President Donald Trump has been walking a fine line when it comes to H-1B visas — the visa that high-skill foreign professionals apply for to work in the US. These visas often go to physicians, software developers, engineers, university professors, and other specialty professions.
Earlier this year Trump proposed a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, a move that aimed to restrict the flow of legal immigrant workers into the US. But in a recent interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the president defended the program and said H-1B visas were necessary “to bring in talent.”
“We have plenty of talented people here,” Ingraham replied.
“No you don’t, no you don’t,” Trump said.
His comments have sparked outrage among his MAGA base.
“Trump needs to get out of his bubble and back on the ground listening to the American people who elected him to work for us,” Savanah Hernandez, a MAGA influencer and contributor to conservative youth group Turning Point USA said online. “His H-1B comment shows how out of touch with the base he has become.”
The debate over high-skill work visas inside this very anti-immigration White House gets at a fundamental tension. Trump may have been elected on an “America First” platform, but as his comments to Ingraham suggest, the reality of the American economy may turn out to be more complicated.
And some in the tech industry say that this debate over the H-1B visas is missing the larger point. Today, Explained’s Astead Herndon spoke with tech CEO Vivek Wadhwa to get an inside perspective. Wadhwa runs a medical diagnostics company here in the US. He thinks the visa system is broken — but that by making it harder for the world’s highly skilled workers to come here, America will only harm itself.
“I came here as an immigrant. I came here as a skilled worker. My father was a diplomat, so I came on a diplomatic visa. And when I came here in 1980, it took 18 months for me to get a green card,” Wadhwa tells Herndon. “Five years later, I was a US citizen. I became part of the American success story.”
When he became an academic, he studied US competitiveness — and found immigration at the heart of the story. “From 1995 to 2005, a quarter of all the startups in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants. A decade later, the trend had become national — that a quarter of all the startups all across America were founded by immigrants,” Wadhwa says.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Why do you think the H-1B program has been so vital when it comes to entrepreneurship?
Because this is the way skilled immigrants come to the United States. They come here either as students or they come here as workers who are working for American companies. And that’s the path to entering the United States.
You’ve recently been writing about your experience with H-1Bs and you write that it has been ripe for abuse. What’s been your experience seeing the system tested in those ways?
Every government program is susceptible to corruption and misuse. [H-1B visa holders] go to body shops, they go to companies looking for cheap labor. And when the H-1B workers do come here and decide that they love America, they want to now become Americans, [but] they’re stuck in the same job.
What happens is there’s a nasty trick over here. If you’re a computer programmer, when you’ve filed your H-1B visa and you become a manager three or four years later — which is what’s normal in the tech industry — it’s a different job.
So therefore people continue doing the same job they did when they started the H-1B process, which means that they’re stuck in limbo and they’re also making below-market salaries. So the opponents of H-1B visas are correct in the fact that the system is abused and that it does impact US salaries.
Trump has sent out some mixed signals when it comes to this. A lot of parts of his administration have talked against the visas, while he has said in other instances that he finds them to be somewhat effective. Now they’ve announced a $100,000 fee on every H-1B visa application. As someone who has leaned on it as an entrepreneur, what would that mean for you?
A startup works on fumes. You don’t have that kind of money. The Googles and the Microsofts and the Oracles, they’ve got big money, so $100,000 is nothing to them. But to the companies that really need the deep talent to be able to do world-changing innovations, we’re on tight budgets. $100,000 is unaffordable.
If I hear you correctly, you’re saying the people who are most affected by this proposed fee are the ones in your sphere, maybe not those big companies.
Yes, it basically shuts off the system.
About two years ago, I was looking to start my medical diagnostics company that’s going to now be able to detect diseases. I’ll bring it to the United States when the time is right. But the skills I needed for that were electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, experts in plasma physics, thermodynamics, lab technicians — a lot of skills that you can’t readily find in the United States. I needed top-notch mathematicians who understood biology, all right? There are very few of those in the United States. And if they exist, they’re outside Silicon Valley.
So at first, I was looking to raise money over here, build my company over here. And then I realized, I simply can’t find — I looked, it’s not that I didn’t try, I looked for talent.
So I started looking on LinkedIn for experts across the globe. And there were quite a few of them in India because they still have universities that teach these things. So I was looking to hire them and then I said, ”My God, H-1Bs, I need to bring them on H-1B visas.” And I looked at the numbers, the chances of being able to, it’s literally a lottery.
And then all the hassles, the fact that you’re bringing people in, if they fall in love with America, they can’t stay. It was a losing battle. I knew enough about the system that I said, “Forget it.” I decided to move my company to India. So the United States lost over here.
You know, you mentioned about being a proud American, about what this country has given you. Is there any kind of — I don’t know — a feeling that when it comes time to build this company here, that you’re going back to India? Is there anything you owe the United States to build the company here?
Absolutely. I owe the United States everything. I wouldn’t be where I am. I wouldn’t be able to do these innovations. I wouldn’t have had the opportunities if it wasn’t for America. This is my country. I consider myself 100 percent American and my loyalty is to America.
This is why it pains me that I had to build my technology in India, even though I love India also. I wanted to build my technology here. And I could have raised the money I needed to build the technology here, but not dealing with all the nightmares and the stigma around H-1B visas and then the delays, the $100,000 [fee]. Because at the end of the day, even if I raise $20 million from Silicon Valley, I’m still a startup. I can’t afford $100,000 fees on every employee I hire.
A question I have for you is, what do you think the solution is? I mean, we’re coming at a point now where H-1Bs have been kind of politicized for several years. There’s been so much back and forth about what the right level should be. You get back and forth messages from the White House itself. What would be the biggest thing that the country could do to make your life easier?
Well, number one, free the people who are trapped in immigration limbo. There are about 1 million people who are here legally — they’re working for American companies, paying taxes. They can get a green card immediately, all right? You’d have half a million people buying houses, okay? That would boost the American economy more than his tariffs can, more than anything else can. And then get rid of the stupidity, $100,000 fees and so on.
Is some of what we’re subtly talking about here a kind of American cultural thing too, that we think that because of our education system, the American worker is just not fit for the emergence of jobs that we have right now?
I’ve written books about this, about the exclusion of minorities, the exclusion of women. I mean, there are a lot of issues here, okay? And the fact that Americans aren’t studying the hard sciences anymore. They aren’t studying mathematics anymore. So if we don’t bring the skills, engineers and scientists to the United States, other countries will. Or countries like India will have innovation systems that rival Silicon Valley. And that breaks my heart. We have to save America from itself.
