Elon Musk said that America has benefitted immensely from talented Indians. The multi-billionaire, who featured on the latest episode of Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath’s “WTF is” podcast today, also explained that some of America’s so-called anti-immigration policies were triggered by the “misuse” of H-1B visa program and the previous regime’s “free-for-all” approach.
His remarks come even as for thousands of Indians, the American dream of world-class education, lucrative careers, better quality of life and social mobility is turning sour due to rising US visa restrictions and policy unpredictability.
Musk explained why it was important to have border controls. “Under the Biden administration, it was basically a total free-for-all with like no border controls, which you know, unless you’ve got border controls, you’re not a country. So, you had massive amounts of illegal immigration under Biden. It actually had somewhat of a negative selection effect. So if there’s a massive financial incentive to come to the US illegally and get all these government benefits, then you’re you’re you’re going to necessarily create a diffusion gradient for people to come to the US. It’s an incentive structure. And that obviously made no sense. Like, you got to have border controls. It’s kind of ridiculous not to.”
Talking about the perception of some Americans that somehow their jobs are being taken away by people from other countries, he said, “I don’t know how real that is. My direct observation is that there’s always a scarcity of talented people. So you know, from my standpoint, I’m like we have a lot of difficulty finding enough talented people to get these difficult tasks done and so more talented people would be good.”
Musk, who owns Tesla, SpaceX, X and XAI, also said that at his companies, the focus is on trying “to get the most talented people in the world”.
He also spoke about “some misuse of the H-1B visa”. Musk, however, doesn’t think the program should be shut down.
I think there’s been some misuse of the, you know, uh, H1B program. It would be accurate to say that there’s, you know, like some of the outsourcing companies have kind of gamed the system on the H-1B front, and we need to stop the gaming of the system. But I’m certainly not in the school of thought that we should shut down the H1B program.”
“I think they don’t realise that that would actually be very bad,” he said.