MAGA’s other immigration battle

Speaker 1 So, President Trump has been pretty consistent about his feelings regarding illegal immigration to the U.S.

Speaker 2 All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.

Speaker 1 When it comes to legal pathways to immigration, Trump's feelings are harder to gauge.

Speaker 1 The president has gone back and forth on H-1B visas, the ones for high-skilled workers in industries like tech and medicine. He has said that he has himself used these visas to hire people.

Speaker 1 And he recently pushed back against Laura Ingram of Fox News, a MAGA loyalist, to defend these visas from right-wing attacks.

Speaker 2 You also do have to bring in talent when we have plenty of talent to familiarize.

Speaker 1 So, why is President Trump supporting a program that his MAGA base doesn't like? That's coming up next on Today Explain from Box.

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Speaker 1 H-1B visas have been a simmering issue on the right for years now. A couple months ago, we had the Wall Street Journal's Michelle Hackman on to explain.

Speaker 1 She said, there's been a lot of legitimate abuses of the program.

Speaker 7 A lot of these visas actually go to companies.

Speaker 7 There's There's sort of a whole business model that's sprung up around the H-1B visa of sort of IT companies who staff almost their entire companies with primarily Indian men on H-1B visas.

Speaker 7 And their model is that they do IT, you know, a little bit cheaper than a lot of companies' in-house IT offices.

Speaker 7 And so what's happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that a lot of companies have actually laid off their internal IT and hired these sort of IT external companies on H-1B visas to come work for them instead.

Speaker 1 This week, we got Michelle back on the line to walk us through the latest. She says, this H-1B visa mess all started back in 2016.

Speaker 7 Trump takes office. He obviously has all of this anti-immigrant rhetoric.
You know, Mexicans are rapists and refugees are all terrorists. And

Speaker 7 his movement, you know, sort of involved a lot of, you know, we want to hire more Americans. We don't want jobs to go to foreigners.

Speaker 7 And so naturally, the H-1B visa became sort of a target in that broader rhetoric.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can see how it could find itself in the crosshairs of America First.

Speaker 2 I know the H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use. We shouldn't have it.

Speaker 9 Very, very bad for workers.

Speaker 7 But during the first Trump administration, you had a lot of competing voices. You know, Jared Kushner was in the White House, and he was sort of a more old school Republican pro-business voice.

Speaker 10 We want to make sure we're bringing in people who will grow GDP, create jobs. We want to attract the best and brightest.
We want to welcome people to this country.

Speaker 7 He was a bigger fan of the H-1B visa program. And so the story of the first Trump administration was you definitely had the MAGA right hates the H-1B.

Speaker 7 A lot of other big business owners, including, you know, big tech,

Speaker 7 love the H-1B. And so you see this sort of like policy tug of war taking place where overall, like nothing really happens.

Speaker 7 You know, maybe denials for the visa go up a little bit, but for most of the Trump administration, it's not like they made major changes to the program.

Speaker 8 What happened during the Biden years?

Speaker 7 You saw sort of a marginal around the edges.

Speaker 7 Trump and Biden both trying to tweak policies, you know, to make it so that people who

Speaker 7 are paid better are getting H-1B visas as opposed to people who are being paid lower than Americans, for example.

Speaker 7 But I wouldn't say anything like particularly ideological happened with the H-1B under Biden.

Speaker 7 But while Trump was out of office, this sort of tug of war that was happening in the first Trump administration went away, and the MAGA right was sort of allowed to like

Speaker 7 foment and cement its anti-H-1B feelings. My dear fellow Americans, I'm introducing a bill to completely eliminate the H-1B visa program.

Speaker 9 H-1B visas are a total scam that are decimating the American workforce.

Speaker 4 But I seriously have not met a single American that supports the H-1B visa program. The only people that I see supporting it are

Speaker 1 Indians.

Speaker 7 You had people sort of using more and more strident, sort of racist, anti-Indian language to the point where when Trump is sort of elected for the second time, you see tweets from people basically saying, oh, God, you know, we can't be hiring Indians to work at the White House.

