President-elect Donald Trump claimed this week that he has not changed his mind about the controversial H-1B card plan and that the U. S. needs” bright folks” coming into the region, amid a furious intra-Republican discussion on the card plan. ” I didn’t change my mind. I’ve often felt we have to have the most skilled people in our country, and we need skilled people”, Trump said at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night. We require intelligent citizens to enter our nation. Numerous individuals must enter. The H-1B visa program, which is increasingly used by the tech industry, allows U.S. companies to hire overseas workers for special occupations.” We’re going to have jobs like we’ve always had before.” However, it has long been questionable for some conservatives, who say it is abused by software companies to bring in low, mainly American, labor to substitute American workers. ERIC SCHMITT BLASTS’ ABUSE ‘ OF H-1B VISA PROGRAM, SAYS AMERICANS ‘SHOULDN’T TRAIN THEIR FOREIGNREPLACEMENTS’The system hit the headlines last week when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have been tapped by Trump to guide the Department of Government Performance, argued for the importance of international workers for technology companies. Musk stated on X that the explanation I’m in America along with so many important people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and lots of different companies that made America powerful was due to H1B. That caused a gap between those on the straight and those on the left regarding whether the system is being used to recruit the best skills or whether it is being used by businesses to hire less expensive laborers who are tied to their jobs by their visas. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said on Fox News Sunday that H1-B permits are being “abused”. ” I think the crimes of the H-1B system have been visible, where you have kind of the sons and daughters of those factory workers who lost their jobs, got white collar employment as auditors, and they’re, you know, training their repairs, the foreign workers who are undercutting their wages”, he said. The H-1B visa program will now be changed to prioritize higher-wage applicants. Rump has previously expressed doubts about it. He pledged to address the abuse of the program and made a statement during his 2016 presidential campaign about allegations that American companies were forcing Americans to train their less expensive alternatives. ” The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. He declared in 2016 that he was “fully committed to ending rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices like those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements.” I will end the H-1B’s use as a low-cost labor program forever, and establish a stipulation that American workers must be hired first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions”, he said. He added that” I shouldn’t be allowed to use the H-1B visa program” because his companies use it and that his administration immediately began looking into changes to the program. In 2020, it proposed a sweeping rule that would prioritize the selection of higher wage applicants for the roughly 85, 000 visas given annually. That rule would have required that registrations at the highest of the four wage levels must first submit an application for visa allocation. Once applicants at the highest level have applied, the application process will move to level III, and so on until the spots are filled. ” Put simply, because demand for H-1B visas has exceeded the annual supply for more than a decade, DHS prefers that cap-subject H-1B visas go to beneficiaries earning the highest wages relative to their]Standard Occupational Classification ] codes and area ( s ) of intended employment”, the rule says. Trump claims to be a “bibler” in the H-1B visa for skilled workers as the right-wingers of immigration: report The Biden administration, which later abandoned it, proposed a new rule of its own and later adopted it. However, it was greeted favorably by immigration hawks. Other recommendations made during the Trump administration included limiting the scope of the term” specialty occupation” and changing the “prevailing wage” in order to prevent underpaying U.S. wages. The incoming Trump administration has not specified specifically what it will do with H-1B and whether it will resurrect its efforts after the end of its first term. However, Musk suggested “making it significantly more expensive to hire from abroad than domestically by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B.” ” I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform”, he said on Saturday. Trump also claimed that the program is “great” and that” I’ve always been in favor of the visas.” That’s why we have them”, Trump said. ” I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program”.The Associated Press contributed to this report.