Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
US President Donald Trump on Thursday praised some of the country’s biggest technology leaders at a White House ceremony, including Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, even as his administration moved against Microsoft over its use of foreign worker visa routes.
Hours before Trump presented medals to leading figures in science and technology, Vice President JD Vance said Microsoft was being suspended from a programme that allows companies to apply for green cards for skilled foreign workers with H-1B visas. The move highlighted the tension between the administration’s ties with the companies driving US economic growth and its push to curb immigration, which it says has hurt American workers.
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Vance said the action against Microsoft came under his role as head of a fraud task force. “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” he told a press conference. He said the company had abused the visa system, adding: “You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”
According to Vance, Microsoft last year fired 6,000 US workers while also obtaining 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, has 223,000 employees worldwide. The company has not commented on the allegations.
At the White House later in the day, Trump took a very different tone while presenting the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Nadella. He praised Nadella’s work at Microsoft and did not mention the company’s hiring of foreign workers. “For more than three decades, Satya Nadella has been a key figure in the transformation of Microsoft, revolutionising the company and empowering businesses, students and consumers from all over the world with some of the most capable software ever built,” Trump said.
Of the six technology leaders honoured by Trump, five are immigrants. The president gave the National Medal of Science to SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and Advanced Micro Devices chief executive Lisa Su. Musk was born in South Africa, Brin in Russia, and Huang and Su in Taiwan. Along with Nadella, Trump also gave the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Dell Technologies chief executive Michael Dell, who was born in Texas and has backed the government’s special investment accounts for children known as Trump Accounts. Nadella immigrated from India.
Trump called the group of billionaires “national treasures” and compared them to his uncle, John Trump, an electrical engineer and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who received the National Medal of Science in 1983. “Such a big day in the world of science and the world of technology – this is the biggest day there is,” Trump said. “You’re going to go down in the annals of history as being great.” He also joked to those present: “We have an extremely high IQ audience, for a change.”
The honours were part of a summit celebrating what Trump described as a new “golden age” of science. The event built on his repeated praise for these entrepreneurs for speeding up the development of artificial intelligence, which he calls super intelligence. He has increasingly relied on the technology to support his economic agenda and has pushed for the US to lead its development, while resisting calls for guardrails that he believes could slow growth. Past winners of the National Medal of Science, created in 1959, have largely been academics and research scientists rather than business leaders. The ceremony also came in the same week as the separate announcement of Nobel Prize winners.
The technology leaders have visited the White House frequently in recent weeks. Musk, Huang and Su sat at the head table with Trump at the state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, while Brin, Nadella and Dell also attended. Dell was in the Oval Office on Wednesday to discuss Trump Accounts. Last week, Huang and Musk were among the technology leaders who came to the White House to sign a voluntary agreement on AI development after recent models raised national security and safety concerns.
With the November midterm elections less than a month away, Trump has also tried to show voters how investment in AI data centres and related equipment has helped lift the stock market to record highs, increasing the wealth of richer Americans. But that message has not always connected. Polls show concern across party lines that AI is moving too quickly, while high prices for everyday goods such as petrol and groceries are weighing on people’s economic outlook.
Vance also said several universities, including Stanford and MIT, should be investigated for visa fraud. Huang and Brin studied at Stanford, while Su has multiple degrees from MIT. The White House, however, praised Thursday’s award recipients. “These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” spokesperson Liz Huston said.
The day therefore brought two sharply different messages from the administration: public honours for some of the best-known technology leaders in the US, and tougher scrutiny of the visa system used by major companies and institutions linked to them.
With PTI Inputs
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
