The College Fix

Program has drawn criticism from both Republicans and Democrats

Immigration experts shared their insights recently on the H1-B visa program following a public dispute between high-profile Republicans about skilled immigrants, particularly those with college degrees.

The program is designed to help employers “who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals” from other countries, according to the Department of Labor.

A senior analyst at the Migration Policy Institute said Trump’s plans were “uncertain” and will depend on policy.

“How the current debate around H-1B program will translate to actual policy is uncertain and will depend in big part on who will oversee immigration policy during Trump 2.0 overall and how consistent President-elect remains – in focus and direction — on this issue,” Jeanne Batalova told The College Fix via email in mid-January.

“What is certain [is] that the discussions over the program’s size and the types of workers and employers who can benefit from it will continue,” Batalova said.

The issue came to the forefront in the weeks prior to President Donald Trump returning to the White House. Failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy criticized the “culture” of American workers and championed the use of H1-B visas.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer),” Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the Department of Government Efficiency effort before it really started, wrote on X. “That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.”

However, the visas drew criticism from both Steve Bannon, an ardent supporter of President Trump, and Ambassador Nikki Haley, a moderate Republican and critic of Trump.

“What is lazy is for the tech industry to automatically go to foreign workers for their needs,” Haley wrote, appearing to respond to Ramaswamy. “If the tech industry needs workers, invest in our education system.”

When I was governor in SC our unemployment went from 11% to 4%. How? Not by hiring foreign workers. We recruited foreign companies to invest in SC but not their workers. We retrained South Carolinians in our tech schools for these new jobs.

The companies started apprentice…

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) December 27, 2024

Responding to a different post, Elon Musk wrote, “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” along with a vulgar phrase.

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” Trump told the New York Post.

Batalova said the H-1B visa program “has been instrumental in bringing highly skilled immigrant workers – in high tech as well as in education, sciences, engineering, medical fields.” However, “it also got mired in bad publicity when some companies hired H-1B workers as substitutes for domestic workers.”

The Fix contacted the Center for Immigration Studies for comment but it did not respond. However, its president, Mark Krikorian, raised the issue of American workers being fired in a recent essay opposing the visa program.

He criticized Disney for firing American workers and forcing them to train their replacements – even though H1–B visa holders are supposed to be skilled and only filling jobs a company cannot hire for.

“The foreign workers were so ‘highly skilled’ that the Americans they were replacing had to train them on how to do their jobs — and if they didn’t, they’d lose their severance pay,” Krikorian wrote in the DC Journal.

He also wrote, H-1B visas are “intended to replace American workers and hold down their salaries. H-1B workers, mainly from India, have been used by dozens of corporations to replace their American staff with cheaper foreign labor.”

“There is no shortage of workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) — because if there were, wages in those fields would be going up, which they haven’t,” Krikorian said. “And tech companies wouldn’t be laying off thousands of workers, either.”

Batalova, with the Migration Policy Institute, said there is “significantly higher demand for these visas, including from U.S employers wishing to hire international students who graduate from U.S. universities.” She said the program needs updating, as it has only been “revised a few times” since it was first started in 1990.

Another policy expert said “we need foreign workers.”

Third Way policy advisor Kylie Murdock told The Fix, “if every unemployed person got a job tomorrow, we would still have one million open jobs.”

“If Trump wants to avoid an inflationary crisis, he needs to expand the administration’s use of the H-1B visa program, without undercutting American workers,” she also said.

George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin would go further. He told The Fix the U.S. “should drop all or most immigration restrictions and let the market work to select migrants rather than trust governmental central planners to do so.”

“The former approach is both more efficient, and provides far greater freedom and economic benefit to both immigrants [and] natives,” Somin, who is affiliated with the Cato Institute, also said.

An economist at a conservative think tank suggested some changes Trump could make to improve the system.

The Manhattan Institute’s Daniel Di Martino told The College Fix, “Trump should pressure Congress to modify the law so that H-1B visas aren’t allocated randomly and instead go to the immigrants with the highest wage offers.”

“This would lead to better immigrants being selected to come to the U.S., who pay more taxes, and don’t compete with middle-class workers,” Di Martino said. “It would also end the fraudulent practice of many H-1B dependent companies and low-wage offers.”

“Trump could build upon the fraud-prevention efforts of Biden’s H-1B regulation that banned multiple entries into the H-1B lottery by enacting a rule that increases surveillance of H-1B dependent companies,” Di Martino also said.

Research is mixed on whether the visas drive down American wages.

A recent paper, using leaked data from Big 4 accounting firms, found mixed results. The data are also two decades old. “We observe that the starting salaries of H-1B visa holders in audit and tax are about 10% lower than their newly-hired peers (matched by office, position, and time of hire) during our sample period (2004–2005),’ the authors concluded.

“In further tests, we find no evidence of H-1B employment driving down the wages of peer U.S. citizen employees,” the authors also found.

Reforming the visa program has drawn bipartisan interest from conservative Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and liberal Senator Dick Durbin, D-IL.

For years, they have pushed for reforms that would include greater wage transparency and better promotion of job openings.

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