Senator Sanders is coming out squarely on the side of immigration hardliners by saying that the H-1B visa program for high-skilled immigrant laborers is nothing more than a ploy for the rich to get richer by suppressing American wages.

Mr. Sanders, who is an ardent opponent of President Trump, has inserted himself into a debate that’s divided Trump supporters. Trump’s co-chairmen of the new Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have received fierce criticism from America Firsters since saying that the H-1B program should not only be protected, but expanded. 

Mr. Sanders has been beating the drum against these kinds of high-skill visas for decades, but his statement Thursday is aimed squarely at Mr. Musk and his assertions that immigrant employees are better for his companies because they have skills that are extremely difficult to find among the American citizenry, and they also work very hard. 

Mr. Sanders wrote Thursday that, “The main function of the H-1B visa program and other guest worker initiatives is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”  

The Vermont socialist, who will be the Democrats’ ranking member on the Senate Labor Committee starting tomorrow, points out that tens of thousands of American employees have been laid off in recent years at the same time as American tech companies are importing foreign laborers, many of whom will work at lower wages than their American counterparts. 

“It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker,” Mr. Sanders writes. 

He also points to the fact that many H-1B visa recipients have taken lower-wage, blue collar jobs — a fact that many of Trump’s supporters have also called out in response to Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy’s claims that the foreign labor is needed because Americans simply won’t be able to fill the most demanding positions. 

“If this program is really supposed to be about importing workers with highly advanced degrees in science and technology, why are H-1B guest workers being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers? Can we really not find English teachers in America?” Mr. Sanders asks. 

Some conservatives opposed to Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy’s position — which is now also the position of Trump, despite his previous promise to abolish the H-1B visa system — offered some praise for Mr. Sanders’s stance on the visas. 

“Bernie is 100% correct,” the president of the New York Young Republican Club, Gavin Wax, said on X.

“If we as Republicans let Bernie Sanders outflank us on protecting American workers, we deserve to lose,” an activist with Turning Point USA and the Ohio College Republicans, Gabe Guidarini, wrote on the platform. 

The Vermont senator has been speaking out against these visas since he first joined the upper chamber in 2007. During a floor speech that year, Mr. Sanders lambasted Motorola for firing thousands of manufacturing plant and tech laborers, only to later hire hundreds of foreign employees to work at the company. 

Mr. Sanders told Lou Dobbs, who was then at CNN, that politicians were “ignoring the economic reality of everybody else” by saying how great the stock market was doing at the time, while they were also pushing for these guest employee visas to be doled out. 

“That gets us to the immigration issue. If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are right now,” Mr. Sanders said.