US President Donald Trump is once again trying to impose a $100,000 fee on employers seeking to hire skilled temporary foreign workers through the H-1B visa programme. But while tech titans like Elon Musk have long championed the programme to draw top global talent to Silicon Valley, critics on both left and right say the scheme aims to replace skilled US-born workers with cheaper – and more easily controlled – foreign guest workers.
Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at the Edward J. Bloustein School and senior faculty fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, said that the idea that the majority of H-1B visa holders were making up for chronic domestic skill shortages didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
“It’s been hugely abused,” he said. “And you have to ask yourself, how is the IT industry the only industry that’s been claiming a [skilled labour] shortage for over 25 years – and can’t seem to fill it? These are jobs that require skill, and some talent, but it’s not like they’re PhD-level markets, where we have an oversupply. So we can oversupply PhD markets, but we can’t fill tech jobs – most of which are not at Google, really rare positions, but common IT support and back-office jobs.”
While Trump’s proposed fee is designed to raise the cost for employers in hiring H-1B workers, another proposed regulation put forward by the Department of Labor in March appears to tackle the problem from the other end.
The proposal would, among other things, raise the current wage floor for H-1B workers, doubling the minimum bracket from the 17th prevailing wage percentile to the 34th – still well under the median wage for US-born workers in the same job.
“These wage levels that are set, they don’t reflect what is the actual market wage – meaning what employers are paying in markets for the given level of talents,” Salzman said. “So they’ve been able to under-classify, allowing them to legally underpay H-1B workers. This is an attempt to have them more properly classified at accurate wage levels.”