By HERMAN MORRIS
Over 2024’s Christmas holidays, a debate erupted within the incoming Trump administration over the H-1B program for certain categories of highly skilled immigrant workers. Trump selected Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American venture capitalist and an advocate of raising country caps on green cards, for his presidential cabinet. This sparked an immediate backlash from the nativist wing of the Trump movement, with Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer accusing Trump of not standing by his anti-immigrant principles.
At the same time, tech CEOs such as Elon Musk vigorously defended the program as an economic necessity. In response, Trump has for now given rhetorical approval to the H-1B plan, saying that “it’s a great program.” On the surface, this seems like a bizarre retreat from his fire and brimstone rhetoric on attacking immigrants, which includes talk of mass deportations, further militarization of the border, and ending birthright citizenship. In reality, this debate exposes the contradictions that the incoming Trump administration is going to face when the new president tries to deliver on his promises to terrorize and deport immigrants.
What is the H-1B program?
The skilled workers who are being debated have been largely brought to the U.S. through a visa program known as H-1B. It is the largest worker visa program in the United States and allows for 65,000 workers to enter the U.S. every year, along with an additional 20,000 slots reserved for workers with advanced degrees. While the H-1B program covers most private-sector jobs that require a college degree, most of them are issued to the tech industry. Of the companies awarded H-1B visas in 2024, the top 10 were all technology firms.
H-1B visas do not necessarily permit a permanent stay. If a worker on the program loses their job, they have 60 days to find a new H-1B employer or they will become undocumented and face deportation. While the H-1B provides the option for permanent residency, the waits can be enormously long due to draconian per-country caps. In the case of Indian workers, it can be over 100 years. For many others, it is still a matter of several years in which they cannot change job titles or employers. (It is possible to keep their place in the green card line while changing employers, but this is again subject to bureaucratic overhead).
Moreover, a permanent residency card still does not entitle the person to benefits enjoyed by a full U.S. citizen, such as voting or running for office, and it can be revoked if the person is convicted of a criminal offense.
H-1Bs have been a godsend for the tech industry for two reasons. One is that it has allowed the industry to expand at a rate faster than the U.S. economy can add new domestic technology workers. Secondly, it has created a vast underclass of tech workers who are exploited at a higher rate than citizens and permanent residents, since they are often tied to a single job and switching jobs while keeping an H1-B is much more difficult.
For many foreign workers, this bargain is still worth it. Even with the diminished civil rights they receive working in the U.S., for many it’s a huge financial step up from what they made back home; taking an H-1B job can mean lifting themselves or even their entire family out of poverty.
Many immigrants to the United States are coming to escape the economic, climate, and political crises of their own countries. Often these crises are imposed on them by the U.S., through the destabilizing impact of its economic policies, environmental degradation caused by its resource extraction operations, and its support of reactionary regimes around the world.” While it’s critical to end the American military occupations overseas and to lift U.S. sanctions on countries like Cuba, the workers of these oppressed and economically underdeveloped regions also deserve the right to seek out better conditions. That right can only be upheld by ending all deportations and guaranteeing full civil rights to immigrant workers, including the right to change jobs, to quit their job, to unionize, to vote, and to gain an efficient path to citizenship.
Workers as the pawns of capital
While the U.S. GDP may be at the highest level it’s ever been, most workers in this country have not seen their wages keep pace with inflation, leading to their lives getting materially worse in the past four years. The Democrats and Republicans have no real solution to this problem. Trump blames the low wages on the allegation that immigrants are taking the jobs of U.S.-born workers. This is despite the fact that most immigrants to the U.S. work the most menial and lowest paying jobs in the country and that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been complaining about a labor shortage, claiming that we are still 1.7 million workers short of where the workforce was pre-pandemic.
In some respects, H1-B workers are the ideal target for someone like Trump. These workers are in most instances highly compensated and highly trained, compared to the median American worker. Almost always, they perform a job that requires completion of at least a four-year degree. Trump could plausibly kick these workers out of the country and pretend to have secured a victory for American workers by opening these positions for them. Instead, we are seeing the tech capitalists get their way, and Trump is indicating that H-1B’s will be carved out of what appears to be a historic assault on immigrants.
