In the latest effort to divide the working class along national and racial lines, a heated political and ideological battle has ignited between Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s MAGA allies over the H-1B visa program.
The framing of the “debate” comes in the context of a rightward shift across corporate media after Trump’s re-election—either in terms of ultra-right demagogy or bending over backwards to accommodate Corporate America—and many facts about the nature of the guest worker program have been lost in the weeds.
That’s no accident. Ever polarizing, the mainstream press has focused on generating outrage and hyping up division, with little attention to the real issues at stake behind the supposed debate. Hesitant to spill any information which could threaten ruling class profits, the media instead opts to frame the debate as a false choice between the camps of “pro-immigrant” and “anti-immigrant,” or “right” versus “left.”
The whole effort serves to divert attention away from the real root causes of the H-1B dilemma and the complex challenge they present for the working class.
MAGA factionalism
The H-1B visa program was established under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and later modified by the Immigration Act of 1990. The program provides work authorization for migrant workers in occupations for which enough U.S. workers supposedly cannot be found, typically those requiring advanced education, like computer sciences, information technology, and software development. It is the largest temporary work visa program, with nearly 600,000 workers currently in the U.S. in this category.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech and pharmaceutical billionaires chosen to lead the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Trump, are at odds with ultra-right, anti-immigrant Trump advisors such as Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, who’ve long advocated sealing the border.
Musk, the richest person in the world, has spoken out in favor of H-1B visas and said he will “go to war” over this issue. Ramaswamy, in an X post that originally lit the fire, complained that Americans are simply not “good enough” when it comes to competing with foreign workers in the technology sector and that’s why he backs expanding H-1B admissions. He blamed the “dumbed-down” culture of the U.S. as the main culprit—sending the “America First” section of the MAGA coalition into a frenzy.
Ever eager to please his billionaire backers, Trump—who in 2016 pledged to eliminate “rampant, widespread” abuse of “H-1B as a cheap labor program”—said recently: “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
Big Tech exploits H-1B visa program for profit
Originally meant to fill U.S. labor market shortages with skilled foreign workers, the H-1B visa program has diverged from its initial purpose over the years. Rather than plugging holes and raising economic standards, in many ways the program has become a disaster for visa holders and U.S.-born workers alike.
The corporations that rely most heavily on the program—such as Tata Consulting Services, Infosys, Cognizant Tech Solutions, and others—have an outsourcing business model that exploits the program by underpaying migrant workers, who have virtually no labor rights. H-1B incentivizes corporations away from seeking qualified workers in the U.S. who are looking for higher pay. It has been criticized as a “job laundering” program and a form of “indentured servitude.”
A glaring example of the exploitative nature of the H-1B visa program was seen in 2015, when 250 Disney workers were told that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to migrants on temporary visas for “highly skilled technical workers,” or the H-1B visa. Over the next three months, some Disney workers were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had just lost.
“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” one former worker told The New York Times. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”
Musk has been using his newfound influence in the Trump coalition to push for increasing the cap on H-1B visa recipients. His Tesla corporation, like the tech consultancy firms, has relied heavily on H-1B to trim its costs and boost profits. In late 2024, Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace the U.S.-born workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier in the year.
Roughly 15,000 workers were made jobless at Tesla last spring, with every department reportedly impacted. Current and former workers at Tesla said that many of the laid-off U.S. workers were replaced by H-1B visa holders. They said that many workers let go were senior engineers with higher pay; they’ve been replaced with junior engineers at significantly lower pay rates.
Amazon, one of the world’s largest corporations, ranked first for a number of years recently in terms of both new H-1B workers and layoffs. In 2022, the company hired 6,400 new H-1B workers and almost the same number the year before, with nearly 6,200 brought on board. But the company is also looking at laying off 27,150 workers, more than double the total number of H-1B workers they hired in 2021 and 2022 combined. Amazon’s owner and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos is now an ally of Trump, seen wining-and-dining at private events with the incoming president.
