Debating H-1B visas

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next, sticker shock for high-skilled immigrants.

Last month, President Trump issued a proclamation that hiked the H-1B visa fee from a few hundred dollars… to $100,000 dollars. He says it’ll end abuse and safeguard American jobs. Others say it could backfire on American businesses and communities.

WORLD reporter Josh Schumacher has the story.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: To visualize the current H-1B visa debate, picture an NBA sports team.

ROBBINS: Imagine you are the Oklahoma City Thunder, and you are competing for a national championship and your MVP, your best player is a Canadian immigrant.

Jeremy Robbins is the executive director of the American Immigration Council.

In his sports analogy he says the team then puts in place a new policy…saying Canadian immigrants can no longer play for the team. The reason? The team wants to give more spots to American players.

ROBBINS: If you’re a fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder, are you going to be like, “That’s a great idea”? No, you’re going to be like, “I want my team to win. I want them to be competitive.”

And it’s that competitive edge that Robbins believes the current administration is losing sight of in its approach to the H-1B visa program. In its bid to protect American workers by keeping high-tech specialists from other countries out, he fears the White House will only end up hurting America’s chances of competing in the technology marketplace.

Here’s a little background. Congress created the H-1B visa program in 1990. The goal of the program was to help companies bring in foreign workers with special expertise that most Americans didn’t possess.

Companies could enter a lottery every year to see whether they could nab one—or a few of the 85,000 H-1B visas U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would hand out that year.

Companies paid pocket change to enter the lottery. To qualify they had to promise to pay the worker the same amount as similar American workers and notify American workers that there was a job they were looking to hire an H-1B visa applicant for.

But over the years, the program has shifted and drawn criticism for unfairly disadvantaging American workers.

RIES: We have gotten far afield from the original intent of H-1B

Lora Ries is the director of the immigration center at the Heritage Foundation.

RIES: It has become a visa that is being used for not-specialty occupations and shutting the door, not allowing American workers to compete.

She says that companies haven’t always followed the H-1B program’s rules.

In recent years, companies such as Meta and Apple have had to pay millions in settlement agreements with the Department of Justice after being caught hiring H-1B visa applicants without considering American workers.

Ries argues that putting a steep price tag on H-1B visas will stop such abuse going forward:

RIES: What this fee does is it raises the price, it makes employers have to prioritize, okay, you can still get a H-1B, but you're gonna have to be choosier about who you're going to get such a visa for.

But Jeremy Robbins doesn't think that it will guarantee American jobs.

ROBBINS: And what's very clear from the data is that it's not a zero-sum game. It's the opposite.

Robbins says many companies will find other workarounds… like telecommuting or establishing international offices.

And he believes that’s a bad thing for the United States. Robbins points to the research of economist Giovanni Peri. He tracked H-1B visa workers and their effect on the companies that hired them—and the communities where they worked.

ROBBINS: So not only did the companies that got H-1B visas create more American jobs, the communities around them created more American jobs because there was more spending in the community, there was more innovation, there's support functions that come with it.

Robbins argues that if companies can’t bring these high-skilled workers into the country easily, American workers will actually lose in the long run.

ROBBINS: They might make the decision that you know what, like let's not even bring that employee here, let's let's put them in Canada or put them in Germany or put them someone else. And then you lose not only that employee and that spending but then you lose all of the support functions around them and all those external jobs are not created in America. They're created elsewhere.

But Lora Ries warns that something must be done to better protect the American job market. And argues that businesses need to be pushed to give Americans a better chance of advancement.

RIES: We need to get this thing back into its original intent, back into the box, so to speak, and allow American students and American workers a fair shake at applying for jobs, being interviewed for jobs, being hired for jobs, and being retained at their jobs and that's just not the situation right now.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

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