Speaker 7 It's going to smell like curry.

Speaker 8 So now that Trump is back in office, the visas have become, again, another flashpoint.

Speaker 8 Because as we know, Trump has made immigration such a cornerstone of his politics, but that's almost exclusively focused on domestic immigration, deportations, and things that are happening.

Speaker 8 What I would say not for a college educated or a highly skilled worker class. What's the state of H-1B visas now?

Speaker 7 You had Elon Musk come into this administration.

Speaker 12 The reason I'm in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H-1B.

Speaker 12 I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.

Speaker 7 And then really, really publicly exit.

Speaker 12 As my scheduled time as a special government employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President Real Donald Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.

Speaker 7 And it was after he exited that this tug of war that we'd been talking about of, you know,

Speaker 7 America first, anti-immigrant voices on one side and sort of more pro-business, you know, big hiring voices on the other side goes away. And suddenly, Stephen Miller is the one in charge.

Speaker 13 Our view on H-1Bs is that you cannot displace or replace American workers.

Speaker 7 He's allowed to do what he wants.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 totally out of nowhere, we get this announcement that they're attaching a $100,000 fee to the H-1B visa.

Speaker 2 So the whole idea is: no more will these big tech companies or other big companies train foreign workers.

Speaker 7 They explicitly say that that is meant to almost shut down the program, that they don't expect a lot of people to pay it.

Speaker 2 Train Americans, stop bringing in people to take our jobs.

Speaker 8 So the tug of war seems to be won by the Stephen Miller side of the Trump administration, who has effectively imposed a financial penalty

Speaker 8 in the explicit effort of shutting the program down. But then we saw Trump say he thinks the U.S.
needs to bring in more foreign workers. So help square this circle for me.
What does he mean?

Speaker 8 Has he been specific about the jobs that he wants to do that for? And how does this interact with what he says?

Speaker 8 How should we see this versus the fee on the H-1Bs?

Speaker 7 So I think it's really interesting, and it doesn't totally make sense. You know, Trump hires these people who have these strident anti-immigrant views.
They're zealous in their opinions.

Speaker 7 But from everything we've seen from Trump, he actually doesn't totally believe it himself.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I also saw him say that he seemed to regret one of the raids that was one of the more notable ones over this summer.

Speaker 8 Can you tell me about his statement specific to the raid on Korean workers? And how do we think that fits in to his sentiments?

Speaker 7 This was a raid on a Hyundai plant that was making electric cars.

Speaker 7 And those people were not on H-1B visas, but I think the themes are similar, right? That raid, you know, was planned by ICE. Trump didn't know about it.

Speaker 7 They had planned to go in and actually hunt for, you know, Latino construction workers and in the end ended up arresting 175 Korean workers who, you know, not all, but typically were working in sort of higher skilled jobs.

Speaker 2 You know, making batteries are very complicated. It's not an easy thing.
It's very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems.

Speaker 7 And he, I mean, basically like went out and disparaged the work of ICE. He was like, that raid shouldn't have happened.
I don't know why they did it.

Speaker 2 You can't just say a country's coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant.

Speaker 2 and going to take people off an unemployment line who haven't worked in five years and they're going to start making missiles.

Speaker 11 It doesn't work that way.

Speaker 7 And he actually arranged with the Korean government to let a lot of those people come back.

Speaker 8 So should we see this as Trump maybe seeing the H-1B worker maybe differently than he sees people who come here for asylum seeking purposes or other means of immigration?

Speaker 8 Or should we see this as Trump being deferential to the concerns of business leaders, often of whom have relied on this H-1B group and have a direct access to him in the White House?

Speaker 8 Where do we think this shift in sentiment is coming from?

Speaker 7 So you have to remember, Estad, that it's kind of both because Trump himself was a businessman. He employed a lot of foreign workers himself.

Speaker 7 And so I think he, you know, it's not just like an influence campaign. I think he sees it from this perspective of those guys.

Speaker 7 Where he just doesn't, I think this is where he doesn't actually connect with the MAGA base is that he's like, oh my God, you know, when I was running my hotels, I couldn't find Americans who wanted to take these jobs.

