Elon Musk and the other tech moguls fluttering around Donald Trump claim that Silicon Valley needs more H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers because there aren’t enough Americans studying science and tech. American innovation requires “critical people” from abroad like Musk himself, they say, because Americans just don’t want to learn that stuff.
There’s some truth to that. But what they don’t tell you is that for more than a decade, Americans working in the tech industry have been systematically laid off and replaced by cheaper H-1B visa holders.
I discovered this in 2013 when I reported an investigative project for The Boston Globe about widespread fraud in and abuse of the H-1B visa program. At the time, three companies got the largest number of visas in the H-1B lottery: Infosys, Tata and Cognizant. All three used a business model that cut costs by bringing over temporary workers from India and leasing them out to American firms like indentured servants. Prominent companies were jettisoning their locally hired I.T. departments and outsourcing those jobs.
Not much has changed. Today, those three companies are still among the top five recipients of the visas. When Americans realize they can’t make a living as software engineers, they leave the industry. The H-1B program worsens the very shortages it was supposed to address.
Most H-1B visa holders are lower-paid labor, not top talent. In May, Musk laid off more than 14,000 Tesla workers, including many H-1B visa holders. Reddit threads filled with laments by workers who had moved to the United States from India only to be let go with no warning. They were desperate to remain in the country, but because H-1B visas are owned by the employer, they had few options for doing so.
That’s why these workers stay compliant and cheap: They can’t leave the companies that control the visas. If they were really top talent, they should be getting green cards, not enduring six years of underpaid servitude.
Such mass layoffs in the tech industry should make us question the premise that more H-1B visas are needed.
“How do they get away with mass layoffs — then claim shortages?” Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who has written about this issue for two decades, asked me.
Confronted on X with evidence of relatively low pay for H-1B positions, Musk admitted what many of us already knew: The “program is broken and needs major reform.”
Does that mean he’s going to push for it to be fixed by raising the wages for temporary workers and making it based more on unique skills than on a lottery? Don’t hold your breath.
