Daily Archives: December 27, 2024

Tech program for refugees opens doors to careers in a growing industry

Twenty-six-year-old Blisha Magar is one of 20 refugees working away in a classroom during a free computer coding boot camp called Refcode. The program, led by software engineers, teaches refugees tech skills.

On Magar’s screen is a website she made with two furry monsters, one blue and one orange. They look ready for lunch.“I’m going to add a burger, pizza, broccoli and a cookie on the side,” Magar says.

A hospice care worker, she’s originally from Nepal. Magar is flexing the skills she learned in the boot camp to practice creating a website pixel, which reacts when you hover a mouse on it. She clicks the burger and drags her cursor over the monster.

“So if I click on broccoli, it might just open it,” Magar says. 

She learned about the boot camp from friends, and it felt like an opportunity she could not pass up. “Since it’s free and I would be learning, like, a skill that’s very prevalent now. So two birds with one stone,” Magar says.

Brenton Strine, a software engineer, started the Refcode program in 2017.

“Companies are almost desperate to hire talented software engineers. So there’s this huge need there. And then, on the other hand, there’s this huge need of new Americans starting over from nothing,” Strine said.

This is one of a handful of programs around the country that aim to bring thousands of new Americans into growing industries such as software development and artificial intelligence.

When refugees come to the U.S., they usually need jobs. Last year, over 60,000 refugees resettled in the country after a record low in 2021.

Many refugees of working age start with low-wage, low-skilled labor. Strine said many refugees want tech jobs but have to settle for roles like rideshare drivers because learning how to code is difficult.

“If you think about a ladder that you climb to get to your first job, a lot of the rungs on that ladder are already in place, but what’s missing is that bottom rung for people who haven’t gotten a start yet, don’t know anything about code,” Strine said.

The 10-week boot camp provides hands-on experience with AI and coding. The industry is hungry and some students find jobs after completion.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the tech sector in the U.S. will grow faster than the workforce in the next decade, adding over 350,000 jobs a year.

Refcode has recently grown and is now funded by DeKalb County, part of the Atlanta metro area. Strine said he can expand boot camps, pay instructors and offer internships to some graduates.

“We’re starting to fill in the rungs on that ladder a little bit where we’re paying our graduates now to do real work and put a real job on their resume,” Strine added.

For some participants, the program can jump-start a new career. That’s what 54-year-old Tesfaye Gebeyehu hopes for. He came to the United States over a decade ago from Ethiopia, where he was an irrigation engineer. He currently works at a supermarket and hopes the program will help him get a job in information technology.“I am interested in changing my career. Now, I am working unprofessional work. I try to change my career to IT,” Gebeyehu said.

A couple of weeks later, Gebeyehu and the rest of his cohort were ready to graduate. Strine congratulated them. “I’m really excited because you made it to the end of the class,” he said.

Graduates took photos. They got a slice of pizza, a diploma and a fresh line on their resume that might help them land their next job.

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Can Tech Companies Thrive Without H-1B Visas? Elon Musk’s SpaceX Sure Is

Elon Musk’s defense of the H-1B visa as a necessary component to empower the American tech workforce has come under scrutiny, especially in light of the lack of such visas needed to keep SpaceX at the top of its field in space exploration and rocket engineering.Why It MattersMusk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, has been at odds with MAGA faithful over the issue of H-1B visas, which allow foreign workers with specified skillsets to live and work in the United States so long as they have an employer willing to sponsor them.Musk himself benefited greatly from the H-1B visa program, having first entered the U.S. on a J-1 academic visa that he says changed to an H-1B visa. Some of his companies, such as Tesla, rely on the program for their workforce: Tesla brought in 724 employees in 2023 on H-1B visas.However, he also represents a counter-example in his company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known colloquially as SpaceX.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Musk has come under fire from Trump supporters…
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Musk has come under fire from Trump supporters for his support of the H-1B work visa.
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Brandon Bell/Getty Images
What To KnowSpaceX, which is privately held, has an estimated market capitalization of roughly $350 billion, based on a secondary share sale. That would make it one of the top 30 companies by market cap in the country (private companies do not have to publicly release detailed financial data).The company has had a banner year: its Starlink satellite-based internet constellation has grown into a behemoth as traffic tripled in 2024, with Musk himself estimating Starlink could represent at least half of SpaceX’s overall valuation.In October SpaceX also demonstrated the reusability of its Starship rocket technology by “catching” its booster with mechanical arms for the first time.To reach those and other milestones, SpaceX has hired just 17 H-1B workers between 2011 and 2024, according to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Data on the service’s website shows a single H-1B rejection in that period.This is largely because the U.S. has for years mandated the hiring of U.S. citizens and green-card holders over foreign workers for certain sensitive industries and technologies, such as defense, under a set of regulations known as International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). SpaceX is a significant defense contractor.

