Why the MAGA Fight Over H-1B Visas Is Crossing Party Lines

If there is one issue that illuminates the tensions between the populist and the plutocratic wings of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, it’s the issuance of H-1B visas to high-skilled workers born overseas. Trump started his political career opposed to the program, which allows up to eighty-five thousand foreign workers with “specialty occupations” to receive visas each year. Then, in March, 2016, during a primary debate he said, “I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country.” At another debate a week later, he reversed course: “I know the H-1B very well. And it’s something that I, frankly, use, and I shouldn’t be allowed to use. We shouldn’t have it. Very, very bad for workers.”

As President, in June, 2020, Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning H-1B visas, which a federal court struck down. That October, his Administration enacted new rules to try to restrict the program. After Trump’s reëlection, this past November, many expected another assault on H-1Bs, but they hadn’t reckoned with the intervention of the tech barons (and Trump appointees) Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who both defended the visa program, setting off a bitter dispute on social media and on conservative airwaves during the holiday season. Steve Bannon has called the H-1B program a corporate “scam” and last week, warned Musk—who had pledged to “go to war” to protect the visas—“We’re going to rip your face off.”

Trump supporters such as Bannon and the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer aren’t the only ones criticizing the H-1B program. In a statement posted on Musk’s X platform last week, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said it served “not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.” Ro Khanna, a progressive Democratic congressman who represents Silicon Valley, said the visa program was being “abused” and needed reforming. Evidently, this is an area where figures from the right and the left find common ground.

And yet, for decades there has been a bipartisan consensus that the U.S. is falling behind other countries in technical education, and that bringing in highly skilled foreigners can help to close the gap. A number of economic studies have argued that the visa program helps foster innovation and growth. A paper published in 2019 found that firms that employed workers via H-1B visas were more likely to be associated with new patents and patent citations. A study published last year concluded that H-1B “lottery wins enable firms to scale up without generating large amounts of substitution away from native workers.”

But not everybody is convinced. Shortly before Sanders entered the fray, I spoke with Ronil Hira, a political scientist at Howard University who has been studying the H-1B program for more than two decades and writing about it at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, and elsewhere. Hira has frequently testified before Congress about what he sees as the program’s tendency to depress wages, promote outsourcing, and pad the profits of tech companies. The political fractures exposed by the MAGA blowup weren’t surprising to him. “This isn’t really a left-right issue,” he told me. “It’s a worker-corporations issue.”

H-1Bs are employer-sponsored visas that Congress introduced in 1990 as part of the bipartisan Immigration Act that President George H. W. Bush signed into law. “This legislation will encourage the immigration of exceptionally talented people, such as scientists, engineers, and educators,” he said at the signing ceremony. Typically, the H-1Bs last for three years and can be extended for another three. Before 2007, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S.C.I.S.) allocated them on a first-come, first-served basis. Now if the cap is reached, it switches to a lottery system. Since 2013, this cap has been reached every year and the number of applicants has usually been four to five times greater than the number of available visas. Legally, the visas are reserved for occupations requiring “highly specialized knowledge.” In its eligibility guidelines, however, the U.S.C.I.S. says this requirement can be satisfied with attainment of a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. Many successful applicants have higher degrees—master’s or Ph.D.—but others don’t. (A little over a quarter of the visas are allotted to those with higher degrees.)

Although any business operating in the United States can sponsor or hire someone who holds an H-1B visa, the successful applicants are predominantly sponsored by large tech companies. In 2024, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and I.B.M. were in the top ten, according to the Wall Street Journal. So were three Indian technology-consulting firms that operate in the United States—Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and HCL America—and one U.S.-owned equivalent, Cognizant. These consulting firms all facilitate outsourcing routine office work to low-cost contract workers here and overseas. In one notorious case reported in the New York Times in 2015, some tech workers at Disney in Florida were forced to train their replacements, who were supplied by HCL America.

During the intra-MAGA spat on X, Musk said he was referring to “bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.” But a wide range of jobs, from senior engineering and managerial positions to junior-analyst jobs are eligible for H-1B visas. According to data from the Department of Labor, Tesla had more than fifteen hundred H-1B positions in 2024, with salaries ranging from under eighty thousand dollars to nearly three hundred thousand. (The median was a hundred and forty-five thousand.) “There’s always a shortage of the super-skilled workers—the top 0.1 per cent of them, which Musk talks about,” Hira said. “But most of the people getting H-1B visas are not these geniuses.”

