Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy In Fiery Spat with MAGA Allies Over Foreign Worker Visas: ‘Essential for America to keep winning’; Unemployed Workers Having Trouble Finding a Job, Latest Claims Data Suggest

Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy in fiery spat with MAGA allies over foreign worker visas: ‘Essential for America to keep winning’:

Tech titan Elon Musk — who has quickly become President-elect Donald Trump’s right-hand man — got into a fiery spat Thursday with MAGA allies over foreign worker visas, arguing along with Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy that the program is key for American innovation.

The billionaire DOGE bosses lashed out the day after Christmas Day at some of Trump’s staunchest supporters and other immigration hawks for opposing the H-1B program, which lets highly skilled foreign workers enter the US for companies who sponsor them.

“I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote on X, comparing the US to a sports team bringing in athletes to boost their game.

The richest man in the world had been agreeing with his DOGE counterpart Ramaswamy, who went to argue that American “culture” was celebrating “mediocrity” — sparking the initial rift with members of MAGA world who want to restrict even legal immigration into the US.

“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture,” Ramaswamy wrote in a lengthy post on X.

“Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH.”

Ramaswamy then laid out how popular American culture, since at least the 1990s, has favored “the prom queen over the math olympiad champ” and “the jock over the valedictorian,” allowing other countries like China to retain talented engineers — while the US lost top recruits.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he explained.

“‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.” —>READ MORE HERE

Unemployed workers having trouble finding a job, latest claims data suggest:

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits held steady last week, though continuing claims rose to the highest level in three years.

Jobless claim applications ticked down by 1,000 to 219,000 for the week of Dec. 21, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s fewer than the 223,000 analysts forecast.

Continuing claims, the total number of Americans collecting jobless benefits, climbed by 46,000 to 1.91 million for the week of Dec. 14. That’s more than analysts projected and the most since the week of Nov. 13, 2021 when the labor market was still recovering from the COVID-19 jobs wipeout in the spring of 2020.

The rising level of continuing claims suggests that some who are receiving benefits are finding it harder to land new jobs. That could mean that demand for workers is waning, even though the economy remains strong.

The four-week average of weekly claims, which quiets some of the week-to-week volatility, inched up by 1,000 to 226,500.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered representative of US layoffs.

The labor market has hinted at some softening recently but remains broadly healthy and has held up better than many economists predicted considering that interest rates have been elevated for years. —>READ MORE HERE

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