Washington, DC, January 7, 2025 --  

The Trump world is in a civil war over H-1B visas. The fight may be ugly, but the program itself is even uglier.

When a fight erupted last week between Trump supporters Steve Bannon and Elon Musk over visas for tech workers, they didn't mince words. Musk threatened to "go to war" over the issue and Bannon retorted with a threat to "rip your face off."¹ These are pretty harsh words over an arcane tech worker visa program called H-1B.

But for Bannon, Musk and millions of tech workers, the stakes are high. Bannon believes that H-1B migrants are just another group of unwanted foreigners stealing American jobs. Musk believes that most American-born workers are too lazy and dumb to high tech work, and the H-1B program is needed to get jobs done. Both men are spectacularly wrong.

While America certainly needs more engineers to grow the economy, and filling those slots with foreign talent is a good idea, the H-1B program is hardly more than an abusive racket. The program largely fails to bring in the top talent it was designed to attract, and instead enables abuse of low-level workers. Between the program's birth in 1990 and the mid-2000s, several giant Indian companies cornered the market on the H-1B system. Today, the biggest such companies include Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, and Infosys. While America's tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Meta have gotten into the game in recent years, sometimes following the same playbook.

The overwhelming country of origin for H-1B migrants is India -- 74 percent in 2019 according to latest numbers from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service². There are a number of reasons for this: common English proficiency, low wages, and a big pool of IT workers. But Indian dominance of H-1B is still striking compared to mainland China (11 percent), Russia (0.2 percent) and Ukraine (0.1 precent).³ Indians dominate both sides of the program, where they seek to recruit and control their own people.

The H-1B program is designed for highly skilled employees. But for the sponsor, the skills, talents and abilities of the H-1B migrant are often irrelevant -- all that matters is that applicants meet the bare minimum standards. All too often, this means nothing more than a diploma from a third-rate technical academy specializing in rote memorization. These low-end tech workers do little to advance America's economy.

For the H-1B migrant, the actual job also largely irrelevant. What really matters is that the visa lets the immediate family to move to the United States and get in the queue for a green card. The salary needs only be enough to get by while biding time for the green card application process. The sponsoring companies flood the system with as many applications as possible because every visa is a chance to milk the system. For this fiscal year, there were 470,342 applications, but only 135,137 were selected -- about 29 percent.⁴

While applications are supposed to be for tech jobs open to anyone including U.S. citizens, in reality, most jobs don't actually exist. They are invented on paper as placeholders merely to obtain slots in the lottery.

Once an H-1B application is granted, the sponsor immediately starts making money off the migrant. Job shops rent out migrants to American companies, pocketing the profits much like a street corner pimp.

But the exploitation only starts there. The H-1B migrant is effectively an indentured servant, at risk of loss of visa status and possible deportation at any time he or she falls out of favor with the sponsor. The sponsor can make all kinds of unreasonable demands. In practice, this means off-the-books work (often to recruit more H-1B migrants) and requirements to purchase insurance and other services from "preferred" suppliers.

While there are lots of other kinds of migrants facing much worse abuse -- refugees from war and young women trafficked as sex workers come to mind. But the existence of greater abuse by others does nothing to justify lesser abuse.

So why is Musk so enamored with H-1Bs? His personal history is likely part of it -- Musk said that as a young graduate in the mid-1990s he got a visa from the new H-1B visa program.⁵ But if Musk tried again today, it is unlikely he would succeed. Again, only 29 percent of applicants got a visa for this fiscal year, and as of 2019, South Africans amounted to only 0.1 percent of those receiving the visas. But it is certainly true that today's Musk benefits from a program that allows him to hire foreign workers below prevailing wages and force them to say under his thumb. That's hardly surprising given his abusive reputation as a boss.

Related Web Columns:

A Severe Shortage of Common Sense
How the High Tech Industry Creates its Own Labor Shortage, April 21, 1998

Notes:

1. New Indian Express, Why H-1B Visa is in MAGA Crosshairs, January 5, 2025

2. US Immigration and Naturalization Service, H-1B Petitions by Gender and Country of Birth Fiscal Year 2019, January 21, 2020

3. Ibid,

4. US Immigration and Naturalization Service, H-1B Electronic Registration Process, as posted January 7 2025

5. Musk, Elon, Post on X.com, October 27, 2024