Citizens can win curbs on the H-1B visa worker program if they swamp legislators with visits, calls, and statements, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) told Breitbart News.
“The federal government doesn’t move quickly, but it does make a difference when enough Americans start speaking up,” Crane said.
“Most of these people up here [in Congress], though they might not care what the American people think, but they care about getting reelected, and so if they get enough pressure, it does affect them,” he said, adding:
I can tell you, as somebody who’s been behind the scenes on some of the things that we fought for, I’ve seen almost fist fights break out in conference meetings because the public put so much pressure on [establishment] members of the House of Representatives over certain legislation that the base felt was selling them out.
Crane’s bill is called the “End H-1B Visa Abuse Act of 2026,” and it would block the arrival of new H-1B foreign contract workers for three years, as many white-collar jobs are lost to outsourcing and Artificial Intelligence.
The bill also would cut the annual H-1B inflow from roughly 110,000 to 25,000, assign visas to the high-pay contracts, and require companies to search for American candidates before asking the federal government for H-1B visas.
It would protect younger Americans by forcing H-1B employers to pay their foreign workers at least $200,000 per year, bar the use of H-1Bs for staffing contracts, block H-1B from bringing wives, and end the policy of allowing H-1Bs to be paid with green cards from American citizens.
The Crane bill would also cancel the huge Optional Practical Training program, which is annually used by more than 400,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges to take jobs from Americans.
The existing laws keep a population of more than two million foreign contract visa workers in white-collar jobs throughout the United States. These workers will accept low wages and much workplace abuse because they are working to get their employers to give them the golden prize of immigrant green cards and U.S. residency.
The programs divert vast wealth from middle-class Americans towards employers, their stockholders, and the migrants — even as foreign hiring managers embezzle much of the wealth by quietly selling jobs to migrants in exchange for kickbacks from their new American salaries.
The H-1B program is defended by the groups that profit from the migration giveaways. “Let’s be clear … This is an attempt to dismantle the high-skilled immigration system piece by piece,” said an April 24 statement by Rahul Reddy, one of the lawyers who helps deliver the H-1B workers to companies. He added:
The most troubling part is the attack on the student-to-work pathway. Ending OPT would directly hurt international students who invest heavily in U.S. education. Blocking H-1B workers from adjusting status would destroy the traditional path from temporary employment to green card.
Changing the system will be tough, said Crane, because the program generates wealth for employers:
It would take a lot of pressure from the [GOP] conference itself to get [GOP] leaders on board with it. You have some pretty big business groups out there, like the Chamber of Commerce that would probably oppose it, and so we’re gonna have to build momentum. But I think that if enough members of our conference got on board as [bill] co-sponsors, and they saw how popular it was with not only the members [of Congress] but our base of voters, they would probably come around.
So far, Crane has 11 co-sponsors, including Reps. Brian Babin (R-TX), Brandon Gill (R-TX), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Wesley Hunt (R-TX), Tom McClintock (R-CA), Keith Self (R-TX), and Andy Ogles (R-TN).
Many of these legislators are also sponsoring additional bills to curb migration and visa workers — marking a growing interest by GOP members to lead the growing public demand for curbs on the visa worker economy.
Citizens should lobby in their own interest, Crane told Breitbart News, adding:
Get a group of people — whether it’s your small group at church, your school board that you’re a part of, a parent’s group, get some of your coworkers — to all reach out, to your Representatives and your Senators and say, “Hey, we support this, and we want you to actually address some of these concerns about companies who have been using the H-1B program to replace or undercut American workers,” and then start going down the list of things that this bill does.
Anytime you can get face time, whether it’s at a town hall in their district, or even … call directly into their member’s office, their Senator’s office. The [BillBlaster] app will also show you know whatever constituents are conducting the activism that hits members’ social media, their website. They can just bombard members of Congress and the Senate with, you know, social media posts, phone calls, etc.
“If it’s enough of a wave and a bombardment, it does affect members, and they do start to care,” he said.
A left-wing commentator — Matt Yglesias — described how politicians deal with the myriad demands amid the road of D.C. lobbying:
It is extremely hard to tell what politicians really think, not only because it is generally hard to truly know the mind and soul of another human being, but also because most politicians don’t really think that way. A good politician will have a couple of issues he cares a lot about and works hard on and is very knowledgeable about, but then mostly passes through life addressing things either on the basis of going along with his colleagues or else some specific consideration related to politics in his home state or home district.
“If we get activism from around the country, this bill has a much better chance of passing through the House into the Senate and being signed into law,” Crane said. “There’s been this shift in the Republican Party towards a more America-first platform, and so it does work — this takes time, and we all have to work together on it.”
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