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Tesla replaced laid off US workers with foreign workers using H-1B visas that Musk want to increase

Summary

Tesla replaced many laid-off U.S. workers with foreign H-1B visa holders after a 2024 wave of layoffs affecting 15,000 employees.

These visas, tied to employer sponsorship, often lower compensation and give employers significant leverage over workers.

Critics argue this displaces U.S. employees, as senior engineers were replaced by lower-paid junior engineers.

CEO Elon Musk, while advocating for expanding H-1B visa caps, faces backlash, especially from conservatives, for “job-stealing” concerns.

Musk contends there’s a U.S. skill shortage, but critics highlight potential exploitation tied to Tesla’s demanding work culture and visa dependence.

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106 comments

  • H1B is just corporations trying to drive down tech wages. Things is, the "skilled workers" they get from other countries are often unskilled who just learn as best they can on the job. I deal with one of the big companies that supplies these workers and the vast majority of their personnel are "bodies." You may have 1-2 fairly skilled people leading the team while the rest are folks who can follow a script if it's written well enough... Zero critical thinking or depth of knowledge.

    While the short term may seem beneficial on paper, you get what you pay for. You can't fake your way without longer term problems showing up.

    It's also another form of job exporting like the manufacturing jobs that corporations got rid of, and we know what that did to the US.

    I'm good with a massive reduction on H1B.

    • They want workers who can't jumo to another company. If an H1B worker quits, they get deported.

      It's about indentured servitude.

    • I deal with one of the big companies that supplies these workers and the vast majority of their personnel are “bodies.”

      InfoSys. My issue with these folks is that generally speaking they go into programming because it's a lucrative career, not because they have even a mild interest in it as an activity. I've encountered a few exceptions to this in my career, but they're extremely rare.

      • InfoSys. My issue with these folks is that generally speaking they go into programming because it’s a lucrative career, not because they have even a mild interest in it as an activity.

        My experience with H-1Bs has been very much like that. Although during the dot-com bubble and again more recently, I've experienced more than a few citizens in the same camp, too. The same type of person that learned to spell HTML in a bid to make it rich during the dot-com bubble is now the same type that you see trying to LARP as a "front-end developer" in React or what have you. That's if they aren't trying to flex on people by talking about something like Rust or have debates about htmx, SPAs, or whatever the fuck, but not really producing working, well-tested code that meets the business need or what have you, even if it's not in the language/framework of the Youtube channel they happen to be following...

        I've noticed during a downturn/layoff session, they might not get rooted out right away, as some of the citizen programmers have priced themselves wayyyy under market probably because they know they are posing. But I think ultimately many of them do migrate to management, testing, documentation, or something else on the periphery of the actual work of programming. That, or leave the field entirely.

    • Yeah, I've seen incredibly wide ranges of talent both in seeking out dirt-cheap labor in places like India or Pakistan via offshoring engagements - most of that range being on the very, very low-quality range. I was not convinced it was even the same people working on it from week to week. For one of the projects, the "design", such as it was, was so bad that it was something that required a rewrite by skilled citizens. So they saved no money at all on that one.

      A few - very few - of the people I've worked with that were H-1B were good enough, and like one or two that were pretty good. Nothing that needed to be sourced outside of the pool of citizens, though. Most of them struck me as people kind of still halfway through an undergrad program or maybe a boot camp in skill level and general knowledge of IT.

      I'd welcome killing H-1B completely and taxing services for offshoring to a high enough extent to discourage it. People were told to get educated, get a degree, go to boot camp, and have a job with semblance of dignity. And the broligarchs and government work hand-in-glove to fuck over Americans that did the right thing while fucking over foreigners? To hell with that.

      On the other hand, I think we should be pushing for more enterprising and smart people to come here, permanently. It's good for those that want to come here, and it's good for America, too, since they are likely to make things better here, both by contributing to the taxes. I think foreigners tend to start more businesses than natives, too. I think it's exceedingly stupid and short-sighted to bring people here, exploit them, but also give them lots of on the job experience, then send them home afterwards? How is that the American dream?

      I still think the brain drain donvict 1.0 started by scaring off foreign students is going to hurt us long term. We might not have felt the effects just yet, and now he's going to have another chance to make it even worse. But abusing H-1Bs and screwing citizens is not going to address the brain drain problem.

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