H-1B High-Tech Worker Job Displacement
Original Intent of the H-1B visa
The H-1B visa was intended to bring in temporary foreign job seekers in order to fill labor shortages in the United States.
Over the years, it has become one of the most harmful visa programs, resulting in permanent displacement of American workers from the high-tech labor force. Educated and competent U.S. STEM workers (in science, technology, engineering and mathematics) cannot compete with foreign workers who are often brought in by industry to work at a fraction of the wages of American workers.
H-1B visa background
The original cap on H-1B visas was set at 65,000 per year in 1990. Today, the United States. issues 85,000 H-1B visas per year, with 20,000 reserved for graduates with a master's degree or doctorate. Visas are issued for three years, with one three-year renewal.
In 2023, the U.S. admitted 755,000 H1B visa workers, with more than 4,980,290 temporary workers and family members admitted in total. That's only one component of the 68,227,240 foreign citizens admitted on DHS form I-94, which tracks legal foreign entries to the United States, along with permitted duration of stay.35
These huge numbers reflect an ongoing invasion, not an attempt to fill the jobs Americans aren't able to do at a living wage.
Consequences of the H-1B program on American tech workers
The US produces enough STEM graduates to meet industry demands for high-tech workers. Yet many highly qualified STEM students realize the potential for H-1B offshoring and turn away from high-tech careers.2,31,33,34 Indeed, the Department of Labor's 2006 Strategic Plan stated that "H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker."
While the H-1B program requires foreign workers to be paid prevailing wages, in practice that does not occur. The H-1B program currently functions to provide U..S employers with cheap foreign labor, rather than to fill temporary vacancies.3,32
More than 100,000 US programmers and tech workers were unemployed in 2022, and many more were underemployed or have been forced out of their career.22 The total number of displaced American workers is close to half a million.
Today, 80 percent of the top ten companies using H-1B visas are Indian outsourcing companies who maintain their H-1B workers outside of the US. Thus, H-1B job displacement is intrinsically coupled with high-tech job offshoring.
Impact on Education
K through 12 education has been consistently dumbed down beginning in the 1960s. The religion of woke DEI has supplanted emphasis on quality STEM education.
Yet at the university level, we see a different story. Dr. Norman Matloff testified before Congress in 2002:
....Thus the universities must turn to foreign students to populate their PhD programs. Rather than simply allow PhD production and research to fall to the relatively low level justified by industrial and societal conditions, the universities will do anything to maintain high levels of these activities. Hence their vigorous lobbying for liberal H-1B policies. Note also that universities themselves employ H-1B researchers, and one aspect of their lobbying efforts has been to get Congress to exempt universities from paying H-1Bs market wages.29
Industry's big lie
The "big lie" is a formal debating tactic where if lie is repeated often enough, it's taken as fact. This is the case with the claims of big business that there is a shortage of high-tech workers and that foreign H-1B workers are needed in the U.S. There is essentially no data supporting such a claim.4,31 A RAND study concluded that 'One primary question this study sought to answer is, are there current or imminent shortages in the U.S. STEM workforce This question can be answered, "No," with a degree of confidence for workers with a graduate education.'5
Yet industry has found that blatantly repeating the big lie about high-tech worker shortages gains traction with Congress, who willingly allow them to use cheap, foreign, H-1B workers at the expense of American tech workers.
Age discrimination
Professor Norm Matloff makes three crucial points about H-1B labor:11,12
- "Cheap labor" H-1B workers are paid less than American workers.
- H-1B workers are essentially compliant indentured servants, tied to their employer for the duration of their visa.
- Use of H-1B workers facilitates age discrimination against older, more experienced, and therefore more expensive American workers.
The scam works as follows: Human Resources words job ads that filter out older applicants. Hiring departments then say that they can't find qualified American workers. They then are free to hire H-1B workers.
The H-1B scam
It was observed in a 2024 article that:
First things first: the H-1B visa system is a scam. That's absolutely beyond doubt. Anybody who argues otherwise either doesn’t know a thing about the system or is being disingenuous. There exists a massive apparatus - corporations, subcontractors, recruiting firms, ethnic mafia patronage networks straddling oceans and continents - that exists for the sole purpose of undercutting American workers by importing foreigners, mostly from Asia, to do their jobs for less, via H-1B visas.
It’s about money. Of course it is...
So give Americans what they want. Give them a real meritocracy. Let them actually compete on a level playing field in their own country.25
Jonathan Keeperman observes in an article:
You Matter
The things you are saying are being read and considered by the people who matter. X discourse is not just trivial recreation. These ideas trickle up. The tweets themselves trickle up...
