Indian American scholar Ron Hira, a professor at Howard University and a prominent critic of the H-1B visa system, recently outlined why many U.S. employers prefer hiring foreign visa holders over American workers. He spoke at a panel discussion titled “How the H-1B Visa Led to Importing Mass Cheap Labor,” hosted by The Heritage Foundation.
Hira is widely recognized for his research and writing on “offshoring high skilled immigration including H-1Bs, innovation, employment relations, and the decline of the middle class.”
During the panel, he addressed whether executive actions during the Trump administration had made any meaningful impact on reforming the H-1B program. Hira stated, “back then, 20 years ago, it was obvious that H-1B visa abuse was critical in speeding up the offshoring of these jobs. Yet for the past 20 years, Washington has turned a blind eye to this abuse.”
He continued, “Okay, so now fast forward 12 years to 2017 and 60 minutes, profiled American workers who were being forced to train their H-1B replacements. This case is particularly gluing because their employer is the University of California, which gets about 10 billion in state funds and 8 billion in federal funds to do what? To train scientists and engineers. Now they’re forcing their own tech workers to train their H-1B replacements. Imagine the workers both humiliation and sense of betrayal.”
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Hira then asked the audience, “does anybody really think that that’s how the program is supposed to operate?” In response to his own question, he stated, “it’s certainly not sold that way.”
“But it persists today. People are training their replacements today.”
Explaining the nature of the system, Hira said, “The H-1B program, as Mark said, is a guest worker program. And guest worker programs are fundamentally about labor policy. They’re not really about immigration policy. And the reason for that is all guest worker programs leave workers vulnerable to exploitation whether it’s high-skilled H-1B or lower skilled H2A H2B, and whether it’s in the U.S. or in the UAE need labor policies that protect both American and foreign workers.”
“The H-1B labor protections and regulations and rules are a complete fiasco. So the solution, what we should be focused on is to redesign these labor regulations to ensure that the H-1B program doesn’t depress wages, that it protects workers, and that it’s actually fulfilling its purpose, which is to fill genuine shortages instead of displacing Americans,” Hira emphasized.
“So I’m going to give practical some real world examples of how this actually operates. So …. how employers are able to game the system. They hunt for ways to pay as low as possible in terms of the required wages,” he added.
Referring to a top H-1B employer, Hira told the audience, “there is an approved application from 2023. And here the employer Deloitte Consulting, a top 10 H-1B employer is claiming that a position that its own job title is senior consultant that’s consulting describing the position senior consultant is actually an entry level position when it comes to setting the prevailing wage for the H-1B worker. Why? Because setting it as an entry level, wage level one allows it to pay a lower wage.”
He added, “Now is a senior consultant entry level? Probably not. Right.”
Adding to his concerns, he said, “So, you have thousands of H-1B eligible workers who are just sitting overseas waiting for billable jobs to show up. That’s against the law. Nobody’s enforcing it. It should limit the types of organizations who are eligible for H-1B cap exemptions. They’ve expanded that far too much. DHS also needs to overhaul the L-1 visa and the optional practical training guest worker programs. They have even fewer protections than the H-1B program. And the EEOC and DOJ also have an agenda.”
“They should be investigating employment discrimination by auditing all mass H-1B employers and should intervene in false claim act whistleblower lawsuits on guest worker abuse.”
Hira further asked, “Congress also should be thinking bigger about transforming our skilled immigration system. This sounds kind of funny to say, but our U.S. skilled immigration system has almost no immigration in it. It’s almost entirely guest worker programs. And just to put some numbers around this, there are about one and a half million skilled guest workers chasing about 60,000 green card slots.”