I'd rather the world's most talented bring their skills to the US, contribute to our economy and pay taxes. BAM.
Putting America First Requires H-1B Visa Reform
Vital but far from perfect, the program needs a new method for selecting who gets in and who doesn’t.
By Jeremy Neufeld, WSJ
Jan. 7, 2025 5:04 pm ET
A civil war has erupted among Donald Trump’s supporters over the H-1B program, America’s primary visa for skilled workers. Does putting “America First” mean ending the program, as Steve Bannon believes, or supporting it, as Elon Musk and Mr. Trump argue?
The debate stems from a fundamental flaw in the H-1B program: A randomized lottery is used to select which applications are reviewed. In effect this means the lottery determines who gets a visa.
Awarding visas by chance means that while the program can bring in world-class talent, including Mr. Musk, it also brings in thousands of middling workers. They compete with citizens for jobs and contribute less meaningfully to productivity and innovation. As constructed, then, the lottery doesn’t serve American interests and needs to be replaced.
The H-1B program is supposed to be reserved for workers in occupations requiring specialized knowledge, but that can include anything from biochemists earning hundreds of thousands to acupuncturists making less than the median household. This means that the country’s flagship skilled immigration program is seriously underdelivering, wasting scarce slots on low-paying jobs. Many are going to basic information-technology workers.
The problem isn’t the pool of talent; it’s how we choose from it. There are nearly four times as many H-1B applications every year as available slots. This disparity is worsened by companies that flood the system with applications for candidates meeting the bare minimum requirements for an H-1B. Companies that need top talent get crowded out. In 2022, 35% of all new H-1Bs went to companies dependent on them.
Mr. Trump seems to understand this. In a recent Truth Social post, he emphasized the importance of skilled immigrants and the utility of the H-1B program. In 2020 his U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appointees tried to replace the lottery with a system to rank applicants by how much companies promise to pay them compared with other workers in the same job and region. This reform failed to go into effect.
While this would have been an improvement, it still would have prevented many companies employing early-career workers in high-paying occupations from getting the highly qualified talent the country needs. It also neglected the importance of the length of a worker’s potential contribution. This would set back efforts to retain top international students graduating from U.S. universities. A promising young graduate in STEM with specialized knowledge shouldn’t have his spot taken by a replaceable IT consultant simply because the latter would be paid slightly higher than the industry average.
There are other options for reform. A more straightforward ranking by salary regardless of occupation would allow us to prioritize the sectors most likely to contribute to innovation. These rankings could also be adjusted by age to ensure we are retaining bright professionals at the beginning of their careers. A 24-year-old making $150,000 is generally preferable to a 63-year-old making $160,000.
These reforms would increase the average H-1B wage by 41%. This would translate into a $1.1 trillion boost to America’s gross domestic product over 10 years—nearly twice the effect of the 2020 plan. In other words, without increasing the number of slots, we could nearly double the value of the H-1B program. Such a boost should be attractive to Republicans looking for pay-fors during the upcoming budget debate.
Reconciliation affords an opportunity to raise revenue by addressing the H-1B program’s problems. Congress should at least raise the fee to file an H-1B petition and the $60,000 wage threshold that allows staffing companies to depend so heavily on low-skill H-1B workers.
Despite its lottery woes, the H-1B program boasts a great track record, and shutting it down would extinguish the country’s primary pathway for global talent. By replacing the lottery, the Trump administration could lock out importers of cheap labor and make it easier for top talent to secure visas. Doing so would satisfy both sides of the “America First” civil war.
Mr. Neufeld is a senior immigration fellow at the Institute for Progress.
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