Musk v MAGA: Faced with nativist fury, Elon dials down support for H-1B program and calls for reform

TOI correspondent from Washington: Tech billionaire and Trump surrogate Elon Musk dialed down on his unstinted support for H-1B visas on Sunday, acknowledging in the face of backlash from MAGA hardliners that "the program is broken and needs major reform."
Responding to a data-driven post by investor Robert Sterling that showed that H-1B "isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described" but "simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals," Musk stepped back and qualified his support, saying the issue can be "easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly." A yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B could also be added to make it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically, he added.
Musk's recalibration came after he had initially backed the H-1B visa program asking critics to "go f..k yourself in the face" and saying he would "go to war" for "bringing elite engineering talent from abroad," which he argued was "essential for America to keep winning."
But MAGA hardliners and some experts, citing data, maintained that rather than bring in top foreign talent, US corporations and offshoring firms have gamed the system to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals, suppressing wages of American professionals and often replacing them.
The issue is particularly relevant to India because more than 70 per cent of H-1B visas go to Indian students and professionals as part of a globalization trend that began in the early 1990s when it was seen as a win-win for all, notwithstanding a few skeptics in both countries. Some experts in India saw a "brain drain" in India bleeding talent and some others in the US saw America bleeding jobs of its US-born workforce in the face of arguments that the US was also the beneficiary of a "brain gain," which is the argument Musk and other tech elites are making.
That long-accepted hypothesis is now being challenged by MAGA hardliners -- amid a rising tide of "America First" and anti-globalisation nativism -- who believe the proposition, advanced by US corporations and big tech, that there is a shortage of US-born STEM talent is overstated.
Some MAGA trolls are going so far as to argue that the "underlying goals of the H-1B scheme is population replacement with darker shade of ethnics," an oblique reference to Indian students and professionals who came to America through the H-1B route, and some of whom now head major US tech firms such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, and FedEx.
"India relies on H-1B visas to facilitate offshoring US jobs, while allowing a large number of Indians to settle in America. This creates a steady flow of remittances and strengthens political influence that aligns with India's interests. Bad for American workers," a public policy group of US tech workers that has long campaigned against H-1B visas, said.
Mush himself is being attacked by MAGA hardliners as a foreign oligarch who, along with his "tech bros" like Vivek Ramaswamy, has wormed his way into Trump's inner circle to enrich themselves at the expense of the MAGA base that put Trump into office for a second term. MAGA radicals also dredged out data to reveal that even Tesla, Musk's flagship company, has used H-1B visas to recruit "ordinary" workers rather than using it for bring in the 0.01% elite tech talent from across the world that he is arguing for.
"MAGA did all the hard work, and the oligarchs swooped in to take all the laurels," one Trump loyalist complained as MAGA v Musk battle took shape three weeks before Inauguration Day.