Nick Plumb, a Republican candidate for Congress in Texas’ 2nd District and former Head of AI Enablement at Amazon, appeared in Episode 19 of Nick’s Right Podcast. Plumb used to platform to wade into one of the most contentious policy debates in the country: immigration and employment visas.
The discussion touches on the H-1B visa program, corporate hiring patterns, university admissions data, federal contracting practices, labor policy and proposals for immigration reform. Plumb argues that the current system, in his view, disadvantages American workers and lacks sufficient modernization.
Plumb begins with a personal account of his daughter’s college admissions experience. What starts as a family story soon broadens into a sweeping critique of how employment-based visa programs operate in the United States.
“I think I’d really put it down to my daughter’s story,” he said.
Plumb described his 19-year-old as a standout student. “She did it all right,” he said, noting she graduated high school with a “four or five GPA,” earned 32 college credits, competed as a varsity swimmer and led multiple extracurricular initiatives. Despite that, she was rejected not only from the University of Texas at Austin but, he said, “the entire UT school system.”
That experience pushed him to look more closely at broader admissions and workforce trends.
“Anecdotally I had seen my team shift from 95 percent American to within five or six years, I was the only one,” Plumb said of his time at Amazon. “I started to think maybe there was something more going on here. I dove into the data and what I saw is just absolutely alarming.”
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Citing enrollment statistics at UT Austin, Plumb claimed that in recent years white female enrollment was down 21 percent and white male enrollment down 30 percent, while Asian female enrollment rose 50 percent and Asian male enrollment 25 percent. “There are more Asian females at the University of Texas in Austin than there are Black and Hispanic males combined,” he said, calling the numbers “a really telling story.”
From there, the conversation turned to visa classifications, particularly the H-1B program and dependent H-4 visas.
Plumb describes what he calls a “back door” in university admissions. Because children of H-1B workers on H-4 visas are considered residents for certain purposes, they do not require F-1 student visas. At the same time, they are neither U.S. citizens nor permanent residents. According to Plumb, this status can mean they are not counted under caps that some universities may apply to international students.
“What you see when these kids come over as a dependent of an H-1B, they’re H-4 students,” Plumb said. “So they’re classified as residents. They’re not international students.”
When asked whether that classification makes them citizens, Plumb clarified, “That’s not a measure. When you go look at how UT classifies their students, it doesn’t show citizen, non-citizen. It’s resident or international student.”
He argued that this distinction has significant consequences. “All those safeguards that we have in place to try to make sure that the universities remain X amount American or X amount in state are all out the window because we have a ton of foreign students classified as Texas residents, eating up all these slots in our universities.”
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He contends that this structure creates unintended consequences in competitive admissions environments. Tying the policy discussion back to his daughter’s experience, Plumb says the issue underscores the need for clearer rules and updated immigration laws.
Plumb is proposing a two-year pause on certain employment-based visa programs, arguing that Congress should use that time to reassess and modernize the system. He maintains that reform should balance economic growth with protections for American workers.