The real labor crisis? Too many visas, not too few workers



After two generations of record-breaking immigration, we’re still flooding the labor market with millions of foreign students and visa workers — gutting entire industries and boxing Americans out of their own economy. On what planet does this country need more foreign labor?

Last week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it had selected 120,141 H-1B visa applicants in its random annual lottery for fiscal year 2026. While the number is slightly lower than during the Biden years, it reflects the same endless pipeline we’ve seen for decades.

So much for putting American workers first.

A shrinking job market

At any given time, roughly 1.5 million white-collar foreign workers operate in this country on a mix of visa categories — H-1B, H4EAD, L-1, J-1, O-1, TN, OPT, and CPT. That doesn’t even count the more than 1 million foreign students or the birthright citizenship granted to their children, despite many of them being here on “temporary” visas.

The real number of new H-1Bs that should be admitted next year? Zero.

If we truly had a shortage of skilled labor, wouldn’t wages be rising? Shouldn’t entry-level pay be going up?

The only reason we allow India to monopolize graduate programs and entire sectors of the tech and medical industries is to suppress wages. Meanwhile, American companies continue to lay off workers while lobbying to import more foreign labor. That contradiction exposes the lie.

Last September, the Wall Street Journal described what young tech workers now face.

Once heavily wooed and fought over by companies, tech talent is now wrestling for scarcer positions. The stark reversal of fortunes for a group long in the driver’s seat signals more than temporary discomfort. It’s a reset ...

Job postings for software developers are down more than 30% since February 2020, according to Indeed. Layoffs in tech have continued into this year, with around 137,000 jobs eliminated since January, per Layoffs.fyi. Many workers — especially younger ones — are experiencing their first taste of a shrinking job market.

And yet the foreign labor machine rolls on.

If we truly had a shortage of skilled labor, wouldn’t wages be rising? Shouldn’t entry-level pay be going up?

In fact, the opposite is true. The Journal reports that median pay dropped 1% to 2% for software engineers, product designers, and technical managers — precisely the fields dominated by the Indian slave trade, a system of corporate-sponsored indentured labor enabled by the H-1B program.

The wage gap between job-switchers and job-stayers has nearly vanished. Historically, job-changers earned more. Now, thanks to artificially depressed wages and a labor market flooded with visa-bound foreign workers, that advantage has all but disappeared. Wages have nowhere to rise.

Corporations win, workers lose

Federal law technically requires H-1B employers to pay prevailing wages, but enforcement is a joke.

The Center for Immigration Studies found that in 2023, the average salary employers promised new H-1B workers in computer-related fields was 25.2% lower than the average for U.S. software developers.

RELATED: How H-1B visa loopholes are undercutting American wages and jobs

 filo via iStock/Getty Images

And what about the claim that these are the “best and brightest” minds from around the world? According to CIS, H-1B workers in tech were paid 41% less than Americans in the 75th percentile and 53% less than those in the 90th percentile.

So much for “high-skilled labor.” The reality is simple: This is about corporate access to cheap, compliant, and easily controlled labor.

Trump can stop this

So why is the Trump administration approving another 120,000 H-1Bs while American tech workers struggle to find jobs?

While courts have limited the administration’s ability to remove those already here, the Supreme Court has ruled that the president has plenary authority under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to block prospective visa applicants. Section 215(a)(1) gives him similarly broad power to regulate all entries and exits of foreign nationals.

Congress may set the cap — but nothing stops the president from suspending the program entirely in the national interest, as Trump did with the refugee program in his first term.

Here are a few reforms Trump could impose immediately.

  • End the random lottery: Select applicants based on highest salary offers. If this program is truly about skilled labor, prove it.
  • Blacklist diploma mills: Deny visa applications from unaccredited or fraudulent institutions.
  • Reject firms that fire Americans: Companies that lay off U.S. workers shouldn’t receive new batches of foreign replacements.
  • Terminate the OPT program: Created without congressional approval, OPT allows employers to hire foreign students tax-free for entry-level jobs. Trump can end it with a stroke of the pen.
  • Cap foreign workers at 10% per company: No corporation should be allowed to replace Americans en masse with foreign labor.

Trump began cracking down on visa abuse late in his first term, but Biden quickly reversed those gains.

Now Trump is back. So what happened to the promise of putting American workers first?