... the H1B program taken in aggregate creates a form of labor arbitrage that favors the mobility of capital and foreign workers over the well-being of the national workforce. This is a fundamental violation of the social contract and a betrayal of the reciprocal promise of work for fair wages that undergirds any functional market...
If you want the numbers on H1Bs, then here are the numbers.27 It’s not pretty...
Suffice to say that we want, what I want anyway, is to preserve America and its bounty for, firstly, Americans, its unique heritage, its wealth, its traditions, its culture, and the opportunities it creates...
The American work force is quite capable. As Crémieux has demonstrated, PISA scores for Americans, once you control for race, dominate the rest of the world.
Removing DEI, discriminatory hiring practices, reforming talent development pipelines, particularly higher-ed, so that they don’t actively suppress our native talent, especially white men, will solve most of these problems. The idea that Americans lack technical ability or that our culture is somehow deficient is insulting, but more importantly it is simply wrong...28
Abolish H-1B visa scam
The corrupt H-1B visa scam cannot be reformed. It must be abolished.
1. NumbersUSA background on H-1B visa job displacement. Search for "H-1B visa".
2. Lowell, B. Lindsay, Harold Salzman, Hamutal Bernstein, and Everett Henderson. "Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students through the Science and Engineering Pipeline". Rutgers University, 2009. Print. Pg. 31.
3. Low Salaries for Low Skills: Wages and Skill Levels for H-1B Computer Workers, 2005, Center for Immigration Studies.
4. The Big Lie behind H-1B visas, Center for Immigration Studies, 2009.
5. Will the Scientific and Technology Workforce Meet the Requirements of the Federal Government?
6. Prof. Matloff Busts 'Best and Brightest' Ballyhoo for H-1B Workers, Center for Immigration Studies, 2011.
7. Nonimmigrant Visas: H-1B/L-1, Programmers Guild.
8. 2013 Programmers Guild Reforms: Guest Worker Visas and Green Cards, Programmers Guild fact sheet.
9. Media and Congressional Fact Sheets, Programmers Guild.
10. H-1B Visas: Harming American Workers, FAIR, 2008.
11. H-1B high tech age discrimination explained, by Dr. Norm Matloff, 21 June 2014.
12. Tech Industry Job Ads: Older Workers Need Not Apply, by Verne Kopytoff, Fortune, 19 June 2014.
13. H-1B Visa Architect: Program 'Hijacked' to 'Displace Americans' - 60 Minutes special highlights voices of U.S. workers replaced by foreigners, by Kathryn Blackhurst, Lifezette, 20 March 2017.
14. The Big, Fat "American Worker Recruitment First" Lie of H-1B, by Michelle Malkin, VDare, 18 March 2015.
15. Why the H-1B Visa Racket Should Be Abolished, Not Reformed, by Ilana Mercer, American Renaissance, 22 April 2017.
16. Facebook, H-1B and Age, by Norm Matloff, Upon Closer Inspection, 30 September 2013.
17. Blog: Upon Closer Inspection, by Norm Matloff.
18. The Worst H-1B Employers, According to the Labor Department, Center for Immigration Studies, January, 2015.
19. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services guidelines help foreigners apply for H-1B jobs displacing American workers.
20. Primer for Reporters Looking Into the H-1B Program, by John Miano, Center for Immigration Studies, 25 June 2015.
21. What Needs to Be Done with the Higher-Skilled Work Visa Programs Such as H-1B? By Gene Nelson, Ph.D., The Social Contract, September 2013.
22. Shattering the American Dream, By Gene Nelson, Ph.D., The Social Contract, September 2014:
... older Americans are being economically squeezed by employment age discrimination. Particularly in technology-related careers, it is a commonplace (and perfectly legal practice) to force experienced Americans to train their younger foreign-born replacement, as a condition for the Americans to receive their meager outplacement benefit. A summary of this practice that was published over a decade ago labeled this cruel employer practice, "extortion into oblivion." Since the author has also served as a professor at several colleges and universities, he has witnessed first-hand how his well-qualified students are having a difficult time being hired into positions that are connected with their areas of study...
... work visa programs such as H-1B have morphed into de facto government-sanctioned foreign hiring preference programs, as the foreigner’s work visa has been designed to facilitate long-term immobility of the foreigner via the effective indenture provisions of the work visa, while at the same time the design features of the work visa program allow employers to legally underpay the foreign worker, relative to an American citizen worker.
23. H-1B visas and prevailing wage levels: A majority of H-1B employers - including major U.S. tech firms - use the program to pay migrant workers well below market wages, by Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, Economic Policy Institute, 4 May 2020.
