What the H-1B Visa Fight Is Really About
The debate over immigration in America has taken a strange turn recently. Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer and a prolific spreader of dehumanizing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, finds himself defending an immigrant-visa program against his fellow right-wingers. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most prominent leftist in the country, has taken to harshly criticizing the same program for undermining American workers. Odder still, the richest man on the planet and the senator who thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist actually agree on what should be done to reform the program.
The policy in question is the H-1B program, which allocates about 85,000 temporary visas every year to foreign workers who hold at least a bachelor’s degree and have expertise in a “specialty occupation,” such as engineering or information technology. The program is relatively small, but the debate around it could have deep implications for both major political parties. For Republicans, it is a harbinger of a looming intra-MAGA war over skilled immigration that might intensify when Trump enters office. For Democrats, it represents a key front in the fight over whether the party should turn in a nativist direction to repair its toxic brand on immigration. In both cases, the struggle is a preview of just how unpredictable the country’s immigration politics could be over the next four years.
The debate began just before Christmas, when Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born former Twitter executive and a vocal supporter of skilled immigration, to be a senior AI-policy adviser in his incoming administration. Laura Loomer, the openly xenophobic MAGA influencer, criticized the decision on X and attacked Krishnan for his views on immigration. Other right-wing figures piled on. This prompted members of the tech right wing, most notably Musk, to defend both Krishnan and high-skilled immigration more broadly. The dispute quickly turned to the merits of the H-1B visa program, as the nativist right argued that the program was designed to replace American workers with foreign labor and the tech right countered that it is necessary to fill a shortage of highly skilled workers and help the U.S. compete with its rivals. “The ‘fixed pie’ fallacy is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking,” Musk posted on X. “There is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation.” (The back-and-forth also featured less high-minded arguments. “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India,” Loomer posted on X. Indians make up more than 70 percent of H-1B holders.)
[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]
Eventually, Donald Trump weighed in on the side of Musk, claiming he’d always been supportive of the H-1B program. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” the president-elect told the New York Post. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” (In fact, Trump campaigned against H-1B at points in 2016, and he might have been mistakenly referring to his use of the H-2B visa program for lower-skilled immigrants who work on his properties.) Trump’s intervention caused the controversy to quiet down temporarily. Then an unexpected interlocutor entered the fray.
“Billionaires like Elon Musk claim it is crucial to our economy,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed for Fox News on Wednesday, referring to the H-1B program. “They are dead wrong.” The Vermont senator went on to accuse H-1Bs of allowing wealthy corporations to enrich themselves by importing cheap labor (or, in Sanders’s phrasing, “indentured servants”) at the expense of native-born workers.
Both Sanders and Musk turn out to have a point. Sanders is correct that the H-1B program has major flaws that are often exploited by corporations at the expense of workers. A 2021 analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, for instance, found that at least a quarter of H-1B visas are allocated to outsourcing firms, which use the program to import foreign workers, train them up while paying below-market wages, and ultimately return them to their home countries, where they can do the same work at a fraction of the cost. In one infamous case, tech workers at Disney were forced to train their replacements, H-1B visa holders who were subcontracted by an Indian firm, before being laid off.
However, Musk is correct in the sense that most careful experimental studies on the program find that, overall, it has neutral or positive effects on the employment prospects and wages of native-born workers. Companies that receive H-1B visas tend to grow faster than companies that don’t—likely because many of them really are hiring foreign workers whose skills they need—and thus often end up employing more native workers overall. Employers receiving H-1B visas also tend to develop new products and technologies at higher rates, which helps create new jobs.
Despite their sharply different takes on the merits of the H-1B program, Musk and Sanders endorse the same set of reforms to it: a combination of raising the salary floor for H-1B visa holders and raising the cost to companies for maintaining an H-1B visa, which together would make it more expensive for a company to hire foreign workers over domestic ones.
But the fact that Musk and Sanders agree on solutions means very little about the prospects for reform, because the real conflict here is within the parties, not between them. This is especially true on the right, where the fight is over how the second Trump administration should approach skilled immigration. Trump was elected by a coalition that included Silicon Valley technologists, who tend to believe in immigration for skilled workers, and hard-core nativists, who believe that all immigration, at least from most non-European countries, is bad. Both sides will hold considerable power in the incoming administration; the tech right is represented most prominently by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy while the nativist right is represented by Stephen Miller, a longtime opponent of even skilled immigration. Miller shaped much of immigration policy during Trump’s first term, including multiple efforts to limit the H-1B program, and has been tapped for an even larger role in his second.
[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]
It’s impossible to know which faction will ultimately triumph in the second Trump administration. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has pointed out, although Trump has rhetorically endorsed Musk’s position on H-1Bs, he tends to defer to Miller on the substance of immigration policy. The current, mostly online spat over H-1B visas is likely a preview of a larger coming showdown between Miller and Musk. (Complicating matters further, Trump recently appointed Miller’s wife to staff the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Musk and Ramaswamy.)
The left is engaged in a factional fight of its own. The Democratic Party’s approach to immigration is widely understood to have hurt its standing with working-class voters, including many Latinos. But a new politics of immigration has yet to emerge to take its place. Sanders’s criticism of the H-1B program suggests one direction the party could take: a return to old-school economic populism that portrays certain forms of immigration as a scheme perpetuated by corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of the American worker. Sanders embraced this position during his 2016 presidential campaign, at one point calling open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal” that would “make everybody in America poorer.”
Back then, Sanders’s immigration skepticism was met by widespread criticism from the left. Not this time. In fact, some of Sanders’s fellow Democrats have levied their own criticisms of the H-1B program. But the Sanders approach suffers from a glaring flaw: A large body of research shows that even low-skill immigration does not make native-born American workers worse off; high-skilled immigration almost certainly makes them better off. Claiming otherwise might be an effective way for Democratic politicians to win over immigration-skeptical voters. But in the long run, they might find out that false narratives about immigrants, once unleashed, are hard to control.