Why We Need Major Reforms in the H-1B Program

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), current Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), today released the following statement on H-1B guest worker visas and recent debate concerning the program:

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the H-1B guest worker program. Elon Musk and a number of other billionaire tech company owners have argued that this federal program is vital to our economy because of the scarcity of highly skilled American engineers and other tech workers. I disagree. 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. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.

In 2022 and 2023, the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers. There are estimates that as many as 33 percent of all new Information Technology jobs in America are being filled by guest workers. Further, according to Census Bureau data, there are millions of Americans with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math who are not currently employed in those professions.

If there is really a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, why did Tesla lay-off over 7,500 American workers this year – including many software developers and engineers at its factory in Austin, Texas – while being approved to employ thousands of H-1B guest workers?

Moreover, if these jobs are only going to “the best and brightest,” why has Tesla employed H-1B guest workers as associate accountants for as little as $58,000, associate mechanical engineers for as little as $70,000 a year, and associate material planners for as little as $80,000 a year? Those don’t sound like highly specialized jobs that are for the top 0.1 percent as Musk claimed this week.

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? Can we really not find English teachers in America?

Let’s be clear. To the extent that there may be labor shortages in our country in some highly specialized areas that need to be filled by employees from abroad through the H-1B program, we must utilize this program as a very short-term and temporary approach. In the long term, if the United States is going to be able to compete in a global economy, we must make sure that we have the best educated workforce in the world. And one way to help make that happen is to substantially increase the guest worker fees large corporations pay to fund scholarships, apprenticeships, and job training opportunities for American workers. This is something that I have advocated from my first days as a U.S. senator.

Further, we must also significantly raise the minimum wage for guest workers, allow them to easily switch jobs, and make sure that corporations are required to aggressively recruit American workers first before they can hire workers from overseas. The widespread corporate abuse of the H-1B program must be ended.

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

Mr. Musk, Mr. Ramaswamy, and others have argued that we need a highly skilled and well-educated workforce. 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.

Thirty years ago, the economic elite and political establishment in both major parties told us not to worry about the loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs that would come as a result of disastrous unfettered free trade agreements like NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China (PNTR). They promised that those lost jobs would be more than offset by the many good-paying, white-collar information technology jobs that would be created in the United States.

Well, that turned out to be a Big Lie. Not only have corporations exported millions of blue-collar manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, they are now importing hundreds of thousands of low-paid guest workers from abroad to fill the white-collar technology jobs that are available.

At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the richest three people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our country and when the CEOs of major corporations make almost 300 times more than their average workers, we need fundamental changes in our economic policies. We need an economy that works for all, not just the few. And one important way forward in that direction is to bring about major reforms in the H-1B program.