Republicans Grapple With Thorny H-1B Visa Issue

Democrats view the visa program as a flashpoint issue that could divide the Republican base.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has slashed border crossings and started an aggressive campaign to deport illegal immigrants. Now his administration faces the thorny task of addressing legal immigration—including the H-1B visa for skilled workers.

As U.S. companies struggle to find certain specialized talents locally amid the nationwide push to reindustrialize triggered by the president’s tariffs, Trump and the GOP must manage a complex balancing act on H-1B visas.

Trump has sometimes criticized the H-1B program as rife with abuse. In a September proclamation announcing changes to the program, including a $100,000 fee for new petitions, he warned that the visa replaces domestic labor and threatens both national security and American prosperity.

In recent weeks, he has also defended the program, arguing that H-1B workers can teach American workers skills for the high-paying jobs he hopes to return to the United States.

Republicans in Congress are also at odds on the best way forward. Some are advancing measures to remake or even eliminate H-1Bs, while others have defended the visa.

“Do we need some modifications to it? Maybe—but we’re not going to do away with the program,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Epoch Times.

As Republicans confront voter discontent over the H-1B visa and face internal divisions over how to address it, some analysts and politicians believe Democrats could stand to gain from the issue.

“H-1B is one area where the Democrats can outflank some of the Republicans on the right,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to curb immigration into the United States, told The Epoch Times.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), who just announced a Senate run, told The Epoch Times that the H-1B debate is “an internal fight that MAGA is having.”

Crockett defended the H-1B program as “smart immigration policy,” and predicted that the division could demoralize GOP voters ahead of the midterms.

But some Democrats and left-of-center voices have gone beyond casting the dispute as Republican infighting.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 8, 2025. Crockett called the debate about H-1B visa reform “an internal fight that MAGA is having.” Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

In January, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) decried the visa in response to pro-H-1B comments from Elon Musk, who donated to Trump’s 2024 campaign. The senator wrote on X that visa’s function is “to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”

Also in January, Sanders offered an amendment to the Laken Riley Act that would have doubled the $1,500 H-1B fee at the time and prevented companies from hiring H-1B workers to replace laid-off Americans.

Democrat Dr. Amy Acton, who is campaigning against Vivek Ramaswamy for governor of Ohio, recently condemned a December 2024 post on X from Ramaswamy that helped touch off a debate among conservatives over immigration and foreign labor.

At the time, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate wrote that tech firms often hire non-Americans because American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

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“Vivek Ramaswamy says Ohioans are lazy and mediocre. He’s wrong,” Acton wrote on X.

Although Ramaswamy has spoken positively of H-1Bs, he has also expressed support for Trump’s fee hike. At a Turning Point USA event in October, he called the H-1B issue “complicated” and said it lags behind illegal immigration in importance.

CNN anchor Abby Phillip raised concerns about the H-1B issue in a recent exchange with Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary, who defended the program.

“It needs some degree of reform,” Phillip told the “Shark Tank” host. “There are real concerns that people have about companies that abuse the system.”

Christina Pushaw, a communications specialist for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, suggested that Phillip’s comments reflect a broader pattern—one that could spell trouble for the GOP.

“The more it becomes mainstream for Democrats to criticize the great foreign replacement of American workers, and the more the GOP establishment defends infinity ‘legal immigration’ to serve corporate interests, the more it looks like these Dems are picking up a crown from the gutter,” she wrote on X on Nov. 13.

The Tech Visa

Created through the Immigration Act of 1990, the H-1B program lets companies hire non-immigrant aliens on a temporary basis for specialized jobs. Those eligible typically have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Although H-1Bs are limited to six years, the visa can be extended if the alien’s employer is seeking a green card for them. Many H-1B holders transition to permanent residency and, in some cases, become citizens, making them immigrants rather than temporary workers.

Congress initially set a cap of 65,000 H-1Bs per year. In 2000, Congress permanently eliminated the H-1B cap for nonprofit research institutions and universities. In 2004, lawmakers added another 20,000 slots for foreign workers with advanced degrees—at least a master’s—from U.S. institutions.

The number of approved H-1B petitions rose from 178,803 in 2000 to almost 400,000 in 2024, according to an analysis from the Pew Research Center.