Google and Meta, both tech giants and virtual monopolies in their own right, have been top H-1B employers for many years, bringing in over 3,100 new H-1B workers last year. Meta has such a large number of H-1B workers that it has classified itself as an “H-1B dependent” corporation in government filings because over 15% of its U.S. workforce consists of H-1B workers. Google and Meta jointly laid off 33,000 workers in 2022, almost 11 times the quantity of new H-1B workers they hired.
Weak labor protections at the heart of program’s failures
Corporations, in the pursuit of maximum profit, exploit the guest-worker recipients through lower wages and precarious working conditions. U.S. law leaves them minimal economic and political rights and prevents them from seeking new job opportunities or advocating for better working conditions.
“The main function of the H-1B visa program and other guest worker initiatives is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt. in a statement. “The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
Sanders highlighted that during the years 2022 and 2023, the top 30 corporations utilizing this program laid off at least 85,000 U.S.-born workers while they brought on board over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers. Estimations suggest that up to 33% of all recent Information Technology job openings in the nation are being filled by guest workers.
Furthermore, according to U.S. Census Bureau information, millions of Americans with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are not currently working in those fields. As many as 74% of such graduates are not employed in the sector they trained for.
Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said on X that “Senator Sanders is 100% right. The H-1B guest worker visa program displaces U.S. workers and allows billionaire tech employers to exploit foreign workers.”
Rather than using the H-1B program only as a last resort when U.S. workers are not available, many corporations hire H-1B workers because they can be paid less and are essentially tied to the employer who sponsored their application—hence the indentured servitude descriptor.
“We must stand against worker exploitation in all forms, be it American workers, workers overseas, or immigrant workers here in America,” said labor-backed former Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner. “The ruling class wants cheap labor and will game any system to secure it.”
Most H-1B workers are vastly underpaid, earning less than the market average for their occupation and location. According to a study done by the Economic Policy Institute, 60% of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the same occupation.
What’s more, current DOL rules allow for large-scale wage theft of H-1B workers. In a 2021 study, EPI found that thousands of skilled migrants employed by HCL Technologies—an India-based IT staffing firm that places H-1B workers at corporations like Disney, FedEx, and Google—were underpaid by at least $95 million.
Guest-worker programs operate outside of standard labor laws, allowing corporations to employ a workforce that has few of the protections afforded to citizens and permanent residents. And since corporations aren’t required to test the U.S. labor market to see if any workers are available before hiring an H-1B worker, or pay their H-1B workers a fair wage, corporations have exploited the program.
When H-1B workers are laid off, they are under immense pressure to find a new employer to support their visa within a strict 60-day timeframe, or else face potential deportation from the U.S. The fear of being forced to leave serves as a powerful tool to prevent workplace organizing and encourages compliance with management orders.
In effect, the precarity of these workers and their conditions lower the labor standards for all workers in their respective fields.
As capitalism’s chief critic, Karl Marx, pointed out, the system’s mode of production leads to the elimination of “specialized” labor and a general reduction of wages and conditions of life for the entire working class to the same low level. The H-1B visa gives corporations the power to dilute the bargaining power of workers who have special education and training, driving down pay and security for everyone—U.S.- or foreign-born—in the interest of profit. It allows companies to shift the labor market’s supply and demand equation for their benefit.
Another benefit to monopoly corporations is the “brain drain” of other countries, whereby the workers who could produce in their countries and contribute to economic development there are being used up and exploited here in service to Corporate America.
MAGA doesn’t really care about U.S.-born workers
The ultra-nationalist section of the MAGA coalition, represented in Trump’s circles by people like Bannon and Miller, are demagogically using the discourse around the H-1B program—along with the justified criticisms of it—as a battering ram against all immigration and immigrant workers in general.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Bannon and Miller raised the same grievances, alleging that “legal immigration is the real problem” for the economy. They deceptively try to portray themselves as defenders of U.S.-born workers.
Last week, Bannon warned Musk that he and other MAGA fanatics are going to “rip his face off” unless Musk “smartens up” and stops pushing visas for foreign workers to “take jobs from Americans.”
With the incoming administrating threatening the “largest deportation operation in the history of the U.S.,” this latest maneuver by the ultra-right around the H-1B program only contributes to the negative ideological influences of nativism, jingoism, and nationalism on the working class. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has warned that MAGA and the capitalist class are preparing to “divide and conquer” and “leave with all the loot” while pretending to care about U.S. workers.