Tennessee Valley Authority gets a Trump-style reckoning



President Donald Trump has made the Tennessee Valley Authority a key front in his America First energy agenda. With the authority to appoint and remove TVA directors, Trump hasn’t hesitated to fire those who promote globalist “green” schemes that ignore the needs of the region’s residents.

This month, Trump ousted two Biden-appointed directors, including the board’s chairman. Their offense: trying to turn the TVA into a vehicle for the radical left’s anti-carbon agenda.

The future of reliable energy across the Tennessee Valley — and much of the South — still hangs in the balance.

Trump took similar action during his first term, firing several directors, including a previous chairman, after they approved outsourcing 146 American tech jobs to foreign workers on H-1B visas.

These firings are critical to ensuring that the Tennessee Valley Authority continues to produce abundant and reliable energy for the seven states it serves.

A call for reform

Last month, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) published a joint letter voicing their concerns about the agency’s distracted leadership. They stressed the need for the energy provider to expand nuclear projects, especially small modular reactors, which utilize existing fission technology on a smaller, more deployable scale than the massive projects of decades past.

As to the incapable leadership of the existing Tennessee Valley Authority board, the senators wrote:

As it stands now, TVA and its leadership can’t carry the weight of this moment. The presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed TVA Board of Directors lacks the talent, experience, and gravitas to meet a challenge that clearly requires visionary industrial leaders. The group looks more like a collection of political operatives than visionary industrial leaders. The current TVA board focused on the diversity of its executives ahead of job creation for hungry workers in the region it is supposed to serve.

Shortly thereafter, Trump fired two of the agency’s six current directors.

A critical purge

Trump fired Michelle Moore on March 27, followed by TVA board Chairman Joe Ritch on April 1. Both were Biden-appointed green energy enthusiasts bent on turning the Tennessee Valley Authority into a utopian solar-and-battery experiment.

Had they succeeded, the consequences for the region’s energy reliability would have been disastrous.

Moore founded and runs Groundswell, a “sustainable energy” company whose mission statement boasts a “people-centric approach to developing community solar projects.” I’m not sure what that means — but I know I’d rather depend on coal, natural gas, or nuclear power than on some feel-good solar scheme when temperatures plunge below freezing.

Ritch, originally appointed to the TVA board by President Obama, returned under Biden’s nomination to serve as chairman. In his Senate confirmation statement, Ritch promoted transitioning the agency away from its current mix of coal, nuclear, hydro, and gas toward unreliable green alternatives — convinced, somehow, that it would help the environment and boost the economy.

A historic blunder

This utopian obsession with “sustainable energy” isn’t just naïve — it’s deadly. In December 2023, a hard freeze struck the Tennessee Valley Authority’s service area. The cold snap wasn’t historically extreme, but the consequences were.

For the first time in TVA history, the agency failed to produce enough electricity to meet demand. Rolling blackouts swept the region. Why? Because the TVA lacked enough baseline reliable energy. On those near-zero nights, solar energy produced exactly zero kilowatts.

That’s the future TVA customers would face under the fantasy energy plans pushed by climate zealots like Michelle Moore and Joe Ritch: blackouts in the dead of winter and no backup.

TVA leadership has failed in other ways too — most notably by outsourcing American jobs. In 2020, CEO Jeff Lyash tried to replace over 100 U.S. tech workers with foreign nationals on H-1B visas. While gutting working-class jobs, Lyash collected nearly $8 million a year, making him the highest-paid federal employee. One longtime worker said employees were expected to train their foreign replacements before being shown the door.

Trump responded immediately. While he couldn’t fire Lyash, he could — and did — remove board members who refused to act. When the board wouldn’t fire Lyash or cut his pay, Trump fired them instead.

Soon after, Lyash ended the outsourcing plan. Following Trump’s 2024 election win, Lyash saw the writing on the wall and resigned.

Protections are still needed

The Tennessee Valley Authority remains vital to the economic strength of the upper South. Trump’s removal of Obama-Biden-era appointees has played a key role in preserving the agency’s reliability and focus. But the threat isn’t gone.

The TVA’s service states — especially Tennessee — face a serious vulnerability: Any future Democrat president could again install green energy ideologues, fire current directors, and impose Green New Deal policies. The result? An energy-starved Tennessee Valley plagued by blackouts and foolish political experiments.