Speaker 7 And so I had to hire people on visas.

Speaker 8 And it really seems as if, you know, the moments in which Trump is willing to go past his base or incur blowback, to your point, flow from the experiences that he has had and he's comfortable by.

Speaker 8 And it does seem as if, whether it's as a business owner or New Yorker or his relationship with these other CEOs, this is an issue that he might see much more differently than not just the folks in his administration, but also his electoral base.

Speaker 7 The thing is, Estead,

Speaker 7 it's not like his views have actually shaped the policy of his administration.

Speaker 8 Say more about that.

Speaker 7 Yeah. So, I mean, you know, Trump repeatedly makes these sort of pro-foreign worker comments.
He's basically pro-H-1B visa. He's pro making it easier for people to get green cards.

Speaker 7 That is not at all where his base is on this issue. They would like to, I mean, the H-1B has become such a flashpoint that his base has gone beyond, you know, let's fix this IT problem.

Speaker 7 They They want to shut down the H-1B visa. They hate it.
They want it to go away. He is not there at all.

Speaker 7 But his administration basically is moving ahead with this $100,000 fee, which is an attempt, you know,

Speaker 7 doing what they can without Congress to try to shut off access to the H-1B visa program.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 8 we have him making kind of sympathetic statements about folks who receive these visas at the same time making them less accessible by imposing the $100,000 fee.

Speaker 8 It seems as if it represents something we've seen across this administration where there are wildly different views on a macro level and also sometimes conflicting points of view, even when it comes to the principals in the room.

Speaker 8 Do we know where this goes next? Like, is there any sense that we could have about maybe the next flashpoint when it comes to this debate?

Speaker 7 The big thing that we're going to be watching for is: are companies going to be willing to pay this gigantic fee?

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 7 And if not, what are they going to do?

Speaker 7 You know, are they going to actually try to hire more Americans? Are they going to actually just outsource more jobs? You know, you hear a lot of companies saying, Why on earth would I pay this?

Speaker 7 I'm just going to hire someone in Canada, or I'm going to hire someone remotely, or I'm going to open an office in Europe and sort of work that way because this is crazy and it's not worth it.

Speaker 1 up next, we'll hear from an India-born CEO who has some feelings about visas for foreign workers.

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Speaker 1 The debate over high-skill work inside this very anti-immigration Trump White House gets it something awkward.

Speaker 1 Maybe what's America first, or good for Trump politically, isn't what's necessarily good for business in America.

Speaker 1 Vivek Wadwa is a longtime tech entrepreneur and runs a medical diagnostics company here in the U.S.

Speaker 1 His business relies on foreign workers, many of whom are on H-1B visas. And Vivek says that the visa system is broken, just not in the way the Trump administration is saying.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And five years later, I was a US citizen. I became part of, you know, the American success stories.
I founded two companies, employed thousands of people

Speaker 11 at its peak. When I became an academic several years later, I started researching US competitiveness.
And it came down to immigration.

Speaker 11 From 1995 to 2005, a quarter of all the startups in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants.

Speaker 11 A decade later, the trend had become national that a quarter of all the startups all across America were founded by immigrants.

Speaker 11 And if you looked at the top tech companies today, it's a bunch of Indians who are running them or who are behind the scenes developing all of the world-changing technologies.

Speaker 1 Why do you think the H-1B program has been so vital when it comes to entrepreneurship?

Speaker 11 Because this is the way skilled immigrants come to the United States. That they come here either as students or they come here as workers working for American companies.

Speaker 11 And that's the path to entering the United States. And then they file for a green card after they fall in love with America.
And, you know, the process is supposed to take 18 months,

Speaker 11 not, you know, 70 years.

Speaker 8 You've recently been writing about your experience with H-1Bs, and you write that it has been ripe for abuse. We heard some of that earlier in the show.

Speaker 8 What's been your experiences seeing kind of the system tested in those ways?

Speaker 11 Every government program is susceptible to corruption and misuse. They go to body shops, they go to companies looking for cheap labor.

