Elon Musk advocates for H-1B Visa reform, says program can be fixed by making it more expensive to hire foreigners

Elon Musk spoke about H-1B visas on Saturday, seeming to soften his previous position on the program. "Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B," Musk said, "making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically. I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform."

His remarks were in response to the Christmas week buzz on X about the usefulness of American visa programs, specifically the H-1B visa which brings in foreign workers on a temporary basis "in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability." Elon Musk and others in the tech industry had argued that the US needed to increase the current cap on workers, suggesting that American workers were not capable of doing the work required.

"I'm confident that the changes made in the Donald Trump administration will make America much stronger," Musk continued. "A rising tide lifts all boats."

Earlier this week, Musk had said "Investing in Americans is actually hard. Really hard. It costs money and time and effort to make a person productive. It’s a short term net loss. It’s much easier to bring in skilled workers who might not do quite a good a job, but will work for a fraction of the cost and be happy just to be here."

He also said as regards the cap on H-1B workers, "No, we need more like double that number yesterday! The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low. Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win."

The MAGA wing of the GOP had contended that high-skilled jobs should go to American workers, not foreign imports and pushed back hard against Musk's remarks about American workers. The comments from Musk on Saturday night appear to be a deescalation of the argument on X.

"America first means the American people first," Human Events Daily's Jack Posobiec said on War Room in response. "I want to be very clear about that, because it seems like some people still do not get this, even after all these years, America first means the American people first. We are not vaccine first. We are not tech company first. We are not military-industrial complex first. No, we are American people first. That is what the nationalist populist movement underpinning MAGA is all about."

Posobiec also shared the regulations on the H-1B program that Trump brought into his first administration. These included an increase in wages so that the imported workers were not simply low-wage replacements, a tightening up of the "specialty occupation" definition, and limiting the time period of the visas. He used Musk's Grok program to summarize the program changes.

The H-1B visa program was signed into law in 1990 by George H.W. Bush to "require the State Department to admit more immigrants with job skills needed in the United States, a step long favored by free-market economists," The New York Times wrote at the time. The bill allowed for the total legal immigration into the US to be 700,000 per year, not including refugees, which at the time was capped at 131,000. The idea from Congress was that the bill could "fill job openings for scientists, engineers, computer specialists, nurses and medical technicians."

Most legal immigration to the US at the time was from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and extended the Attorney General's responsibility, giving the office "explicit new authority to offer a 'temporary protected status' to certain aliens from countries where there has been an earthquake, flood, drought, epidemic or "other environmental disaster."