Trump’s stand against the radicalization of TVA energy policy deserves recognition. His pushback has protected millions of residents from rolling blackouts and economic self-sabotage. But the fight isn’t finished.

The future of reliable energy across the Tennessee Valley — and much of the South — still hangs in the balance. The region cannot afford to treat Trump’s changes as a lasting victory.

The H-1B brouhaha: Here's what you need to know



Recent infighting over H-1B visas came up after Trump chose Indian-born Sriram Krishnan to be his adviser on AI.

While some see the controversy as a cynical attempt to divide the MAGA movement, the two primary points of view are simple: the populist, nationalist Bannon wing, which wants to cut H-1B visas and boost the domestic workforce, and the Big Tech, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy wing, which wants to maximize skilled immigration and H-1B visas in order to “win.”

More often than not, the incentive lies not in a worker's exceptional talent but in his or her desperation.

In a recent bizarre post, Ramaswamy claimed Americans are raised by a pop culture without a good work ethic and thus deserve to be replaced by harder-working foreigners.

A 'complete scam'

Krishnan seeks to remove national origin caps on green cards to make it easier for H-1B recipients from countries like India to become American residents and citizens. He has also repeatedly talked about and focused on how difficult and Byzantine the U.S. immigration system can be for legal immigrants.

Musk has promised to “go to war on this issue,” crediting the H-1B with his own immigration and American success story.

Bannon has said H-1Bs are a “complete scam” and promised that he and the base are going to “rip your face off” if Musk and his allies think they can get away with supporting immigrants taking American jobs.

The left has gloated over the conflict, with former CNN host Don Lemon calling Musk and Ramaswamy “dumb f***ing idiots” and laughing about tech bros who are seeing Trump’s base turn against them in the “MAGA civil war.” Claiming this is just a fight over “white jobs,” Lemon admitted, “I just f***ing love it.”

Trump's temptation

Trump has been in favor of limiting or ending H-1Bs in the past, saying they are granted for the “explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay.” However, Trump now says he agrees with Musk that H-1Bs are a valuable tool for increasing American economic greatness, claiming this has always been his view.

Trump’s 2024 victory was helped greatly by the money and influence of Big Tech backers like David Sacks, Musk, and the Winklevoss twins. But his base is still deep-red Americans who don’t want to hear about how foreigners getting jobs helps some abstract idea of America or striving foreigners who barely speak English landing cushy tech jobs in Austin or San Francisco.

It’s understandably ridiculous to hear that America is just about GDP numbers and not about the generations who have lived and died as patriotic Americans.

H-1B 101

A look at what H-1B visas are and how they work helps dispel the canard that America lacks a skilled, disciplined workforce.

Anyone holding a bachelor’s degree or above and who has “highly specialized knowledge” can apply for an H-1B. If granted, it gives them the right to work in the U.S. for three years and apply for an extension up to six years. Officially, the wage paid to H-1B workers has to be equal to what would be paid to an American worker.

H-1Bs have existed since 1990 and are especially popular for foreign students in the U.S. who want to get hired at an American company and eventually get citizenship. These visas are liberalized legislative descendants of the H-1 visa of 1952, which excluded most applicants from Asia.

H-1Bs have been widely used by Silicon Valley to recruit graduates from India, China, and elsewhere, ostensibly to address the lack of qualified native-born Americans. The government can issue 85,000 H-1Bs per fiscal year via a lottery system. Much rarer visas like the O-1 are not used nearly as often.

Indentured servants?

But how exactly do H-1B visas help companies?

More often than not, the incentive lies not in a worker's exceptional talent but in his or her desperation. While an H-1B employee can theoretically change jobs, the process is quite difficult; the best chance of staying in America is keeping the current boss happy. At the very least, this makes for compliant workers; in some cases it essentially amounts to indentured servitude.

Instead of offering more and more foreign workers a path to citizenship, we should be helping the citizens we already have participate more fully in the American economy. The Trump administration must focus on preparing Americans to get and excel at the jobs of the future, rather than reinforcing the cheap labor pipeline.

Bernie Sanders bashes controversial visa program



Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont chimed in on the H-1B visa debate, slamming the program for replacing American jobs with cheaper foreign labor.