H-1B visa holders work in many fields, but they are heavily concentrated in the tech industry. Big Tech companies are among the largest H-1B petitioners.

Roughly two-thirds of the 400,000 H-1B applications approved in 2023 were for computer-related jobs, and Amazon, Google, and other Silicon Valley giants were among the top employers, according to Pew Research data.

In fiscal year 2024, Indian nationals accounted for 71 percent of approved H-1B petitions, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Another 12 percent of approvals went to workers from China.

The second and third biggest H-1B employers in fiscal year 2021 were Indian tech outsourcing firms Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, according to a 2022 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. In an analysis of data from fiscal year 2025, the National Foundation for American Policy noted a marked decline in H-1B approvals for India-based companies.

H-1B Defenses Amid Tech Layoffs

The Trump administration’s H-1B proclamation, which also previewed rulemaking by the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security, was issued during a season of layoffs by American tech leaders—including top H-1B employers such as Amazon.

Tech firms announced more than 140,000 job cuts in 2025, according to a November report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The industry has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over the last four years.

Meanwhile, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show that 6.1 percent of recent computer science majors are unemployed, and another 16.5 percent are underemployed. Recent computer engineering graduates must cope with an even higher unemployment rate, at 7.5 percent, while chemistry, physics, and information systems and management majors also face relatively dim job prospects.

The unemployment rates for all five categories sit above the 4.8 percent national average among recent college graduates.

“People understand what’s going on. They understand that their kids are graduating from college with STEM degrees and not finding work. They understand their communities are being changed,” Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers, an advocacy group for Americans displaced from the tech sector by foreign labor, told The Epoch Times.

The H-1B and American Talent

The president’s recent pro-H-1B comments have focused on what he sees as an urgent need for skilled labor.

In a Nov. 11 interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, Trump said: “You also do have to bring in talent.

“You don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles.’”

Later in the month, he said the temporary use of expert foreign labor would help American workers learn critical skills.

“Those people are going to teach our people how to make computer chips, and in a short period of time, our people are going to be doing great. And those people can go home,” Trump said during an appearance at the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum.

Some MAGA backers have voiced their opposition to the president’s stance.

Mark Mitchell, lead pollster for Rasmussen Reports, wrote on X on Nov. 17 that “it’s wild how many disaffected Trump supporter responses” he has received from “people pushed out by H-1B [workers].”

Paul Dans, a Republican challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in South Carolina’s 2026 Senate race, responded to footage of Ingraham’s question on X on Nov. 12, writing: “America’s got talent. America First means American workers and students first.”

Trump appeared to acknowledge that his remarks would cost him some support.

Employees work at Visawaale, a visa facilitation company, in New Delhi, India, on Nov. 28, 2025. In September, President Donald Trump imposed a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas; in recent weeks he has suggested H-1B workers can help train Americans for the high-paying jobs he hopes to bring back to the United States. Reuters/Screenshot via The Epoch Times

“My poll numbers just went down, but with smart people, they’ve gone way up. They’ve gone way up,” he said at the investment forum.

Meanwhile, amid a tariff-driven push to bring jobs home, some industry leaders warn of a lack of skilled domestic labor.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said last month on the “Office Hours: Business Edition” podcast that he cannot fill 5,000 mechanic jobs, despite that those jobs pay six figures.

“We are not investing in educating a next generation,” Farley said. “Those jobs are out there. Mechanics in a Ford dealership, as of this morning, we had 5,000 openings—a bay with a lift and tools, and no one working it.”

Those jobs have salaries of $120,000 a year, Farley said, but it takes five years to learn the necessary skills.

Earlier in the year, immigration officials detained South Korean nationals working at a Hyundai car battery plant in Georgia who were accused of being illegally present in the country.

Afterward, the president defended the immigration operation while stressing the virtues of capitalizing on skilled foreign labor—as long as Americans ultimately benefit.

After their detention during an ICE operation targeting illegal immigrants at a Hyundai-LG plant in Ellabell, Ga., South Korean workers arrive at Incheon International Airport in Incheon, South Korea, on Sept. 12, 2025. Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

“We encourage you to legally bring your very smart people, with great technical talent, to build world class products, and we will make it quickly and legally possible for you to do so,” he wrote on Truth Social. “What we ask in return is that you hire and train American workers.”