The reason for this is very simple: Trump does not represent workers, U.S.-born or otherwise. Even more importantly, tech capital specifically is funding his campaign and victory fund, with right-wing tech capitalist Elon Musk having actively campaigned for him, and corporations like Meta and Amazon making hefty donations to his inauguration fund.
The “progressive” politician Bernie Sanders postures a pro-worker stance on this issue, saying that the H-1B program should be opposed, or only used as a “short-term fix,” because the “guest workers” take jobs at relatively low wages that workers who are citizens should be doing. Instead of standing on the side of full rights for immigrants, Sanders wrote in a rather-short-sighted opinion piece for Fox News that “the answer is to hire qualified American workers first”.
Organizations like the American Immigration Council dispute the allegation that H-1B workers drag down wages or take the jobs of native-born workers. First, the Council states, “Immigrant workers and native-born workers often have different skill sets, meaning that they fill different types of jobs. As a result, they complement each other in the labor market rather than competing for the exact same jobs.” The Council also points out that immigrant workers augment economic growth in the United States by such means as spending their wages in the U.S. economy and stirring businesses to expand operations in the United States rather than searching for new opportunities overseas.
Nevertheless, some studies have shown that, at least in certain fields, H-1B workers tend to earn less than local median wages. The Economic Policy Institute, for example, found that large tech firms—such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—use the program to underpay workers. Their 2020 study showed that 60% of all H-1B jobs were assigned wage levels that were lower than median salaries—as much as 17% to 34% lower in computer work.
Moreover, immigrants in the H-1B program must deal with the constant fear of firing and deportation, and cannot readily change jobs. The category is also a bulwark against unionization, as this class of H-1B workers have far more to lose by getting fired than permanent residents.
For these reasons alone, it is essential for the labor movement in the United State to fight for the rights of H-1Bs and all immigrant workers. Only when H-1Bs and other immigrants gain full democratic rights,and receive wages, benefits, and working conditions that are equal to those of workers who are citizenscan all workers in the U.S. organize and strike on truly the same plane. These rights must include the right to leave one’s job, the right to stay in the country, the right to vote, and the right to become a citizen through a speedy process.
The bottom line is this: H-1Bs (and other forms of immigrant workers) are a boon to capitalists. Their lack of civil rights make them far easier to discipline and underpay than full citizens.
Capitalists may tolerate shock displacements of immigrants, as it helps to terrorize an already precarious workforce into worse (and cheaper) conditions, but divisions within the capitalist class can be expected to widen if Trump tries a deportation policy on the scale of what he is threatening. Case in point: In his first term, Trump did try many times to keep H1-B workers out of the U.S., first by banning new H1-B visas in 2020 and second by cynically trying to raise the wage floor for H1-Bs so high (far higher than the wages of similar employees) that companies would claim that they were unable to afford it. Both actions were swiftly blocked by the courts.
It is important to also remember that the capitalists who are protecting these workers today, will happily throw them the out of the country tomorrow if the economic or political situation changes enough to where it is more convenient to them, much like Operation Wetback in the 1950s, which deported over a million farmworkers to Mexico, many of whom were either working legally or were outright U.S. citizens.
Ultimately, the two parties and the capitalists who run them see immigrant workers, like domestic workers, as pawns to deliver the profits they need to keep the economy running on their terms. This division between the two sets of workers is far more beneficial to the capitalists than it is to workers who are U.S. citizens, despite any additional crumbs they may get from relatively higher wages and full citizen rights. Separating immigrant workers as a second-class source of labor drags down all workers, whose wages and working conditions are pegged against those of people who can’t afford to leave their job.
The answer to this problem lies outside the road that either of the major capitalist parties lay out. U.S. workers gain far more by aligning with immigrant workers than with their boss who demonizes them.
Ending the terror regime of deportations and endless bureaucracy designed to demoralize and discipline the workers coming to the United States will be a key struggle in the years to come as more and more workers migrate to this country to escape persecution, economic crises, and climate disasters. This is why Workers Voice calls for an end to all deportations and equal rights for all immigrants. An Injury to One is an Injury to All! Anything less is just another tool that the boss can deploy against working people.