Hira has personal experience with the immigration system, and the economic benefits it can generate for people from poor countries who obtain professional jobs in the United States. His mother and father—a doctor and an engineer—both emigrated from India in the nineteen-fifties, and moved to the United States, obtaining green cards before becoming naturalized citizens. “My cousins in India—it’s clearly far better for them to earn sixty thousand dollars in the United States than ten thousand dollars in India,” Hira said. He also agrees with the consensus among economists that, over all, skilled immigration has generated substantial benefits for the United States. But he thinks that the H-1B program is designed to favor employers and disfavor workers, including H-1B visa holders. “If you look at how the system operates, you can see that these workers have no leverage and the corporations do,” Hira said. “Are you telling me that for-profit companies won’t take advantage of this situation?”

Supporters of the program dispute the claim that it replaces U.S. workers and keeps wages low. In a fact sheet published on Friday, the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy group, noted that companies applying for visas have to certify to the Department of Labor that hiring a foreign worker won’t adversely affect the wages or conditions of U.S. workers that they employ in similar positions. The fact sheet also pointed out that, in 2021, “the median wage of an H-1B worker was $108,000, compared to $45,760 for U.S. workers in general. Moreover, between 2003 and 2021, the median wage of H-1B workers grew by 52 percent.”

Of course, wages in the tech sector tend to be higher over-all than in many other parts of the economy: it’s a high-productivity industry that employs many highly educated people. The Department of Labor sets minimum required wages for H-1B positions based on occupation, skill-level and geographic location. Hira says these wages are too low and enable employers to compensate workers at below-market rates. A 2020 paper that he co-wrote with Daniel Costa, the director of immigration-law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, cited data showing that, in the previous year, sixty per cent of H-1B positions certified to the Labor Department had wage levels below the local median wage for the occupation. “The fundamental flaw of the H-1B program is that it permits U.S. employers to legally underpay H-1B workers relative to U.S. workers in similar occupations in the same region,” the paper said.

How is this possible? As well as criticizing the government for not raising wage requirements, Hira claims that employers can get away with misclassifying skill levels for H-1Bs jobs because of lax enforcement. He and other critics of the program also argue that foreign workers who obtain these visas are beholden to the companies that sponsor them and have little ability to leave for another job. They aren’t legally forbidden from quitting, but if they do they have to find another position within sixty days at a firm that is willing to file a new visa petition on their behalf, which can cost thousands of dollars in legal fees. Hira said these employees are effectively “captured.” Given that the number of bachelor’s degrees in computer science being conferred by U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the past fifteen years, Hira also argues there are now more American workers who could fill many of these positions, especially following widespread layoffs at tech companies in 2023 and 2024.

Hira has advocated for a series of reforms, including forcing H-1B employers to pay wages that at least match the local median wage in the profession concerned, and changing the visa-allocation mechanism to favor the highest-paid and most-skilled jobs that are hardest to fill. Last November, the Democratic senator Richard Durbin and the Republican senator Chuck Grassley proposed a bill that would require firms which sponsor H-1B visas to first make a good-faith effort to hire U.S. workers. They’ve put forward the bill numerous times in the past, but it’s never been passed, in part because the tech industry lobbies intensively to keep the visa program intact.

What will Trump do in his second term? The new rules for the H-1B program that his Administration proposed in October, 2020, shortly before he left office, including raising the required level of wages in many professions, making a bachelor’s degree mandatory for applicants, and limiting the visa to one year for employees in contract positions—a change seemingly designed to target outsourcing companies. Courts subsequently blocked some of these proposals, and others didn’t go into effect before Trump’s term ran out. Theoretically, he could resurrect them, or even put a hold on the entire program as Bannon has demanded, but drastic action seems unlikely. Two weeks ago, the President-elect told the New York Post, “I have always been in favor of the visas” and referred to H-1Bs as “a great program.” Many commentators hailed his words as an important victory for Musk and the corporate wing of the Republican Party, and a signal that there won’t be major changes.

Hira is reserving judgment. He noted that even Musk, after receiving blowback from the MAGA ultras, said on X that the H-1B program was “broken and needs major reform.” It’s also true that Stephen Miller, the immigration hawk who championed efforts to restrict inflows of all kinds in the first Trump Administration, will be serving as the White House deputy chief of staff for policy this time around. As for Trump, Hira added, “You never know what he will say.” ♦