The H-1B visa program allows foreign nationals to temporarily work in America for specialty workforces like Silicon Valley. In December, the debate surrounding the program was sparked by MAGA allies like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who advocated in favor of the visas.

'Bottom line,' Sanders said. 'It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker.'

Discussion within the MAGA world persisted, with political heavyweights arguing both for and against the visa program. Notably, President-elect Donald Trump opposed the H-1B program in 2016, which he said had the "explicit purpose of substituting [American] workers at a lower pay." Trump has since changed his position in favor of the visa program.

While the debate has been lively on the right, Sanders offered an unexpected take on the issue, echoing concerns Trump himself had in 2016.

"Elon Musk is wrong," Sanders said. "The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire 'the best and the brightest,' but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make."

"If this program is really supposed to be about importing workers with highly advanced degrees in science and technology, why are H-1B guest workers being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers?" Sanders continued. "Can we really not find English teachers in America?"

Musk and Ramaswamy defended the visa program, saying the reason Americans were being displaced in the workforce by foreign workers was because American culture has "venerated mediocrity over excellence" and arguing that companies that utilize H-1B "made America strong."

Sanders pushed back, saying that although America needs skilled workers, there is no need to import them.

"Mr. Musk, Mr. Ramaswamy, and others have argued that we need a highly skilled and well-educated workforce," Sanders said. "They are right. But the answer, however, is not to bring in cheap labor from abroad. The answer is to hire qualified American workers first and to make certain that we have an education system that produces the kind of workforce that our country needs for the jobs of the future. And that's not just engineering. We are in desperate need of more doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, electricians, plumbers, and a host of other professions."

"Bottom line," Sanders said. "It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker."

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MAGA movement fractures on key immigration debate



Conflict ensued inside MAGA world on Thursday as President-elect Donald Trump's allies sparred over immigration policy.

Former Republican presidential candidate and incoming head of the DOGE Vivek Ramaswamy sparked the conversation in a lengthy X post on Thursday. Ramaswamy, who himself is a first-generation American, criticized American culture as promoting mediocrity, which is why he says tech companies often prefer foreign-born workers over native Americans.

"Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer)," Ramaswamy said. "That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers."

"More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of 'Friends,'" Ramaswamy continued. "More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less 'chillin.' More extracurriculars, less 'hanging out at the mall.'"

Ramaswamy's commentary set off a chain reaction of conflict in MAGA world and even outside Trump's inner circle.

'These are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,' Trump said.

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, of all people, came out against Ramaswamy and said the hiring disparities had nothing to do with culture but rather everything to do with immigration policy.

"There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture," Haley said. "All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers."

The online discourse resurfaced an older conversation surrounding immigration policy and the differences between H-1B visas as opposed to O-1 visas.

H-1B visas allow foreign nationals to work in America for a temporary period of time and for a specialty occupation. Most notably, H-1B visas have become instrumental in Silicon Valley's growth, with nearly three-quarters of the workforce being foreign-born.

On the other hand, an O-1 visa is a more stringent nonimmigrant visa for foreign nationals who possess an "extraordinary ability" or who have demonstrated a "record of extraordinary achievement" in a specialized field.

Although Musk himself held an H-1B visa, he advocated an immigration philosophy that closely resembled standards put forward for O-1 visas.

"I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for Americans to keep winning," Musk said. "This is like bringing in the Jokic's or Wemby's of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA. Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct."

Trump notably came out against visa programs like H-1B in 2016, arguing that the program is an opportunity to displace American workers with "imported" and "cheap labor" workers.

"The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay," Trump said. "I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions."

Although Trump has not specifically addressed H-1B in recent years, strict immigration policy was the cornerstone of his 2024 campaign. While Trump repeatedly advocated shutting down the border and putting America first, we will have to see how the internal fractures within the MAGA movement play out in the incoming administration.

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The UGLY TRUTH about Joe Biden "Creating Jobs"...
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The UGLY TRUTH about Joe Biden "Creating Jobs"...

 

It’s Past Time To Prioritize Skills-Based Immigration

Creating a skills-based immigration policy and enforcing E-Verify would help the U.S. economy, American workers, and legal immigrants.

Horowitz: Semiconductor companies just got billions from Congress. Now they want to hire foreign workers.



