WaPo: Elon Musk Worked Illegally in US

Yeganeh Torbati, Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2024

"Three decades ago, when Elon Musk launched his career working illegally in the United States, the U.S. immigration system did little to pursue or punish people who violated the terms of student visas, immigration experts said. ... Musk also violated the terms of his student visa, placing him among the ranks of immigrants Trump targeted during his presidency. ...  Trump also has proposed giving green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. But such a policy would not have helped Musk during his period of illegal employment, which appears to have begun in 1995. Musk didn’t receive undergraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania until 1997, according to the university. Musk — who was born in South Africa, obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother and is now a naturalized American citizen — has denied working in the United States illegally. He has said he had a J-1 student visa before landing a specialized worker temporary visa called an H-1B. However, he has declined to answer questions about exactly how and when he obtained the work visa. Last week, The Washington Post shed light on that question, reporting that Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses. Instead, he launched a start-up, Zip2, that later sold for about $300 million. ... Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to immigration experts — a fact that was discovered by Zip2 investors, who gave Musk and his co-founders 45 days to obtain legal work status. An immigration attorney advised Zip2’s co-founders to downplay their leadership role with the company and scrub their résumés of U.S. addresses that might suggest they were already living and working in the United States, according to documents obtained by The Post. The attorney also advised Musk to obtain passport-size photos and apply to the U.S. “visa lottery.” ... Musk has never publicly acknowledged his period of illegal status, conceding only that he lived for a time in an immigration “gray area.” But his visa issues could raise separate questions for his security clearance, which he holds as the CEO and founder of SpaceX, an aerospace company with billions of dollars in federal contracts. “At a minimum, a determination that he had been less than truthful with immigration authorities would absolutely be something that security authorities could separately consider as casting doubt on his trustworthiness and good judgment,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer who works in security clearance law, wrote in an email. “If his name was anything but Elon Musk,” Moss said, “the odds are his security clearance would more than likely face revocation under those circumstances.” "