Speaker 11 And when the H-1B workers do come here and decide that they love America, they want to now become Americans, they're stuck in the same job. You see, what happens, it is a nasty trick over here.

Speaker 11 That if you're a computer programmer, when you 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.

Speaker 1 Person became from software developer to IT manager.

Speaker 11 That is a drastic change.

Speaker 2 New salary, new department, new job duties. Sounds amazing, right?

Speaker 11 Wrong. So therefore, people start to 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.

Speaker 11 So the opponents of H-1B visas are correct in the fact that this system is abused and that it does impact U.S. salaries.

Speaker 1 You know, one of the things things we just learned about was kind of how Trump has sent out mixed signals when it comes to H-1B visas.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, they've announced a $100,000 fee on every H-1B visa application. So, from your perspective, as someone who has leaned on this as an entrepreneur, what would that fee mean for you?

Speaker 11 A startup

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 8 So 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 or even,

Speaker 8 but the ones who are reliant on folks who use these visas, but that $100,000 would be crippling too.

Speaker 11 Yes, it basically shuts off the system.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But the skills I needed for that were electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, experts in plasma physics, thermodynamics.

Speaker 11 I needed 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?

Speaker 11 There are very few of those in the United States, and if they exist, they're outside Silicon Valley.

Speaker 11 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, I mean, it's not that I didn't, you know, try, I looked for talent.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And then I said, oh, my God, H-1B, I need to bring them on H-1B visas. And I looked at the numbers, the chances of being able to get, it's literally a lottery.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 I mean, I knew enough about the system that I said, forget it. I decided to move my company to India.

Speaker 11 The United States lost over here.

Speaker 8 It strikes me that you were kind of coming up against this two years ago, even before Donald Trump had gotten back into office and then kind of had taken aim at this program more recently.

Speaker 8 It seems to me as if you would have known that $100,000 number, that could have made that decision a lot easier for you earlier, right?

Speaker 11 I wouldn't have wasted four months trying to set up a company in Silicon Valley having to deal with the venture capitalists over here. I mean, forget it.
I mean, it would have been a no-brainer.

Speaker 8 You know, you mentioned kind of about being a proud American. You mentioned about what this country has given you.

Speaker 8 Is there any kind of, I don't know, like a feeling or that when it comes time to build this company here, that you're going back to India?

Speaker 8 Is there anything you owe the United States to build the company here?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 This is my country. I consider myself 100% American.
And my loyalty is to America. This is why it pains me that I had to build my technology in India.

Speaker 11 even though I love India also, and I wanted to build my technology here.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 1 A question I have for you is, you know, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 From your perspective of someone who has experienced kind of the system firsthand, what would be the biggest thing that

Speaker 1 the country could do to make your life easier?

Speaker 11 Well, number one, free the people who are trapped in American immigration. Remember, there are about one million people who's here legally.

Speaker 11 I mean, 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?

Speaker 11 That would boost the American economy more than his tariffs can, more than anything else can. And then get rid of this stupidity, $100,000 fees and so on.
No.

Speaker 8 Is some of what we're kind of subtly talking about here a kind of American cultural thing too, that we think that like, you know, because of maybe because of our education system or because of maybe something of the American worker are just not fit for the emergence of jobs that we have right now.

Speaker 11 I've written books about this, about the exclusion of minorities, the exclusion of women.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And that breaks my heart. We have to save America from itself.

Speaker 1 That was tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadwa. This episode was produced by Peter Balinon Rosen and Miles Bryant, edited by Miranta Kennedy, fact-checked by Hadi Mawagdi and Laura Bullard.

Speaker 1 And our engineers are Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly.

Speaker 1 The rest of the team includes Avishai Artsi, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wesinger, Ariana Aspadu, Noel King, Sean Ramasrom, Amina Al Sadi, and Jolie Myers. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Speaker 1 You know you can listen to the podcast ad-free by becoming a member of Vox, and we're running a sale so you can think of this as your early Black Friday gift. I'm Estead Herndon.
It's Today Explain.

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