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Elon Musk's key ex-employee slams H-1B visa move, hails Indian engineers: ‘They are the reason you can…’
Esther Crawford worked as director of product mgmt during Twitter takeover, rebranding to X; says platform won't have survived without Indian, Chinese engineers
A top executive who helped Twitter's transition and rebranding to ‘X’ after Elon Musk bought the social media platform has pointedly criticised the prohibitive $100,000 fee imposed by President Donald Trump on H-1B visas, by which mostly Indian and tech workers work in the US.
She also wrote against the general anti-immigrant sentiment among large sections of Americans.
Esther Crawford, who served as director of product management at Twitter/X, said the platform could survive only because of engineers from India and China on H-1B visas.
“They stayed after the acquisition, worked long hours and solved brutally complex problems alongside American colleagues,” she wrote in a post on X.
"When posting anti-immigrant takes, remember: they're the reason you can tweet at all," she further said.
Indian form over 70% of the total around 400,000 H-1B holders at present. The Chinese follow at around 12%.
What's Elon Musk's stand on H-1B?
Elon Musk himself has been quiet on the matter since the Friday proclamation that imposed the huge fee on new H-1B visa applications, but, give his past record on this issue, he is unlikely to violently disagree despite a tumultuous relationship with ex-BFF Donald Trump.
The tech billionaire has broadly supported the H-1B visa programme in the past, though he called for making it more expensive since he though the system was “broken". This argument is in line with Trump's logic that the H-1B programme has been misused and that only the truly high-skilled workers should get this US visa.
What happens next in the H-1B mess?
The high one-time fee effectively kills the programme in the medium to long term as the median annual salaries paid to H-1B holders are lower than the $100,000 fee. That means US-based companies may not want to spend so much on foreign employees.
Inversely, these companies could shift some of these jobs abroad. Though, in that case a new proposal called HIRE Act — to heavily tax payments made to companies abroad for outsourced jobs — can come into play if okayed.
For now, the fee applies only to applications after September 21, while existing visa holders and renewal petitions have been exempted.