SpaceX’s mega rocket booster returns to the launch pad to be captured during a test flight on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in Boca Chica, Texas. The successful test was one of several milestones for SpaceX…
SpaceX’s mega rocket booster returns to the launch pad to be captured during a test flight on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in Boca Chica, Texas. The successful test was one of several milestones for SpaceX this year, which it completed with few H-1B work visas.
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Eric Gay/AP Photo
Other defense contractors operate with similarly few foreign workers. Northrop Grumman does not even come up in the H-1B database, while Lockheed Martin, one of the largest defense contractors in the country, had a grand total of 11 H-1B visas approved. Boeing had just under 100 H-1B visas approved since 2009.Newsweek reached out to SpaceX, Elon Musk and Northrop Grumman by email for comment on Friday morning.By comparison, Big Tech companies that do not contract with the federal government on defense in any significant way have higher numbers: Spotify has had dozens of approved H-1B visas almost every year, especially after the pandemic, with 35 approved in 2020, 43 approved in 2021, 45 approved in 2022, 22 approved in 2023 and 41 approved in 2024. Google pulled around 1,043 H-1B visa approvals in 2024 alone, while the IT consulting firm Cognizant secured 6,321 H-1B approvals this year.
What People Are SayingPresident-elect Donald Trump earlier this year said that anyone graduating from a U.S. college should get a green card automatically in order to keep jobs in the U.S.: “If you graduate from a U.S. college—two-year, four-year, or doctoral—you should automatically get a green card to stay,” Trump said during an appearance on “The All-In Podcast” in June. “Too often, talented grads are forced to leave and start billion-dollar companies in India or China instead of here. That success and those jobs should be in America.”David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist and former Senior Advisor to the President in the White House, wrote on X Friday: “This was one of the inevitable schisms between Elon and the billionaire techies who funded Trump’s campaign, and the voters who elected him. They are globalists bankrolling a populist movement for their own purposes.”Ed Krassenstein, a Trump-critical influencer, wrote on X Friday: “MAGA is outraged that Elon Musk is pro H-1B Visa. Someone should tell them that Trump Organization and Trump’s Mar-a-Lag resorts frequently used H-1B visas to hire employees from outside of America.”What Happens NextMusk and Ramaswamy, who have been given charge of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have continued to press their case even against the backdrop of a days-long MAGA backlash over the need for H-1B labor.The president-elect, meanwhile, has been quiet on the issue since his remarks during the campaign. Trump will have wide authority to rework the H-1B system should he want it, using executive orders as he did in 2020.Update, 12/27/24 at 2:36 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to correct a spelling error.

Army halted weapon development and pushed tech to soldiers faster: 2024 in review

An antenna farm is set up away from soldiers inside the command post. (Breaking Defense/ Ashley Roque)
WASHINGTON — In what has turned out as Army Secretary Christine Wormuth’s fourth and final year as the service’s top civilian leader and Gen. Randy George’s first full year as chief of staff, the duo shed high-profile modernization programs, revamped others and pushed tech down to soldiers at a faster clip.
Wormuth, slated to wave goodbye to her post as the 25th secretary of the Army in January 2025, largely spent her tenure keeping the service’s high-profile modernization portfolio intact. This year, though, the axe fell on several initiatives starting with the early February aviation shakeup that ended development on the next generation Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), kept General Electric’s Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP) in the development phase longer, and shelved legacy Shadow and Raven unmanned aerial systems. 
“We are learning from the battlefield — especially Ukraine — that aerial reconnaissance has fundamentally changed,” Army Chief Gen. Randy George said in a press release at the time. “Sensors and weapons mounted on a variety of unmanned systems and in space are more ubiquitous, further reaching and more inexpensive than ever before.”

