Elon is full of it, but his argument is actually true about H1B (in healthcare)

Atrioc has made some excellent point about H1B workers. However, I want to share my personal experience with this type of visa and add a counterpoint about a field that is actually using it appropriately, and would suffer a lot from it disappearing.

H1B workers are doing vital jobs that are incredibly in demand but insanely unattractive for American workers, especially in healthcare.

Foreign physicians who finish residency in the US on a J1 visa have to do 3 years of work on an H1B visa in an underserved area just to stay in the US after training. I can't even begin to talk about how bad the physician shortage is in the US, but it's so much worse in underserved areas. And right now, H1B workers are filling all those spots.

My second example is scientific research in academic universities. A lot of the jobs in medical research just aren't attractive to US citizens, so they're filled with H1B workers. And I'm not just talking about entry-level jobs - this goes for everything from research technicians to postdocs. US citizens quickly leave research and go work in industry where they get paid more. But here's the thing - when they work in industry, anything they discover becomes company property, unlike scientific discoveries made in universities with NIH funding.

Honestly, without immigrants, the medical research system would collapse, and if you didn't live in a really attractive area of the country, you'd have serious problems accessing physicians.

Would that mean that since the jobs are undesirable we should make an effort to improve the material conditions of anyone who does them? Of course Would that mean that efforts should be made to make sure workers are protected regardless of where they come from? Absolutely

But the fact is, the most undesirable job in the US is better than most jobs elsewhere.

So, while Elon and Vivek are full of it, their argument that H1B workers fill jobs that can't be filled by US citizens is actually true in some fields, at least in research and healthcare. And working completely abolish it will hurt the US and immigrants alike. And unfortunately, the population currently sees every problem as black and white without nuance which makes this problem (and many others) incredibly difficult to discuss.

Thanks BigA for the discussion and hope this helps shed some more light on the matter.