The H1-B is the program that large corporate employers use to recruit technical employees from lower-wage nations. These workers, most of whom are low- and mid-level programmers from India, work for a fraction of the wages paid to their American counterparts.
Indian programmers are not “better”. But most of them are “good enough”, and they are almost universally cheaper.
(I’ve actually worked with Indian programmers in a corporate IT setting, so I have firsthand insight on this one.)
Let’s be blunt here: the H1-B is a cost-saving program for big corporations.
Both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have recently come out in favor of expanding the H1-B visa program. This comes amid an atmosphere of anti-immigration sentiment practically everywhere in the Western world, but especially in the United States. Trump won the 2024 presidential election for a handful of reasons, but dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ open-door immigration policies was near the top of the list.
And here are Musk and Ramaswamy, both nominated for positions within the incoming Trump administration, saying that we need to increase H1-B immigration. This presents a problem…or at least a contradiction.
If we clamp down on immigration, pretty much every business is going to have to pay more for labor. That is a fact of economics, supply-and-demand.
We seem prepared to tell restaurant owners and farmers that they must raise wages in order to employ Americans. Are we prepared, in the same breath, to declare that Intel, Microsoft, and Apple should get an increase in low-wage foreign labor, because they and their jobs are “special”?
And is there really no local talent available to fill these jobs? The United States isn’t Latvia (population: 1.8 million). We aren’t even Germany (population: 84 million). We are the third most-populous country on earth. The current population of the United States is 335 million. If an employer can’t find the person they need out of a pool that size, well, maybe something else is wrong (?)
Yes, plenty of young Americans are airheads, but I happen to know that many are quite intelligent and hardworking. They aren’t all majoring in gender studies and/or basket-weaving. We have computer science majors. And engineers. And chemists.
(Actually, the job market for computer science majors is a bit soft right now, with applicants exceeding jobs. So why the rush to bring in foreign talent?)
This seems to me a matter of fairness and consistency. I don’t know what the average family farmer or independent restauranteur makes, income-wise. But I would be willing to bet that it’s substantially less than the typical annual paycheck of a Fortune 500 tech CEO.
In 2024, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, received $79 million in compensation. Microsoft could hire a lot of American-born computer science majors for a mere fraction of that.
If anyone should get a dispensation on cheap foreign labor in the Trump 2.0 era, it should be the mom-and-pop restaurants and the family farms, not the tech giants.
-ET