branding, and more.
Indian IT services companies and their employees too have faced significant challenges in the ’80s and early ’90s due to stereotypes associated with India, but continuous process innovation and consistent performance by many Indian players have today earned the Indian IT services industry a positive country-of-origin perception in America.
Indian engineers are now a prized commodity in the US, with many companies allegedly preferring them over similarly qualified people from other ethnicities.
Country stereotypes can be a double-edged sword. While American actor Kalpen Modi famously had to change his name to Kal Penn to find his bearings in Hollywood and many of his Gujarati brethren are stereotyped as 7-11 clerks and motel operators, the STEM graduates in the university towns, Silicon Valley and Wall Street now face no such problems.
Graduates of our engineering schools are in great demand in the tech sector. CEOs like Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Google, Arvind Krishna of IBM and Shantanu Narayen of Adobe rub shoulders with Srikant Datar, Dean of the Harvard Business School and Arvind Raman, dean of Purdue University’s College of Engineering in the top echelons of industry and academia.
The brightest students from across the world vie for admission to the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas, Dallas and the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University, both of which have been endowed by wealthy Indians (Naveen Jindal is an Indian politician and industrialist, while Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon are American entrepreneurs).
Indians are the amongst richest ethnic groups in the United States today, with a burgeoning influx of highly qualified STEM graduates staffing the tech sector.
The racist outburst against Indians by the MAGA crowd brings back memories of different times. Of dotbuster thugs who terrorised bindi-sporting Indians in the ’70s and ’80s in New Jersey. Of hate crimes against Muslims and Sikhs after 9/11. Of racist barbs against Republican politician Bobby Jindal, striving to move up the political ladder.
In its current form however, the MAGA movement is bolstered by Elon Musk, whose high-tech ventures require large numbers of skilled engineers. It has also found support from Vivek Ramaswamy, an eccentric entrepreneur who challenged Trump in the Republican primaries in early 2024.
Ramaswamy caught the world’s attention as a surprise contender for the Republican ticket in the 2024 Presidential elections, ticking almost all the boxes that please the MAGA crowd – an anti-illegal immigration stance, pooh-poohing the idea of gender and race-based diversity and inclusion, an obsession with STEM meritocracy, and a chest-thumping “America-first” rhetoric.
And yet, Ramaswamy may not be American enough for his own constituency. In a shockingly frank interview, conservative commentator Ann Coulter admitted that despite admiring him, she would not vote for him because he was Indian. Coulter’s comment may have angered the Indian diaspora across the world, but it underlines a hard and uncomfortable truth – that a racist bully always remains a racist bully, and will always remain a racist bully, despite any attempts to ingratiate them.
Vivek Ramaswamy has done himself no favours. He has dived right into the H1B flame war on X, and in a comically toxic post, claimed that the American culture that favors prom queens and sports jocks, has made them weak as compared to the immigrants who push their children to excel in academic pursuits, leading to further outrage from his conservative fans-turned-haters, with their sepia-tinted memories of high school in Anytown, USA.
Yet, Ramaswamy’s views are not uncommon amongst Asian immigrants in the US. Law professor Amy Chua’s 2011 book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, drew a lot of fire from critics, because it laid bare a strict disciplinarian approach to parenting, that many Americans found to be borderline abusive. Sitcoms like Fresh Off the Boat and Never Have I Ever have also explored a culture clash between Chinese and Indian Americans who are driven to become doctors and engineers, and their less competitive “American” peers.
Indian H1B holders and aspirants are themselves in a fix. With nationality-based caps on H1B visas, many Indians are in a Green Card queue for close to two decades; for new applicants, the expected wait times could be as high as 50 years, restricting their mobility, career growth and often, entrepreneurial aspirations in The Promised Land.
For a variety of reasons, Indians far exceed any other nationality in the Green Card waitlist, and many saw Trump, with his anti-illegal and pro-legal immigration rhetoric, as their messiah. When Trump takes office, how will the more populist “America-first” approach play out?
TITLE: Elon Musk is on a collision course with Stephen Miller
https://www.vox.com/politics/392864/elon-musk-vivek-h1b-visas-trump-stephen-miller
EXCERPT: Now, if you believe what Trump says currently, he’s pro H-1B. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the New York Post on Saturday. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he continued. (However, the New York Times reported Trump “appears to have only sparingly used” the H-1B — but that his companies had often used the very different H-2 visas for “jobs like cooks, housekeepers, and waiters.”)
But Trump has previously spoken more negatively about the program. “We should end it,” he said in 2016, calling it “very bad for workers.” (“The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: These are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” he said in a campaign statement that March.)
And the biggest problem for Musk and his tech allies is that, if they want H-1B expansion, they’d have to go through Miller, a formidable opponent.
Trump has sent mixed signals on legal immigration, but Miller has made his agenda clear: He wants much less of it. In 2020, when Trump announced “temporary” suspensions on legal immigration during the pandemic, Miller privately told allies this was just the first step in a broader strategy: “The most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor.”
And in contrast to ideological allies like Bannon and Miller’s one-time boss Jeff Sessions, who flamed out of government and lost Trump’s favor, Miller has lasted, becoming a seemingly permanent fixture in Trumpworld — being dubbed “the president of immigration.”
He exerted such vast policy influence in Trump’s first term in part due to his focus on bureaucratic minutia, in part because he could get other appointees fired, in part because he helped craft Trump’s words in prepared speeches, and in part because he was unshakably loyal to the boss and savvy at making alliances with other top officials. But mostly it was because other staffers believed, with good reason, that he and Trump had a mind meld on immigration — that he was speaking for the boss.
So the venture capitalists and tech executives who have more recently joined Trump’s coalition and hope to be rewarded with their preferred H-1B policy changes will face a challenge getting past Miller. Trump may say things, but it’s Miller who turns those things into policy, and who knows how to slow-walk or squelch proposals he dislikes. So long as Miller holds Trump’s favor, and so long as he remains effectively in charge of immigration policy, betting on restrictionism is the only reasonable bet.
Finally, there’s yet another twist to this messy saga — shortly before this dispute began last week, Trump announced he’d chosen a new appointee to join Musk and Ramaswamy at DOGE.
Her name? Katie Miller — Stephen’s wife. “Congratulations to Stephen and Katie!” Trump posted.