“The reason I am in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that have made America strong, is H1B. Take a big step back and face fuck. “I will wage a war on this issue that there is no way you can imagine,” Musk said.

His sharp and assertive stance comes days after a controversy erupted over it H-1B visa The reason for this was the appointment of Sriram Krishnan as advisor on artificial intelligence policy in the incoming Trump administration. Krishnan had said in November: “Anything related to lifting country caps on green cards and allowing skilled immigration would be huge.”

As Krishnan supports the possibility of bringing more skilled immigrants to the U.S. under the H-1B program, right-winger Laura Loomer criticized the stance as “not an America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump would do this enrich themselves.

This has reignited the debate over skilled immigration with Musk, Krishnan and fellow tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – who was a presidential candidate in the primaries before dropping out and has now been tapped by Trump to expand the size of the US government by a year Third, support the H-1B visa program, even as the right has criticized it.

Immigration was a key political flashpoint in the 2024 US presidential election, in which Trump promised to stop illegal immigration at the southern border and launch a mass deportation effort. However, the current debate focuses on legal immigrants.

Tech companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software developers and others in the industry, are critical for hard-to-fill jobs. But critics say they are undercutting U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right called for the program to be abolished rather than expanded.

South African-born Musk once held an H-1B visa himself and defended the industry’s need to hire foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” he said in a post, adding: “This is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”

Trump has so far said nothing about the online debate. But as a presidential candidate in 2016, he called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers.

Ramaswamy, co-chair of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Musk, has blamed American culture for the shortage of U.S.-born engineers, suggesting that it has “worshipped mediocrity over excellence for far too long.”

His comments were not well received by his fellow conservatives. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley criticized Ramaswamy, saying there was “nothing wrong with American workers or American culture.”

“You just have to look at the border and see how many want what we have,” she wrote on X. “We should be investing in and prioritizing Americans, not foreign workers,” she added.