The plants in Germany and China wouldn't need H-1B since they aren't in the US, but if you'd like to exclude those entirely, that's fine and doesn't really change the argument. Even if we use just their employees from the Austin plant alone,
It's a law that H-1B hires have to be paid whichever is higher between the prevailing wage of that job in the area, or the same as Americans with the same job in the company. The salaries are pretty high, but one of the better deals working for Tesla is their employee stock program with stock options, discounts on stock purchases and a lookback period.
Between this thread and one of the other several threads on the same topic, I've already posted the almost non-existent unemployment for American engineers, the share of foreign STEM majors at American universities, and the ludicrous number of foreign post graduates in STEM fields. Elon also has Space X that employs another 13,000 and can't really hire foreigners for those.
It's pretty outrageous to see how much overlap there is in people who were just 5 minutes ago championing mass migration of millions of unskilled labor and welfare dependents, and have just in the last few days done a complete 180 to pretend that the real evil is the 85,000 or so H-1B visas for a field with full employment and a huge shortage. We don't have a shortage of landscapers, dishwashers, taco trucks and drug dealers and welfare dependents, but we do have a big shortage of engineers, and an even bigger one with engineers with masters degrees, both of which are well within the income levels of paying more in taxes than they use in services.
The supply of American engineers is pretty much tapped out, so the only alternative to bringing top engineers here is to just move the entire company to where there is a bigger supply of people who are qualified to do the job, and it sounds like a horrible solution to make China, India and Russia the leaders in technology because Americans just wanted liberal arts degrees.
