Trump Offers More Commentary on H-1B Visa Controversy: ‘We Need Smart People’

President-elect Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks on New Year's Eve at his Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla. on December 31, 2024. Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday offered more commentary on H-1B visas amid an online debate between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and conservatives on social media over the visa program.

An H-1B visa is provided to highly skilled workers and is often used in the tech industry. Critics say the visa program needs to be overhauled, that it is being used to undercut American workers, and that companies are abusing the system.

At Mar-a-Lago, Trump was asked by reporters on Tuesday night about his stance on the H-1B visa program and whether he had changed his view. Trump had criticized it during his 2016 campaign, notably releasing a statement saying that it has the “explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay.”

“I didn’t change my mind. I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country,” he said on Tuesday. “We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in. We’re going to have jobs like we’ve never had before.”

He also made comments on the H-1B program in a New York Post article published on Saturday, saying, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them.” The president-elect said that he had used the visas to hire workers for his companies.

The H-1B visa program allows up to 65,000 highly skilled foreign workers annually, plus 20,000 foreigners who obtained an advanced degree from a U.S. institution, to fill specialized roles in the U.S. workforce.

Trump’s remarks come amid backlash against Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and social media platform X, and Ramaswamy, who have made comments in praise of hiring foreign workers in recent days.

Both were tapped by Trump to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Musk has been seen frequently around Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks since the president-elect’s November victory.

In a now-deleted post on X, Musk appeared to suggest that there were not enough skilled or highly motivated Americans to fill tech job positions. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, blamed the alleged lack of skilled workers on an American culture that “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

“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. Take a big step back and [expletive] in the face,” Musk wrote on X. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) immediately criticized the pair.

“We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender—and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline,” Gaetz wrote this past week. “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”

Former U.N. ambassador and presidential candidate Nikki Haley also responded, saying that Trump should focus on American workers over foreigners.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley, also the former governor of South Carolina, wrote in her post. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

Over the weekend, Musk appeared to soften his stance, saying the program probably needs an overhaul.

On Saturday night, Musk responded to a thread on social media platform X that criticized how H-1B visas are being doled out and used by tech companies.

“Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically,” Musk wrote. “I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.”

Musk was responding to a comment from investor Robert Sterling, who said that the United States “needs to be a destination for the world’s most elite talent. But the H-1B program isn’t the way to do that.”