Republicans are all unanimous in their opposition to the reconciliation “Build Back Better” bill, but Mitch McConnell and 16 other Senate Republicans voted for the mini BBB bill, dumping billions of dollars into companies that have created a brain gain for China’s trade theft to drain our supply chains. Not only did McConnell agree to the bill despite the refusal of Democrats to entertain amendments ensuring that the jobs stay in America, but now these same companies are turning around and demanding more foreign workers to hire.

“In the near-term, the U.S. educational system does not produce enough Americans with the required qualifications to meet the demand of companies, not just in the semiconductor industry, but across the technical sector,” the HR officers of nine semiconductor companies wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. The nine companies were: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; Ampere Computing; ASML US; Broadcom Inc.; Americas Global Foundries; Infineon Technologies; Americas Corp.; Intel Corporation; Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.; and Texas Instruments Incorporated.

These companies are trying to take our money and pour gasoline on our supply chain fire by hiring more Chinese and Indian nationals. How do you think China has us by the neck when it comes to our industrial base? China flooded our country with foreign students and green card recipients for decades. Some of them were terrific people, but many of them went back and shared the knowledge they learned at our universities and companies and grew China’s industrial base. This is how China has been able to develop an army of people with American expertise to then work for these American or Chinese companies for a cheaper price overseas.

According to a bipartisan Senate Homeland Security subcommittee report, there are 10,000 Chinese nationals conducting research in the Department of Energy’s National Labs. The report found that agencies and departments conducting scientific research like the National Institutes of Health and the State Department do not “systematically track visa applicants linked to China’s talent recruitment plans.”

The report found that foreign-born researchers working for various U.S. scientific research agencies were being paid by China under the Thousand Talents Plan run by the communist government. It concludes, “American taxpayer funded research has contributed to China’s global rise over the last 20 years” because it allowed China to go “from brain drain to brain gain.”

The endless supply of Chinese visa holders has served as this conduit for China’s brain gain. Now, these same companies that lobbied for a bill touted as shoring up America’s control over production of chips are trying to use the money to hire foreign nationals. Given our immigration trends, they will likely be Chinese and Indians.

Massive corporations lobbying for endless corporate welfare along with visa pork is what has demographically gerrymandered the American worker out of entire industries and what has ultimately led to China’s gain and our drain. The pipeline begins with F-1 student visas. In the case of foreign students, it’s really the god of public education, which is being subsidized happily by the Chinese. The universities get cash from the Chinese government, while the Chinese get operatives and intelligence officers into the country to work in academic fields and occupations. The rest of the American people lose. We bring in roughly 369,548 Chinese foreign students a year, together with 80,000 more on immigrant visas. In other words, there are about as many Chinese students in the U.S. as the entire university enrollment in the state of Maryland.

Noted right-wing outlet CNN reported in 2019, "The sheer size of the Chinese student population at U.S. universities presents a major challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies tasked with striking the necessary balance between protecting America's open academic environment and mitigating the risk to national security." Yet these tech companies think we are not bringing in enough Chinese immigrants. The director of national intelligence warned, "China's intelligence services will exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community, using a variety of means."

Thus, this chips bill, as predicted, will wind up helping China rather than countering it. McConnell still supported the bill even after Democrats rejected the inclusion of provisions sponsored by Sen. Rob Portman that would have barred the semiconductor companies from manufacturing in China and would have barred entry of those suspected of coming here to spy on our sensitive technology. The lobbyists worked assiduously to block amendments for more security.

These same greedy companies will use the corporate welfare to hire foreign workers who they know will work for lower pay. Democrats already inserted into the bipartisan defense authorization bill a provision that allows 200,000 adult children of visa holders to inherent the residency status of their parents who hold temporary worker visas, which will further drive down wages of entry-level jobs.

Indeed, corporate welfare mixed with endless visa pork has destroyed our sovereignty as citizens and has sold us out to transnational corporations that now have us over the barrel. Naturally, Congress will aggravate the very variables that got us into this mess.

FACT CHECK: Did Sandro Marcos Advocate For Taxing Overseas Filipino Workers?

There is no evidence that Sandro Marcos made such a statement

Here Are The 17 Republicans Calling For More Foreign Workers With H-2B Seasonal Visas To Come To US

Trump had halted the program