We’re three days into 2025 and already the new year is yielding some pretty strange bedfellows.
Veteran left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders weighed in on the civil war currently engulfing MAGA world, which has seen support for high-skilled (or ‘H-1B’) visas pit tech billionaire Elon Musk and fellow DOGE chief Vivek Ramaswamy against nationalist conservatives opposed to more foreign workers coming to the U.S.
“Elon Musk is wrong,” Sanders wrote in an X post Friday. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”
“The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make,” Sanders added.
In a screengrab of a fuller statement attached to his post, Sanders went on to outline how between 2022 and 2023, some 30 top U.S. corporations laid off an estimated 85,000 American citizens in favour of hiring 34,000 new workers who’d come to the country on H-1B guest visas.
The Vermont senator further claimed these people are more often than not paid significantly less than their U.S.-born counterparts, arguing that the “bottom line” should be that it is never “cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker” if the United States “is going to be able to compete in a global economy.”
Sanders’ criticism of Musk comes a month after he publicly agreed with the Tesla CEO on a different issue, saying change is needed to address “waste and fraud” in the defense budget.
Musk has aggressively defended the guest visa program.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” the South Africa-born billionaire wrote in an X post last week, adding that he is willing to “go to war on this issue.”
Many MAGA fans have expressed support for the SpaceX founder since he came out in support of Donald Trump following an attempt on the president-elect’s life last June.
But the honeymoon period now seems to be well and truly over, with longstanding Trump loyalists criticizing Musk for his support of the visa program—even though Trump himself has personally backed Musk’s position on the issue.
Steve Bannon, for one, has threatened to “rip [Musk’s] face off.” Anybody got the latest on popcorn sales?
