Summary
Elon Musk faced backlash from his followers on X after advocating for importing “super talented engineers” to address a shortage in the U.S. tech industry.
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
Critics argued there’s sufficient U.S. talent being overlooked or underpaid, with some pointing to widespread tech layoffs.
Musk dismissed claims of low wages or training gaps, maintaining a need for exceptional engineering talent to advance innovation.
I don’t believe Elon’s post was exclusively about H1B, please correct me if I’m mistaken.
As for my experience, it’s hard to find Americans to fill certain types of jobs. They are not as motivated to work. My hiring experience is more in low-skilled work, but I’ve witnessed at a company I was a part of before at just how hard it was to find qualified chemists.
I personally support this.
To me it seems a rather obvious fix. If the talent is really that rare in certain areas, make it very easy for people that want to migrate here and become full participants as citizens, let them do so.
Was it hard to find those workers, or hard to find workers willing to work for what the company was offering? “Nobody wants to work :(” is an extremely common refrain of companies offering $0.35/hr and getting no bites.
We pay anywhere from $200~$300 per day. 8~10 hour days, 5 days a week. roughly $25~$30 an hour for people that have more than a few months of experience. from my research it’s a fairly high wage for unskilled work relative to other jobs
it’s just a few things
a) our work is mostly nomadic. it involves staying at hotels all across the US for months at a time and then packing up and moving when finished. we pay for room & board, as well as provide a truck & gas. but even so, most Americans do not want to live like this. juan and pablo don’t mind at all though.
b) it’s hard labor. pretty much digging holes all day. again, most Americans do not want to do this. they either perceive it as below their station or they don’t have the willingness to do hard labor in the sun for hours a day
i’ve been doing this nearly a decade now. it’s pretty well known in the industry. you need a laborer, you get a central american (mexican, guatemalan, nicaraguan, etc). you need a supervisor, you get an americanized / assimilated latin american (typically Mexican). you need someone for the office, you get an American
Yeah, so that’s pretty much it. What you’re willing to pay isn’t what an American is willing to accept for the work. H1B and illegal immigrants tend to be more willing to accept a worse deal because the system they live under has been deliberately arranged to create an underclass of labor. If we didn’t have these systems in place and just had a true open border policy (think “I want to move from Vermont to Colorado” and you’ve got the idea), you’d probably see much higher turnover and/or a lower willingness by those groups to accept what you’ve got on offer. Keep in mind, I’m just pointing out economic pressures, not making moral statements.