US president-elect Donald Trump weighed in on Saturday in a bitter debate dividing his traditional supporters and tech barrons such as Elon Musk, saying that he backs a special visa programme that helps highly skilled workers enter the country.
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“I’ve always liked the [H1-B] visas, I have always been in favour of the visas, that’s why we have them” at Trump-owned facilities, Trump told the New York Post in his first public comments on the matter since it flared up this week.
An angry back-and-forth, largely between Silicon Valley’s Musk and traditional anti-immigration Trump backers, has erupted in fiery fashion, with Musk even vowing to “go to war” over the issue.
Trump’s insistent calls for sharp curbs on immigration were central to his election victory in November over US President Joe Biden. He has vowed to deport all undocumented immigrants and limit legal immigration.
But tech entrepreneurs such as Tesla’s Musk – as well as Vivek Ramaswamy, who with Musk is to co-chair a government cost-cutting panel under Trump – say the United States produces too few highly skilled graduates, and they fervently champion the H1-B programme.
Musk, who himself migrated from South Africa on an H1-B, posted on Thursday on his X platform that luring elite engineering talent from abroad was “essential for America to keep winning”.