24. Comments by Polly Mathick to the article Civil War In MAGA-Land? by John Hinderaker, PowerLine, 28 December 2024
25. Honeymoon's Over: Is This the Beginning of the End for Musk and MAGA?, by Raw Egg Nationalist, 28 December 2024.
26. Videos:
H-1b Visa Use and Abuse, by Sara Blackwell, The Social Contract, September 2016.
H-1b Visa Use and Abuse, by Dena Moore, ex-Disney workers, The Social Contract, September 2016.
H-1b Visa Use and Abuse, by John Miano, The Social Contract, September 2016.
B-1 Visa Abuse, Fraud, and Human Trafficking, by Jack (Jay) B. Palmer, The Social Contract, September 2017.
27. Analysis of Five Years of H-1B Data, by Robert Sterling, 29 December 2024.
28. Debate Club: H1Bs, who has a voice, what does the tech right want, what does MAGA want, and why arguing about it is good akshually, by Jonathan Keeperman, 29 December 2024.
29. Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage - Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration, by Dr. Norman Matloff, 9 December 2002.
30. Book: Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers, by Michelle Malkin, 2015.
31. Untold Stories: The American Workers Replaced by the H-1B Visa Program - Eleven Americans explain how Big Tech’s cheap foreign labor cost them their livelihoods, by Matt Sussis, Center for Immigration Studies, May 2016:
Big corporations and their lobbyists will often claim that there is a “shortage” of American STEM workers that necessitates an ever-growing number of “high-skill” visas, such as H-1B, L-1, and H4 EAD.
This is absolutely false. In fact, only about a third of natives with college degrees in STEM fields actually hold STEM jobs, meaning there are millions of Americans who could be recruited prior to turning to foreigners. Foreign-educated immigrants
are also less-skilled than U.S. degree holders when it comes to tests on numeracy, literacy, and computer operations...
The H-1B program has transformed over time from a means to supplement the American tech workforce to a means of cheaply replacing it.
Americans who are replaced by H-1B guestworkers are often forced to train their replacements or risklosing their severance...
32. They defied the odds --- but is MAGA imploding? by Josh Hammer, Jewish World Review, 27 December 2024:
As for the allegedly pressing need for more "high-skill" immigration, specifically: As the always-astute Blaze Media podcaster Daniel Horowitz pointed out on X, in recent decades, "71% of jobs in Silicon Valley have gone to foreign workers, while 74% of American STEM graduates have failed to secure jobs in STEM fields." Why, then, do we allegedly need to flood our nation — and our tech companies — with foreign, and mostly Indian, labor? We don't.
In fact, it's time for an immigration moratorium. Now.
33. Is There a STEM Worker Shortage? A look at employment and wages in science, technology, engineering, and math, by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, Center for Immigration Studies, May 2014:
- ... total STEM employment in 2012 was 5.3 million workers (immigrant and native), but there are 12.1 million STEM degree holders (immigrant and native).
- Only one-third of native-born Americans with an undergraduate STEM degree holding a job actually work in a STEM occupation.
- There are more than five million native-born Americans with STEM undergraduate degrees working in non-STEM occupations...
- An additional 1.2 million natives with STEM degrees are not working - unemployed or out of the labor force in 2012.
- Despite the economic downturn, Census Bureau data show that, between 2007 and 2012, about 700,000 new immigrants who have STEM degrees were allowed to settle in the country, yet at the same time, total STEM employment grew by only about 500,000.
- Of these new immigrants with STEM degrees, only a little more than a third took a STEM job and about the same share took a non-STEM job. The rest were not working in 2012...
- In total, 1.6 million immigrants with STEM degrees worked outside of a STEM field and 563,000 were not working...
34. New data show no STEM worker shortage, by Steven A. Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies, 17 September 2024.
35. U.S. Nonimmigrant Admissions: 2023, by Aneer Rukh-Kamaa, DHS, Center for Immigration Studies, August 2024
36. You thought H-1B was bad? Turns out ‘OPT’ is what’s really killing American jobs, Revolver, 2 January 2025.
37. How Does the H-1B Visa System Work? by Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, 10 January 2025.
38. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis outlines the problem with the H-1B Visa program, says that he wants Congress to get involved to fix the fraud and abuse that happens in it that takes jobs away from American workers, 8 January 2024:
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis outlines his problem with the H-1B Visa program, says that he wants Congress to get involved to fix the fraud and abuse that happens in it that takes jobs away from American workers. pic.twitter.com/E7AZyatmpF
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 8, 2025
Note: as an IT worker in the 1990s, the author had to train his H-1B replacement.