In turn, the service is planning to spend dollars freed up by those decisions to ink a multi-year procurement deal with Lockheed-Sikorsky for the UH-60M Blackhawk line, give Boeing the greenlight to formally begin production on the CH-47F Block II Chinook, buy new drones and more.
[This article is one of many in a series in which Breaking Defense reporters look back on the most significant (and entertaining) news stories of 2024 and look forward to what 2025 may hold.]

The axe officially dropped on another big-ticket development effort just a few weeks later when the Army unfurled its fiscal 2025 budget request: It was halting development on its Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) platform. The goal was to use the modified artillery platform to launch 155-mm rounds out to 70km, an increase from the current max range of up to 30km. But after spending several years integrating and testing out the addition of a 30-foot, 58-caliber gun tube to BAE Systems’ Paladin M109A7 self-propelled howitzer, it was not working out as planned.
However, the requirement for such a weapon remains and the service subsequently announced it has selected five companies — Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, Hanwha, General Dynamics and Elbit Systems — to demo their existing platforms on a roadshow of sorts. In early December, the director of the Long-Range Precision Fires Cross Functional Team, Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, said those early evaluations should be completed by month’s end. And, he added, so far so good, with early findings indicating that the vendors are “absolutely ready for competitive evaluation,” which means the service may decide not to delve into another lengthy development phase.

“We’re very pleased with what we’re seeing so far, and even some on the autonomy side,” the one-star general told an audience Dec. 3.
Eyeing soldiers’ kit, the service also spent part of the year preparing industry for a possible shake up to its portfolio of night vision devices including the mixed-reality goggles dubbed the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS). Army Rangers from the 75th Ranger Regiment, for example, were tasked with running Microsoft’s most advanced mixed-reality system, IVAS version 1.2, through the ringer alongside dedicated night vision systems like the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENGV-B) and another system dubbed PVS-14.
“They’re going to provide the best feedback in terms of, here’s what the ENGV-B can provide versus a PVS-14 versus the capability inside of IVAS,” an Army official told Breaking Defense. The goal is for those Rangers to provide a “more mature look” at how they use night vision while also answering questions about the ideal IVAS form factor, battery needs and more.
Those answers are expected to help Army leaders decide the best pair up specific night vision devices with units and define IVAS Next requirements for an upcoming competition.
And when it comes to tying everything together, Army leaders also unveiled plans for command and control (C2) Next, or Next Generation C2. Still in the early days of development, this new prototyping umbrella is slated to include: a single array; a line-of-sight and beyond line-of-sight terminal; modular RF communications software; and edge computing capabilities. Service leaders are planning to test it out next year at the fifth Project Convergence capstone event to make sure they’re on the right track.Individual programs aside, George rolled out his “transformation in contact” push this year — an initiative designed to get developmental weapons into soldiers’ hands sooner and tweak how formations are organized. 
George announced plans to expand his keystone inactive beyond infantry under a 2.0 push. The plan, he said, expands the bottom-up approach to two divisions, two Armored brigade combat teams, two Stryker brigade combat teams, and reserve and guard formations. The service started with the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. Next year, it will be expanded beyond infantry under a 2.0 push and will include two divisions, two Armored brigade combat teams, two Stryker brigade combat teams, and reserve and guard formations.

