At a town hall event on Saturday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as Elon Musk continued his tour of the state in support of Donald Trump, the topic of immigration came up. That in itself was hardly unusual — Musk, Trump, and the entire MAGA movement have been demonizing immigrants throughout the 2024 election cycle. But this time, someone wanted Musk, born in South Africa, to share what he had learned in becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen himself.
A question came from an audience member named Mark, who told the billionaire that it had taken “years and money” for his wife to be naturalized “the right way.” He then asked if Musk would talk about his experience with the immigration system. Musk seemed unprepared to address his own story and stammered a bit, saying: “Yeah, well, since your wife has gone through the, um, process of becoming a citizen and getting [a] Green Card, it’s — you’ve seen how absurdly slow and arduous it is.” He then quickly shifted into metaphors for how he wants immigration to work, saying we should think about it as picking people to join a company or sports team. “You know, it’s like, I mean, it’s like, if, like, if you have the opportunity to say, have like, you know, LeBron James or Steph Curry on your team, you’d be like, ‘Yeah, that would make total sense.’”
The country should welcome immigrants, Musk said, who are “productive and honest and a net contributor.”
Musk said nothing about his own time as an immigrant in the U.S. and did not clarify why he believes, as he put it, that “it is easier to get into this country as a murderer than as a Nobel Laureate.” Indeed, his consistent description of the legal U.S. immigration path as a “laborious Kafkaesque nightmare” should probably allay his fears that Democrats are somehow funneling migrants illegally over the border and directly into voting booths. Yet, instead of discussing the specific obstacles he faced and how they can be addressed, he joked that the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A should oversee U.S. borders, because “they are so efficient” and “the chicken sandwiches are epic.” Musk added, “That’s going to be a headline.”
He was right, and the articles about his appearance in Lancaster focused on the bizarre Chick-fil-A comments, as well as his discussion of space aliens — not the side-stepping of his personal history. If Musk was eager to give the media something else to chew on, it could have been because the Washington Post had published a story that morning about how he had worked illegally in the U.S. at his startup company Zip2 after bailing on a Stanford University graduate program in 1995, thereby invalidating a student visa. “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,” he wrote in a 2005 email that came to light in an unrelated lawsuit that has since been settled. Musk never actually enrolled in Stanford classes.
Later on Saturday night, after President Biden took aim at Musk for the hypocrisy of railing against undocumented immigrants despite having allegedly violated immigration law himself, Musk posted on X that he “was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B,” and “was in fact allowed to work” in the U.S. The J-1 is an academic visa that requires the holder to be engaged in study, teaching, or research, and to have a federally designated exchange sponsor — often a university.
Musk didn’t explain whether his J-1 was sponsored by Stanford or the University of Pennsylvania, where he had previously completed his undergraduate degree. But in either case, according to immigration attorney Greg Siskind, author of multiple editions of the primary guide to J-1 visas, Musk would have had illegal status and lacked authorization to work the moment he dropped out of school. “If he successfully transitioned to H-1B status,” Siskind posted on X, “it was because he either left the country and reentered in that status or he lied to USCIS (then the INS) about his status.” An H-1B (not “H1-B,” as Musk styled it) is a temporary employment visa that authorizes the holder to work in “specialty occupations.” Musk has also not revealed just how he converted to this status.
The broad strokes of Musk’s immigration journey are clear: He obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother, Maye Musk, who was born there, and then came to the U.S. on a visa to study at Penn in 1992. Ten years later, in 2002, he gained U.S. citizenship. Yet he has kept his immigration status right after the end of his academic life rather fuzzy, even at one point referring to it as “a gray area” — this in a 2013 interview in which his brother and co-founder in the startup Zip2, Kimbal Musk, openly stated that they were “illegal immigrants.” When a venture capital firm committed $3 million in funding to their company in 1996, the Post reported, the funding agreement required that the Musks obtain legal work status within 45 days. Zip2 board members also worried that the pair could be deported.
Being more transparent on the steps he took toward naturalization would make Musk a more credible voice on the topic, particularly if he wants to keep arguing that the U.S. procedure puts individuals through a bloated and broken bureaucracy. The trouble is, his own story might demonstrate that it is far easier for the son of a white, wealthy, well-connected foreign family to skirt the technicalities of immigration law than it is for a non-white migrant to illegally cross the southern border and gain access to public resources such as schools, hospitals, and benefits programs. Trump’s campaign, of course, has relied on racist tropes about such migrants pouring in to the country, overwhelming municipal infrastructure, and leeching off assistance programs like welfare.
