America’s H-1B visa program has affected few job markets more than the technology industry.  

There have been over 500,000 layoffs in the tech industry since 2022 and recent computer science graduates face a greater unemployment rate in their field than America’s average unemployment rate, Kevin Lynn, the executive director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy, explained during a Heritage Foundation event Wednesday. The H-1B visa program is largely to blame, according to Lynn.  

“The H-1B visa program is by far the largest computer sciences guest worker program in existence,” according to Lynn.  

In 2023, 134,000 American citizens graduated from computer science programs. That same year, 121,000 foreign workers entered the U.S. to work computer jobs, and among those, 75,000 were in the H-1B visa program, Lynn said.  

Since the creation of the H-1B visa program in 1990, the “quantity and the quality of the jobs for computer and engineering professions have suffered greatly for Americans,” Lynn said.  

The intent of the H-1B visa program is to allow employers to hire temporary skilled foreign workers for positions they cannot fill with an American worker. These foreigners, by law, are meant to fill “specialty occupations,” and have at least acquired a bachelors degree.  

Simon Hankinson, a senior research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation who formerly worked in the Foreign Service and helped process thousands of H-1B visas, said the applicants he saw while working as a diplomat could be divided into two categories.

First, the H-1B visa application that fit the legal paradigm might be for a graduate of the Indian Institute for Technology, was and applicant at the top of his class, is fluent in English, has a multipage resume, and is going to work for a large U.S. technology company that will be paying them a six figure salary. 

Applicants that appeared either erroneous or even fraudulent, according to Hankinson, often showed clear signs of bias or nepotism as they sought to hire only from a very specific group of foreigners, or simply sought to hire foreigners for jobs that American citizens were clearly capable of fulfilling, such as a manager at a Pizza Hut.  

Hankinson asserted that the premise for the H-1B visa may not be as relevant today as it was 25 years ago as training for all fields has improved and became more specialized in America over the years.  

“I believe â€¦ that there isn’t really a shortage of talent and skilled labor in the United States,” Hankinson said. â€œBut there is, I will concede, a deep rot in our educational institutions that results in poor matches for the job market.”  

Education standards have declined at many higher education institutions amid a push for equity, leading to less skilled new graduates, he said.  

Young people are “willing to work,” Hankinson said, “but we need to train them for the jobs that exist, and we need to motivate them to work by giving them the right salaries, benefits, and not making it too easy not to work.”  

Hankinson, and the other speakers on the Heritage event, said that the H-1B visa program needs to be reformed to ensure it is used to fill real gaps in the labor market, instead of taking jobs from U.S. citizens.  

A number of changes can, and should, be made to the H-1B visa program to end its abuse, Ronil Hira, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University, explained.  

Employers, for example, should be required to pay H-1B visa holders the same as a U.S. citizen is required to be paid, she said. While the visa program promises not to adversely affect American workers, cases have been found in which mass hiding of H-1B visa holders is predated by mass layoffs of U.S. citizens, even though the program pledges not to adversely affect Americans.

“Violators” of the rules of the H-1B visa program “need to receive significant punishment when there’s violations that are found,” Hira said.  

The topic of H-1B visas is controversial even on the political Right. The Daily Signal’s Elizabeth Mitchell reported Wednesday that there is disagreement over the program within the Trump administration as the president remains largely a supporter of the program, but other administration officials want to restrict its use to the point where foreigners won’t be able to use it at all.  

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the different views on the H-1B visa program, in his opinion, “reflects a kind of … populist versus establishment dynamic within the administration. There’s a lot of people, even in this second administration, who … still have a kind of older perspective on the issue,” he said, adding that he believes President Donald Trump is one of those people. 

“The president is not a restrictionist,” Krikorian said, explaining that more “old style” Republican values on immigration treats legal immigration as good and illegal immigration as bad. But now, with the “next cohort” of Republicans, there is a movement toward “genuine restrictions” on various forms of immigration.  

The debate over the future of H-1B visa program, and various U.S. immigration programs, is likely far from over, according to the panelists.  

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