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Elon Musk Combats Anti-Immigration Sentiment in Posts Decrying ‘Dire Shortage’ of Tech Talent

Billionaire businessman and recently appointed government cost-cutter Elon Musk called for increased immigration of high-skilled foreign workers to the U.S. in several social media posts combating immigration restrictionists.In a post on X, Musk decried a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in America, calling it the “fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Mario Nawfal, a businessman and influencer on X, quoted Musk’s post and said the U.S. semiconductor industry alone needs more than 160,000 engineers by 2032, citing McKinsey & Company.
“No, we need more like double that number yesterday!” Musk replied. “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.”
{snip} “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be,” he wrote.
His argument provoked backlash from immigration restrictionists, who replied that tech companies should look to the 330 million people in America for top talent instead of calling for more foreign workers to immigrate to the U.S.
“Your understanding of the situation is upside-down and backwards,” Musk said in response to a user who demanded to know why he would deny job opportunities to Americans.
{snip}
“If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.”
{snip}

Trump Supporters Push Back After President-Elect Appoints Adviser Who Wants H-1B Expansion: ‘Tech Wants Indentured Servants’

The choice of a policy adviser for artificial intelligence (AI) in the next Trump administration has sparked widespread debate online over the H-1B visa program, which conservatives are calling out as “abusive” and designed precisely to undercut wages of white-collar Americans.
“Sriram Krishnan will serve as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social this week:

Working closely with David Sacks, Sriram will focus on ensuring continued American leadership in A.I., and help shape and coordinate A.I. policy across Government, including working with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sriram started his career at Microsoft as a founding member of Windows Azure. [Emphasis added]
Krishnan’s appointment has sparked a widespread online debate over the H-1B visa program and employment-based green cards.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
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One such major effort that Krishnan has backed is a green card giveaway, primarily to Indian nationals, where country caps for employment-based green cards would be eliminated.
As a result, tech corporations would be massively rewarded for having imported mostly Indian nationals on H-1B visas to take white-collar American jobs. The push to end country caps has failed over and over again in Congress.

Last month, in response to billionaire Elon Musk’s X post regarding the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Krishnan replied that “anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge.”
In a clip from Krishnan’s podcast, he is seen laughing as a guest suggests that Indian nationals ought to “just get married to a U.S. citizen, just make that happen” to secure green cards.
Vivek Ramaswamy chimed in on the debate, suggesting that American companies like hiring foreign visa workers over college-educated Americans because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long…”
In March Ramaswamy appeared on Krishnan’s podcast where he said legal immigration ought to center on filling “labor gaps” and “skills gaps.”
“The sole objective of U.S. immigration policy should be to advance the interests of the U.S. citizens who are already here … against that backdrop, what immigration policy makes sense?” Ramaswamy said:
Great. Now, it becomes easy to implement — Where do we have labor gaps? Where do we have skills gaps? Where do we have people who can add to the productivity of the United States? People who bring a civic love of this country combined with skills and a work ethic and perhaps money and investment to be able to make that happen? That, I think, sets us up for a more rational path here. [Emphasis added]
Conservatives and other dissenters online have fought back on the issue for days now.

“The H-1B visa program is loved by tech companies because it helps hold down salaries of ultra high paid engineering jobs and foreign workers on these visas are way less likely to unionize or agitate for better work conditions,” journalist Lee Fang posted. “Both parties enable the abuse of the program.”
Mike Cernovich and others have used online databases to debunk claims that the H-1B visa program brings only the “best and brightest” of geniuses to the United States to take jobs:

As part of the online debate, many X users are reposting a Breitbart News interview with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance from 2022 when he was running for the open U.S. Senate seat for Ohio.
In the interview, Vance made clear that Congress ought to prioritize overhauling the H-1B visa program to prevent corporations from enacting an outsourcing-offshoring scheme where Americans are laid off, forced to train their foreign replacements, and then those jobs eventually sent to countries like India altogether.
“Generally speaking, a lot of the H-1B abuse we see is in the interests of the people hiring the [foreign visa] worker, who can undercut the wages of Americans, but is it in the interest of the 700 Ohioans who lost their jobs? Absolutely not,” Vance told Breitbart News at the time.
“This is one of these issues where you actually need public policy to solve this problem because they’re taking advantage of a visa system that’s meant to ensure that American companies have the workers that they need — it’s not meant to undercut the wages of American workers in this country,” Vance said. “Unfortunately, that’s what the H-1B visa is just being used to do right now.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.