High-Tech Billionaire Jokes: U.S. Schools Should 'Staple' Visas to Foreign Graduates

Billionaire high-tech executive Marc Benioff, who has supported President Barack Obama, House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Hillary Clinton, said he will only donate to politicians who promise to give the tech industry massive increases in guest-worker visas.

According to Business Insider, Benioff, the Salesforce.com CEO, “wants the government to give more H1-B visas to the tech industry so that bright kids who study and graduate from U.S. universities can stay and get jobs here” and suggested that “the visa should [be] ‘stapled to them’ when they graduate.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) noted that stapling visas to the diplomas of high-tech graduates would give cash-strapped universities incentives to admit foreigners willing to pay to obtain visas.

Benioff made his remarks at a recent Disrupt conference in San Francisco, and Business Insider noted that he was among the “billionaires that donated $25,000 to a SuperPAC for Hillary Clinton” in January. The high-tech industry has come under fire for demanding guest-worker visas that would lower the wages of American workers while they are laying off thousands of Americans.

After Sessions called out Facebook for lobbying for more guest-worker visas, Facebook board member Marc Andreessen suggested Sessions was “clinically insane” for putting the interests of American workers over foreigners. And this weekend, Zuckerberg’s pro-amnesty lobbying group unceremoniously dumped its president, Joe Green, for failing to get amnesty legislation passed. Green didn’t help matters when he went on Bloomberg TV and said he felt that foreign workers were superior to Americans, who were just “sort of okay.”