For all the attention on his recent remarks, Trump’s record also includes significant criticism of the H-1B and reliance on non-American workers.

Campaigning in 2016 on a pledge to “end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program” and hire American workers first, he drew attention to Disney employees who had been asked to train their foreign replacements.

During his first term, he condemned the Tennessee Valley Authority’s use of foreign labor, telling the federally owned corporation it must “[put] the interests of Americans first.”

Trump’s September H-1B proclamation reflected widespread worries about abuses of the program. Yet the substance that went with the announcement has drawn mixed reactions.

Some experts are unenthused about the new $100,000 fee, as it applies only to new filings and does not affect renewals or individuals adjusting their status from some other visa category.

“It’s a nothingburger,” Lynn said.

Krikorian predicted that “employers will get around it” using tourist visas and other maneuvers.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington on Aug. 12, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The Department of Homeland Security has also proposed a rule that would change the H-1B selection process—currently a random lottery system—by adding more weight to workers making more money.

The rule received almost 17,000 comments during the public comment period, which ended on Nov. 24. Many commenters criticized the visa, while others defended it.

Some H-1B advocates, including Daniel DiMartino of the Manhattan Institute, have called for Congress to eliminate the lottery system altogether.

H-1Bs and Congress

Republicans have generally taken a tougher stance on immigration in the Trump era.

Trump’s rise to power on promises of a border wall came soon after the bipartisan Gang of Eight—four Democratic and four Republican senators—failed in 2013 to advance legislation that would have given many illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) (2nd L) speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 12, 2018. In September, Grassley and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) joined forces and questioned major corporations that filed thousands of H-1B visa petitions. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Democrats, meanwhile, have often staked out positions more favorable to immigration.

In 2015, Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, decried open borders as “a Koch Brothers proposal”—a reference to the wealthy libertarian donors who have tended to push for more immigration. By the time he ran for president in 2020, the democratic socialist had pivoted to more pro-immigration rhetoric.

Sanders has since shifted back, at least to a degree. In addition to criticizing the H-1B in January, in October, he praised Trump’s approach to border security.

“If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation,” Sanders said on The Tim Dillon Show on Oct. 22.

“Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border, and it ain’t that hard to do. Biden didn’t do it; those before him did not do it.”

Lynn said Democrats “need someone, one of the power centers in the Democratic Party, to give them permission” to shift on immigration and foreign labor.

“That’s coming,” he predicted, adding that “a trail is being hewn.”

In November, Lynn said, 31 activists with U.S. Tech Workers met with 29 Democrats and 31 Republicans on Capitol Hill. He said members of both parties were generally receptive to the delegation.

In September, Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) joined forces on the issue. They wrote to Amazon, Google, Apple, and other U.S. firms in tech, finance, and retail, questioning their heavy use of H-1Bs despite “all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines.”

They also introduced bipartisan legislation to reform the H-1B program, in part by prioritizing better-educated workers and boosting penalties for employers who violate wage requirements.

For the most part, though, Republicans are taking the lead on the visa.

The big ideas range from that of outgoing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who wants to eliminate H-1Bs entirely, to a measure from Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), introduced in September, that would get rid of the H-1B lottery and make the H-1B wage floor higher. It does not yet have any cosponsors.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told The Epoch Times that the president’s new $100,000 fee is “generally a good idea” and called for a broader reassessment of U.S. visa policies.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) speaks to the press in Washington on June 2, 2025. Hawley supports the president’s new $100,000 H-1B fee and has called for a broader review of U.S. visa policies. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

Not all Republicans are as hawkish as Hawley on immigration and foreign labor.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told The Epoch Times he opposes the $100,000 fee, saying many hospitals and businesses in his district rely on H-1Bs.

He is a cosponsor of the bipartisan DIGNITY Act, a comprehensive bill that would fund border security and provide pathways to citizenship for many illegal immigrants.

He did not want to speak in detail about prospective changes to the H-1B.

“From my vantage point, you have to reform the entire system, not piecemeal,” Lawler said.

Rep. Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) told The Epoch Times she does not support an end to the H-1B visa.

“I think it’s something that certainly needs to be reformed,” she said, adding that the lottery system could be changed.

“I’m not sure that eliminating it is going to be the right strategy for our economic stability when we’re still trying to get people back to work through COVID and with our new work requirements for welfare.”