ST: To H-1B, or not to H-1B

Feb 144 min read

By Michael Im Feb. 12, 2025

Immigration, whether it be legal or illegal, has been a major point of polarization in American politics. And even the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, centered around their support of Donald Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policies, has recently been split over a very controversial, yet legal, visa program.

In December, Elon Musk, a close Trump ally, began voicing his support for Trump’s appointment of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American venture capitalist, as the Senior Policy Advisor for AI. However, many MAGA supporters found this intolerable, believing immigrants such as Krishnan are lowering American wages and taking US-born jobs.

The H-1B visa program, created by the Immigration Act of 1990, offers temporary visas allowing employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations. Major corporations in the tech industry lobbied for the program, arguing that foreign talent was required to compete in the modern economy.

In its current form, the program begins with an American company entering the chosen workers into a lottery that annually distributes 85,000 temporary visas, allowing the worker to remain in the U.S. for up to six years. During this time, many workers choose to seek an employment-based green card, which allows for permanent residency, by first by being sponsored by their employers and then passing the country caps, which allow each country 7% of available green cards per year to prevent countries from hogging available green cards.

In practice, this country cap creates decades-long backlogs for applicants from China and India, who make up the vast majority of applicants, while those from other countries receive visas in just a few years. This problem is uniquely bad for H-1B visas, as many other visas, like the O-1 and F-1 visas for nationally recognized talent and students respectively, are not subject to annual caps.

The vast majority of H-1B visa holders are employed in technology, while others can be found working in healthcare, engineering, finance and other specialized fields. These foreign workers are cheaper: a Public Policy Institute of California study found they are on average paid 12% less than American-born workers.

Of the shortages that do exist, many are artificial. For example, Congress imposed a limit on residency programs for graduate medical students in 1997, artificially creating a shortage of physicians that the healthcare industry was quick to fill with H-1B holders. Since then, corporate lobbyists have maintained this limit, even as the industry grows, leaving foreign physicians as the only option.

“While I did not immigrate from a country with high green card demand, my experience with the H-1B program in the early 2000s was fairly smooth. The company that sponsored me took care of most of the logistics and paid for my legal fees until I acquired a green card. Nowadays, H-1B applications are contentious, without any time guarantees for approval, and create roadblocks for good engineers, even those who went to school in the U.S. I would rather see the existing system managed more effectively rather than expanded, as I do not buy that there is a domestic labor shortage in these industries,” an anonymous tech worker said.

This dependence on H-1B holders has allowed companies to pay workers less, as the government-set “prevailing wage,” the minimum wage companies are required to pay foreign workers, is often less than the standard market rate. Additionally, these workers face significant hurdles when attempting to switch employers or negotiate higher wages, as their residency in the U.S. is dependent on the sponsorship of their current employers.

When combined, these two aspects of the H-1B visa program give employers a cheaper, more compliant source of competitive labor than domestic workers. In 2018, the Department of Labor found that Cloudwick Technologies Inc.—, a California-basedCalifornia based data service that had been subcontracted by a massive list of companies including Apple, Cisco and Comcast—, had abused the H-1B visa system, promising Indian workers monthly wages of over $8,000, but only paying as little as $800 once the workers had been visaed.

These exploitative hiring practices are known to target Indian workers, partially because of the sheer number of H-1B applicants from India, which is known for its focus on STEM education. Additionally, many companies have conspired to falsify certifications for H-1B visas, and to rig the lottery in favor of their own applicants by entering multiple lottery entries for the same worker. In 2008, a Citizenship and Immigration Services assessment found that 21.7% of all H-1B visa applications contained some form of fraud or technical violation.

Despite this, Musk claimed that the H-1B program needed to be expanded even further, escalating the squabble, as several major names in American politics came out for and against his claims. Within the MAGA movement, Vivek Ramaswamy and other business magnates have backed Musk, claiming that the visas attract a small fraction of highly educated workers and that there is an absence of American workers with the work ethic and education needed.

On the other hand, a disparate group of politicians and pundits like Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer and Bernie Sanders have spoken out against H-1B visas, advocating for reforms and reducing the number of visas granted. Right-wing figures such as Loomer and Bannon claim that immigrants and CEOs have duped the MAGA movement into replacing American workers, while from the left, Sanders claims that billionaires have abused the program to lower labor costs at the expense of workers. Trump, who has emphasized the difference between legal and illegal immigration in his campaign rhetoric, has mostly sided with Musk, to the chagrin of many in his base.

“The program needs to be reformed, as these H-1B visas are offering opportunities at the expense of Americans. American workers should always be prioritized and educating them should be our main focus when attempting to fill labor shortages,” Junior Oliver Kutzler said.

This strange mix of conspiracies and personalities has marked this dispute since the beginning, with accusations primarily being lobbed on X or Truth Social. While the jury is still out on the future of the H-1B, this feud has shed light on many of the fundamental issues Americans have with the program.

About the Contributors

Michael Im is a Junior at Leland High School and this is his first year as a Staff Writer in journalism. He likes to learn about random topics, play with his dogs, and sleep.