How the H-1B visa debate divides Republicans

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and MAGA Republicans don’t agree on much. But the self-proclaimed democratic socialist sided with a wing of the incoming Trump administration last week, amplifying their criticisms about employment-based immigration, specifically the use of H-1B visas used to hire foreign professionals to fill specialty occupations.

President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters have split after he appointed Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American who favors bringing skilled immigrants to the United States, as his senior White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence. Vivek Ramaswamy, co-head of the newly organized Department of Government Efficiency, declared his support for employment-based immigration, calling it a necessary antidote to a culture that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

But Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, an immigration hardliner, bashed the H-1B program, which he claims allows wealthy elites to snub American workers.

The backlash has exposed tensions among Trump supporters about the costs and benefits of guest worker programs and whether the incoming administration should restrict legal immigration pathways. Proponents of the H-1B program argue it’s one of the only viable paths for talented professionals from overseas to contribute to the U.S. economy. They say Congress and the executive branch should focus on streamlining cumbersome regulations and addressing decades-long green card backlogs. But critics warn the program is often misused when companies pass over eligible American workers in favor of less costly labor.

Ramaswamy’s co-chairman, Elon Musk, said the H-1B program is essential for tech companies like Tesla, which ranks 16th in the lineup of companies employing the most H-1B visa holders. Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, claims he would not be in the United States without the visa, though details about his immigration journey remain unclear.

Sanders challenged Musk’s comments, painting the H-1B visa program as a money-making scheme for billionaires and comparing visa holders to “indentured servants” who are paid low wages to replace “good-paying American jobs.”

Congress created the H-1B visa program in 1990. Companies may file petitions for high-skilled workers with “theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services explains. Applicants must have already completed at least a bachelor’s degree in a field of study applicable to the potential role.

“This is a program that is primarily very highly skilled people who are very highly compensated for their work,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. There are 85,000 spots available every year, 20,000 of which are reserved for individuals who graduated from a master’s or doctorate program within the United States. (Institutions for higher education and nonprofits are not subject to the cap.)

“It’s been filled basically every year that we’ve had the 85,000 cap,” Bier noted. If more applicants register than the number of available visa spots, the applications enter a lottery. The 2025 cap was filled on Dec. 2, 2024. According to Bier, applicants have about a 1 in 4 chance of being selected through the lottery.

Nikita Kothari remembers crying with her friends when she found out she wasn’t selected from the lottery the first time her company filed her H-1B petition. “I [thought] I would have to go back home,” she recalled.

Kothari, 33, grew up in Bangalore, India, but has lived in the United States for about 10 years—first as a master’s student in Chicago and now in Durham, N.C., as a remote employee for an internet provider. She told me she left India because it offered only limited opportunities for individuals with electrical engineering degrees like hers. International students who graduate from a STEM program in the United States have up to three years to work in their field of study and obtain another visa.

Kothari became a Christian around the same time she accepted the role with her current company, and told me she learned to trust that God is sovereign—even over administrative errors and visa lotteries. “[The visa process] definitely stretched my faith in a lot of ways,” she said.

With one year left before she would have to leave the country, Kothari’s company entered the H-1B lottery on her behalf for the second time in 2019. At 4 a.m. one morning, an email from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services landed in her inbox. She had been selected.

Though the H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant visa category, recipients often use it as a stepping stone to permanent residency and ask their companies to sponsor employment-based green cards. Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow with the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, said this wasn’t how the program was intended to be used.

“It’s become a de facto immigrant visa,” said Hankinson, who interviewed H-1B applicants as a consular officer from 2000 to 2002.

WORLD spoke with five H-1B visa holders working in technology or healthcare fields. Four of them emigrated to the United States from India, and all of them have already requested permanent residency.

H-1B visas are granted for three years and may be renewed once. But many recipients end up staying on the visas for much longer due to backlogs impeding the green card process, especially for Indian and Chinese applicants, who regularly exceed the number of available spots. Immigration rules limit each nationality from receiving more than 7% of the 140,000 employment-based green cards each year.

Krishnan, the Trump appointee, came to the United States from India in 2007 on an L-1 visa—which enables an employer to temporarily transfer an employee from a foreign office to an office in the United States—and is now a U.S. citizen.

Indians received 72% of all of all H-1B visas approved in 2023, according to the Migration Policy Institute. As of August 2023, 63% of migrants stuck in the green card backlog were Indian, and new applicants face waits of up to 134 years. “As long as the green card system is capped the way it is, you’re going to have a lot of people living on H-1B indefinitely,” Bier added.

Raj Karnatak, an infectious disease and critical care doctor in Milwaukee, Wis., has been on an H-1B visa since he arrived in the United States from New Delhi, India, in 2011. When we talked in June 2022, he told me he was waiting for a green card he’d been approved for in 2015. I spoke with him again last week. He’s still waiting—though he recently changed to a category he hopes will progress more quickly.

Karnatak wants to visit his aging parents back in India, but until he officially becomes a permanent resident, travel is risky, and he now has an 11-month-old son to consider. “I may get stuck,” he said. “How is [my wife] going to take care of him alone?”

Employers sponsoring an H-1B visa must file a labor condition application with the Department of Labor stating their requested H-1B employee is not displacing similarly qualified American workers and will be paid the prevailing wage in the industry. The whole visa process process may take up to eight months and cost employers between $1,250 to $4,500 in filing fees and even more in legal fees, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Still, critics of the visas say companies use the H-1B program to pass over American workers for cheaper substitutes instead of relieving genuine labor shortages. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank funded by labor unions, published a report showing outsourcing firms accounted for half of the top 30 H-1B employers in 2021.

Hankinson with the Heritage Foundation said he witnessed rampant fraud firsthand: cases where applicants weren’t remotely qualified for the job or were hired by large outsourcing companies for jobs that didn’t yet exist.

The Economic Policy Institute also noted that the top 30 H-1B employers collectively hired 34,000 new H-1B employees in 2022, despite laying off at least 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023. On Sunday, the Austin American-Statesman reported that though Tesla laid off 10% of its global workforce in April, the company requested roughly 2,000 H-1B visas, according to a report from Electrek.

Stan Veuger, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, argued it’s impossible to make a direct connection between a company laying someone off and then hiring an H-1B worker. That perspective stems from an economic viewpoint that some MAGA Republicans and democratic socialists like Sanders share, he said: “They believe that, if there’s basically a fixed number of jobs, you bring in immigrants, they drive down wages.”

Veuger, originally from the Netherlands, formerly held an H-1B visa. “People are a little casual about the existence of the program, as if there’s all these alternatives that come with more flexibility or a more immediate path to permanent residency,” he said.

But H-1B visa holders are employed in some of the highest-earning areas of the country, he argued, and often end up complementing, not competing with, American-born workers. He warned that cutting the program would hurt American companies overall, who would in turn shrink their entire labor forces. “You’ll see less innovation, fewer new American businesses,” Veuger said.

Following the online spat about the visas, Trump indicated in an interview with the New York Post that he supports the program, though during his first administration, he restricted access to the visas. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” he said. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

The first Trump administration imposed visa and travel restrictions on H-1B applicants during 2020, so the number of admitted visa holders plummeted from 601,594 in fiscal year 2019 to 368,440 in 2020. Lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic caused the tally to drop to 148,603 in 2021, but during 2023, 755,020 were admitted, according to the American Immigration Council.

Still, Bier with the Cato Institute said he wouldn’t be surprised if Trump restricts the program in some way once he takes office. “If he does that, then that’s going to really decimate the program and prevent many skilled people from being able to stay in the United States,” he said.