A bipartisan pair of Senators is asking 10 major CEOs to explain why they are hiring Indian and Chinese H-1B migrants while they are also firing skilled American professionals.
“With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that [you] cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions allocated by the H-1B lottery program,” said the September 25 letter signed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL).
“In evaluating the high unemployment rate for American tech workers, we cannot ignore the massive, ongoing layoffs ordered by you and your peers in Big Tech C-suites over the past few years… At the same time you have been laying off your employees, you have been filing H-1B visa petitions for [thousands of] foreign workers,” Grassley and Durbin wrote in the letters.
Grassley chairs the Senate’s judiciary committee. Durbin is the top Democrat on the committee and one of the most pro-migration Democrats in Congress.
The H-1B issue is becoming toxic for companies as federal data shows rising unemployment among young American graduates.
“The Overton Window has shifted,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which lobbies against the visa programs. He added:
In any other year, we would be fighting bad legislation. Now we’re seeing good legislation being introduced… Trump has come a long way from December [when he backed the H-1B program]… On November 10, we’ll have a bunch of tech workers walking around Capitol Hill, speaking to legislative staff, telling what has happened to them… Yeah, we have a lot of momentum.
One letter was sent to the CEOs of Amazon, which is the biggest user of H-1B workers. Similar letters were also sent to the CEOs of Apple, Cognizant, Deloitte, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Meta, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy, and Walmart, which recently faced claims that an Indian executive sold a subcontract to an Indian-run H-1B firm in exchange for kickbacks.
The letter asks for responses by October.
Some other Democratic-aligned leaders are speaking against the program that keeps roughly 1.2 million foreign workers in the white-collar jobs that are needed by young American couples.
“I’ve worked on H-1B politics for 30 years,” said a September 21 X post from Democratic-aligned investor Reed Hastings. “Trump’s $100k per year tax is a great solution. It will mean H-1B is used just for very high value jobs, which will mean no lottery needed, and more certainty for those jobs.”
“Once in a great while, our Dear Leader does something half-right,” wrote the far-left editor of The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner:
[For example] the H-1B visa program, where Trump abruptly imposed a visa fee of $100,000 per imported worker. The program, on the whole, is a travesty. It’s a modern version of international indentured servitude. Trump’s action was impulsive, weird, and theatrically disruptive rather than reformist. He didn’t say whether it was a one-time or annual fee, and reportedly he hasn’t even figured that out yet. Nonetheless, we’ll take it.
“In the case of the H-1B fee, he stumbled into a useful if impulsive action. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” said Kuttner’s September 26 comment.
Some advocates for businesses are also giving a little ground in the hope that Congress will provide more migrants for tech companies. For example, Jeremy Neufeld, the director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress, told Newsweek:
Neufeld said it was widely understood that the H-1B has been used to undercut American wages, and that he was hopeful Congress could finally act — at the very least to reform the lottery selection process.
“Which is, I think, widely understood to be basically insane that we are deciding who is going to be part of Team America and help drive our economic fortunes by random chance,” he told Newsweek. “We wouldn’t pick our Olympic team by random chance. Why are we picking our high school immigrants this way?”
Neufeld’s group is supported by investor-funded foundations.
The editorial board at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is defending the counterproductive program, but also endorses some tinkering:
Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana), for instance, recently introduced a bill that would similarly raise wage requirements for H-1B holders and replace the visa lottery with a bidding system. Does Trump want a quick win that disappears after he leaves office — or a more comprehensive reform that will last for years to come?
Still, pro-migration groups do not want to give any significant concessions to mainstream American voters.
For example, Indian immigrant Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) denounced Trump’s modest curbs on the outsourcing program.
Trump’s new $100k fee for H-1B visa recipients will completely upend research taking place in WA and across this country. This is bad for our hospitals, our economy, our communities — full stop.
But investor groups just want more migrants,
“The simplest fix would be to simply raise the annual [H-1B] cap, as Congress did temporarily in the early 2000s,” says a January report by FWD.us, a lobby group for Silicon Valley investors, adding:
Congress could exempt priority immigrants, like advanced degree graduates from U.S. schools, from the caps so they do not have to go through the lottery. (Similar exemptions are already in place for employees of nonprofit and government research institutions.)
Congress should also create alternative pathways targeted specifically at recruiting and retaining graduates and STEM experts, thereby moving them out of the H-1B process. This should include a true post-graduation work visa option for international students to begin their careers in the U.S., separate from training programs like OPT, as well as a dedicated green card option on the basis of a U.S. education.
Similar visa options should be established for STEM experts seeking to work in industries critical to national security and global competitiveness, and for entrepreneurs ready to launch new companies and create jobs in the U.S.
Investors gain from migration because the arrival of more consumers, renters, and workers generates more business activity, regardless of damage to productivity, innovation, wage levels, crime, or Americans’ ability to form and raise families.
“The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security,” said a September 19 proclamation by Trump establishing modest curbs on the H-1B program:
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
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The abuse of the H-1B program is also a national security threat. Domestic law enforcement agencies have identified and investigated H-1B-reliant outsourcing companies for engaging in visa fraud, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and other illicit activities to encourage foreign workers to come to the United States.
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