Trump weighs in on immigrant visa debate but offers little clarity

President-elect Donald Trump appeared to weigh in Saturday on a heated debate among his supporters over the role of skilled immigrant workers in the U.S. economy, saying he had frequently used the visas for those workers and backed the program.

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” he told the New York Post. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

But his comments — which were enthusiastically embraced by the technology industry as an endorsement — may muddy the waters because Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States for up to three years and can be extended to six years.

Instead, he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program, which is for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers. Those visas allow a worker to remain in the country for 10 months. Federal data show Trump’s companies have received approval to employ over 1,000 workers through the two H-2 programs in the past 20 years.

The Trump transition team did not reply to multiple requests for comment seeking clarity on the type of visas the president-elect was referring to in the interview.

But it did respond to a prior query about Trump’s position on work visas by sharing the text of a speech he made in 2020 extolling the work of U.S. citizens in building the country, noting that “Americans must never lose sight of this miraculous story.” While campaigning in 2016, Trump spoke out against the H-1B program, calling it “very bad for workers” and stating that “we should end it.”

Still, the news report Saturday set off a wave of celebration in the tech industry and among supporters of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has been an outspoken advocate of H-1B visas.

Ian Miles Cheong, a social media influencer with 1.1 million followers on the social platform X, posted, “Donald Trump backs Elon Musk on H-1B visas.”

Musk, a naturalized citizen born in South Africa who came into the country on an H-1B visa, replied to another post claiming the president-elect had come down in favor of the skilled worker visas with one word: “indeed.”

Musk has frequently stated that the visas are necessary because of a lack of U.S. citizens capable of doing the work required by tech companies. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” he wrote on Christmas Day on X, the platform he acquired in 2022 for $44 billion.

Visas for skilled workers have become a highly polarizing topic among Trump’s followers, many of whom oppose all types of immigration and call for the country’s borders to be closed.

That contrasts with his supporters from Silicon Valley, who have long relied on programmers entering the country on H-1B visas to supplement their workforces.

The debate reached a boiling point over the past week as Trump loyalists including Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist, attacked the visas on social media, calling them a threat to American workers and the country’s sovereignty.

“I foresee this as a national security risk,” she told The New York Times.

The increasing acrimony on social media between the two camps ultimately led to Loomer losing her verified status on X, cutting her off from income from her 1.4 million followers. (She still had not regained her verified status Saturday night, although she noted that X on Saturday still charged her the $16 monthly fee for that status.)

Musk, for his part, on Saturday made a sexual comment attacking a critic of the visas and then stated that H-1B visas are the reason companies like SpaceX and Tesla are strong. Tesla has obtained 724 H-1B visas this year.

Steve Bannon, a close adviser to the president-elect and a self-proclaimed “populist nationalist” who opposes immigration, reposted Musk’s comment online, calling the billionaire a “toddler.”

In an interview Saturday, he said he opposed both H-1B and H-2 visas, claiming that they drove down wages for American workers while increasing profits for billionaires.

“This is war,” Bannon said. “I’m glad we’re having this debate now before Trump takes office.”

Both the H-1B and H-2 programs are overseen by the Department of Labor, which imposes different rules for each. The skilled worker program currently has a cap of 65,000 per year, a number that technology companies have pushed to increase.

H-2B visas, which are for nonagricultural unskilled labor, are capped at 66,000, while H-2A visas, for agricultural workers, have no caps, but are limited to certain sectors of the industry.

From 2003 to 2017, Trump’s companies were approved for more than 1,000 H-2 visas for jobs like cooks, housekeepers and waiters at his properties, including Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, and the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, Labor Department data show. In each instance, the companies had to attest that there were no U.S. citizens who could perform those jobs.

His companies continued to hire H-2 workers during his first presidential term, posting applications for visas for 78 housekeepers, cooks and food servers at Mar-a-Lago in mid-2018, for example.

Federal records show that Trump’s companies have applied for a dozen H-1B visas since 2019, but that most of those applications — for quality control manager positions — were subsequently withdrawn.

The most recent H-1B application, by Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that runs the Truth Social platform, was posted in 2022 seeking a “product data analyst” with a salary of $65,000. It was not clear if that position was filled.

Currently Trump’s winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, is seeking 31 foreign vineyard farmworkers under the H-2A program, offering them $15.81 per hour.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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