Tesla has replaced some of its US employees who were let go as part of a big wave of layoffs earlier this year with foreign workers using H-1B visas, which CEO Elon Musk is now campaigning to increase.
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 personnel will have to be sponsored through a company to download the visa, which has a duration of three years, extendable to six years, after which the holder must reapply.
The visa holder will have to maintain employment with the visa sponsor to obtain their painting visa. The painter will have to leave the country if his employment ends for any reason. This has generated some complaints because it provides great leverage to the employer and can lead to a trendy edition of indentured servitude.
While there are obvious benefits to bringing skilled workers into the US, people are divided on the issue because those workers are often paid less than US workers, putting negative pressure on compensation, especially in the tech industry, on top of the moral questions about holding visas over the heads of foreign workers.
This is why the US Congress imposed a limit of 65,000 visas, restricting the number of H-1B visas that can be issued during the fiscal year, plus another 20,000 for foreigners who graduate from graduate systems at US universities. .
Tesla is a large user of these visas and its CEO, Elon Musk, is its new political influence to announce the expansion of the H-1B visa limit. He has received strong complaints from his new friends on the right side of the American political spectrum, who believe that the visa is used to borrow American jobs.
He is, to say the least, passionate about the subject:
To be fair, Musk came to the United States on an H-1B visa. He arrived on a student visa and was later admitted by his own brother to being illegal immigrants in the early stages of launching his startup Zip2 in the United States.
In recent days, several current and former Tesla employees have contacted Electrek to reveal that Tesla has stepped up its use of H-1B visas to upgrade the US that it laid off in a wave of layoffs earlier this year.
We reported that approximately 15,000 US employees were laid off at Tesla around April 2024. All departments were affected, but the layoffs were concentrated in Texas and California, where Tesla has more staff than others.
Current and former Tesla staff said many laid-off U. S. employees were replaced through H-1B visas for foreign personnel.
These claims are supported by data from the U. S. Department of Labor. U. S. Immigration and Drug Administration (FDA) shows that Tesla applied for more than 2000 H-1B visas at the time it laid off U. S. workers (via Reddit):
Again, there’s a cap of 65,000 visas per year for the entire United States, and Tesla has tried to get more than 3% of that figure.
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.
To be clear, I am not taking a position here on the H-1B visa. It turns out that this visa deserves to have some smart uses, but it can definitely be abused. My purpose is to share more data that could explain why Elon would need more visas for his businesses, and maybe not for the right reasons.
Basically, other people see the challenge of hiring staff from other countries willing to work for less than U. S. staff, taking jobs away from Americans and putting pressure on overall U. S. pay. U. S.
There’s certainly value to the argument. Elon’s counterargument is that the US doesn’t have enough skilled workers, and he needs to hire people from other countries to compensate.
This argument also has some value, especially for express sectors, such as manufacturing engineering, which is less popular in the United States.
However, at Tesla and Elon, things go much deeper than that.
The problem 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 other people still believe in this mission, but Elon has eroded it in recent years by focusing more on autonomous driving and advocating for eliminating incentives for electric vehicles in the United States. It’s increasingly difficult to make other people believe that Tesla’s main goal is to drive the arrival of electric vehicles when its CEO talks more about Tesla becoming “the most valuable company in the world” than about its impact on the upgrade. climate. And let’s not say he’s spent a lot of effort and money over the last year getting the human effect on climate deniers replaced.
But he discovered an effective way to motivate staff to work harder and longer hours: by wearing a visa on their head.
H1B visas are, above all, a means for American corporations to access hard jobs abroad that are less expensive and have reduced protection. H1B staff still live at risk of deportation if they lose their jobs, forcing them to be more compliant to their corporate executives while they remain here. If we really cared about improving the technological capabilities of American personnel, we would simply spend money on education and educating American citizens.
The nature of the H-1B visa being attached to your employer puts tremendous pressure on the workers.
In addition, Tesla, like many other companies with H-1B visas, tends to rent in countries where longer work weeks are already the norm. For example, India already has a 6-day painting week.
I don’t like that Tesla workers commit suicide by running 80 hours a week, but if they do it with passion, by choice, so that what is a wonderful mission, it is difficult to object. Array is your choice.
But if they do it because they need the “American dream” and fear that their firing will end their chances of immigrating or reduce their chances of immigrating because they are in the country on an H-1B visa, that seems to me to be exploitation.
Fred is Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editor at Electrek.
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