Georgi Dimitrov, an anti-fascist leader of the 1930s, explained the ideological influence of fascism on the masses of working people:
“Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses, but it approaches them with the most artful anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, trusts, and financial magnates, and advancing those slogans which at the given moment are most alluring to the politically immature masses.”
The fact of the matter is that these ideologues of the capitalist class don’t actually care about U.S.-born workers, or the working class in general. They are staunch opponents of basic civil rights such as the right to vote, let alone union and labor rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, or the rights of racial and ethnic minorities. It’s yet another instance of fascists using the grievances of the working class, paying lip service to them, dressing them up in an “anti-capitalist” veneer, and turning them on their head for capitalism’s benefit.
As corporations struggle to maintain and expand their profits, we’re also seeing an increase in the exploitation of other guest-worker programs, such as H-2A and H-2B visas. There is widespread abuse, especially in meatpacking and poultry, of these programs, leading to human trafficking and the abuse of migrant workers—even children—in the process.
For workers laboring in these industries worried about deportation and visa loss, many choose not to raise their voices or unionize their shop. It’s the same situation faced by workers in the H-1B visa program—but at even more precarious wage levels and working conditions.
The more hesitant these vulnerable workers are to organize, the more likely corporations will be to continue putting the squeeze on working conditions and wages for all workers.
The working class response
The labor movement and its allies have to contend with the reality of the situation facing the working class of our country. While the response of the ultra-right in this discourse is to put blame on the recipients of H-1Bs and drive wedges between workers, the working class response is to fight for stronger political and economic democracy for working people—whether they be domestic, permanent, temporary, or migrant workers—including but not limited to the guaranteed right to organize at the workplace, fair and equal wages for equal work, and dignity on the job.
The lack of good-paying jobs, rising debt, and the lack of productive work has led to widespread precarity, depression, and anger amongst the U.S. working class. As household and college debt continue to pile up, workers are increasingly having to work underemployed and low-wage jobs, while the capitalist class exploits the H-1B program to pay lower wages for what were once considered higher-wage jobs.
The ultra-right demagogically uses the deteriorating conditions of life for working people not to criticize the system of capitalism but to place the blame for the ills of the system on marginalized sections of the class.
The presence of weak labor laws makes it very profitable for corporations to prioritize hiring H-1B workers over U.S.-born workers, not only because of their exceptional skills but due to the reduction in payroll costs and their indentured relationship with employers. For capitalism, it’s all about profit and maximizing it.
“We must significantly raise the minimum wage for guest workers, allow them to easily switch jobs,” Sanders said. “It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker.”
The EPI recommends changing the rules of the H-1B program to force companies to pay visa holders wages that are higher than the U.S. median. This would disincentivize the corporate practice of hiring H-1B workers as a cost-cutting measure to fill positions with lower wages. Moreover, closing the exploitative loophole that fuels the outsourcing business model and enforcing prevailing wage laws for H-1B workers would ensure fair pay and discourage corporations from undermining U.S. wage standards.
The threat of lay-offs, and thus deportation of migrant workers and their families, must be challenged head-on by the labor movement and its allies. Many H-1B vias holders have deep ties to the U.S., especially in their local communities, and are likely to have U.S.-born children. Can they be seen as a force separate from the whole of the American working class?
At minimum, the H-1B program needs reform—the guest workers must be allowed to switch jobs within the field they were received under; they must enjoy the same labor rights and protections as other workers; and they must be allowed to organize without fear of retaliation. The initial solution lies in working class unity and solidarity and refraining from playing into Corporate America’s “divide and conquer” tactics.
As with all opinion and news-analysis articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the authors.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
MOST POPULAR TODAY
The H-1B visa program debate – beneath the corporate media spectacle
‘Nosferatu’ 2024 review: A dark film interwoven with tragic female suppression
Unions, allies form coalition to protect federal workers from Trump
Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘The Room Next Door’: Euthanasia takes a holiday
Democratic corporate donors a top target at labor-sponsored forum
Comments