Bernie Sanders Slams H1B Visas in Anti-Immigrant Screed

The Vermont independent called H1B migrants "low-wage indentured servants from abroad" in rant against Elon Musk.

WASHINGTON — On Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, called out Elon Musk, president-elect Donald Trump’s efficiency advisor and major campaign benefactor, for Musk’s support of relief for H1B visa holders.

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Sanders, long viewed to be a champion of working people and immigrants broadly, cast H1B visa program as a corporate scam to “replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”

The Vermont independent is particularly irked by corporations he claimed rely on visa workers while implementing mass layoffs. “The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make,” he said.

Musk and fellow Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisor Vivek Ramaswamy made news on Christmas Day by breaking with MAGA’s xenophobic purists by advocating for reforms to help H1B workers and the companies that sponsor them.

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Predictably, woke-right activists on the Internet dragged Musk and Ramaswamy for a week before Trump finally weighed in Tuesday evening:

"I've always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country, and 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,” said the president-elect from Mar-a-Lago.

Sanders was having none of it: “Elon Musk is wrong,” tweeted the octogenarian Senator on Thursday, attaching a statement from his HELP committee website where he argued that H1B visas should only be used to address American workforce shortages in the short term.

“In the long term, if the United States is going to be able to compete in a global economy, we must make sure that we have the best educated workforce in the world. And one way to help make that happen is to substantially increase the guest worker fees large corporations pay to fund scholarships, apprenticeships, and job training opportunities for American workers,” said Sanders, in his statement.

In 2016, Sanders ran for president on welcoming immigrants — specifically, “refugees, asylum seekers, and families who come to the United States in search of the American Dream.” That same year, Trump released a statement opposing H1B migrants after being asked about immigration on the debate stage by then Fox News host Megyn Kelly:

“The H1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements,” said Trump in a statement on March 3, 2016.

“I will end forever the use of the H1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions,” he continued.

Sanders statement Thursday rankled many H1B holders who took to social media to express disappointment over having been cast as cheap and ultimately unnecessary workers by the progressive populist icon. Others were less surprised, pointing out that Sanders worked on H1B restrictions with Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as far back as 2009. WATCH:

“Bernie [is] reverting back to the old mean,” tweeted Eric Garcia, Washington bureau chief for The Independent and friend-of-newsletter. We tend to agree.