A few days ago, J.D. Vance accused Ilhan Omar of “immigration fraud.” She responded in a statement that began: “This is rich coming from someone who literally said they were willing to ‘create stories’ to redirect the media,” referring to Vance’s own admission to spreading the lie that Haitian immigrants eat people’s pets in September of 2024, during Donald Trump’s re-run for president.
Trump himself would later repeat the lie in a presidential debate against Kamala Harris: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris laughed as Trump made those statements, which were fact-checked in real time by the moderator of the debate, David Muir.
You know who else repeated that horrible racist lie? Elon Musk. He shared various memes about the subject on Twitter, including a video in which a woman claimed that Haitian immigrants in the U.S. “perform animal sacrifices for their religion, voodoo.”
This is the same man who would go on to proudly announce that he’d persuaded Trump to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), calling the agency a “criminal organization” and declaring it was “time for it to die.” In reality, a project built to model the effect of morbidity and mortality from U.S. funding cuts “estimates that more than 762,000 people have died as a result of those cuts, including more than 500,000 children.”
ImpactCounter estimated that “cuts to funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) have had the largest impact, resulting in more than 158,000 adult deaths and 16,000 child deaths. Terminated USAID funding has also resulted in more than 164,000 additional child deaths from pneumonia, 125,000 additional child deaths from diarrhea, 70,000 additional adult and child deaths from malaria, and 48,000 additional adult and child deaths from tuberculosis.”
And this is the same man who launched his career in the U.S. working illegally.
In 1995, Elon Musk arrived in Palo Alto, California, to study for a graduate degree at Stanford. But he dropped out of school immediately, never even enrolling in a class. Instead he devoted himself to a startup company that became Zip2, which he’d eventually sell for more than $300 million in 1999.
Foreign students, according to Leon Fresco, a former Justice Department immigration litigator, cannot “do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation.”
“[Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal’s] immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S.,” said a former chief executive of Zip2. “We don’t want our founder being deported.”
Musk has admitted as much, stating “Actually, I didn’t really care much for the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country, so that seemed like a good way to solve both issues.”
In 2013 in an interview with his brother, Kimbal Musk flat out contradicted Elon’s characterization of their presence in the country illegally as a “gray area.” “We were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal asserted in reply.
“Were” is the appropriate term here, as Elon became a naturalized citizen in 2002. How he managed to do that is apparently an open question, since his claim to have received a J-1 visa which led to an H-1B visa doesn’t address it, as both require that the recipient be a student. There has been speculation that investors in Zip2 helped Elon to obtain an EB-5 investor green card in 1997, which led him to become a U.S. citizens through the naturalization process a few years later.
If so, that would amount to the product of his illegal means of remaining in the country allowing him to transform that status to a legal one. When law enforcement officers seize your property (including cash) when it’s suspected of being connected to criminal activity, that’s a legal process called “asset forfeiture.” Presumably, nobody showed up at Musk’s naturalization ceremony to confiscate the means by which he purchased his citizenship.
Meanwhile, under the Trump administration:
USCIS is “re-examining” green cards for individuals from 19 countries, and applications for new green cards have been paused.
Immigrants about to be naturalized have had their oath ceremonies canceled.
The number of refugees admitted into the country is restricted to 7,500, a group anticipated to be largely comprised of South African citizens.
The Trump Gold Card allows a foreign citizen to receive U.S. residency by “contributing” a million dollars, plus a $15,000 “DHS processing fee.”
The DHS proposes a new rule “to End Foreign Student Visa Abuse,” stating that “For too long, past Administrations have allowed foreign students and other visa holders to remain in the U.S. virtually indefinitely, posing safety risks, costing untold amount of taxpayer dollars, and disadvantaging U.S. citizens. This new proposed rule would end that abuse once and for all by limiting the amount of time certain visa holders are allowed to remain in the U.S., easing the burden on the federal government to properly oversee foreign students and their history.”
Go on, DHS— make the rule retroactive to 1995. I dare you.