H-1B visas to work in the U.S. are in the news again.
Tesla boss Elon Musk has said H-1B visas were being “gamed” by “some outsourcing companies”, but the solution was stopping the abuse and not dismantling the system.
Roughly 70% of these visas – that allow US companies to hire skilled foreign workers – are used by Indian citizens working in sectors like technology and medicine.
In September, US President Donald Trump added a $100,000 (£74,000) fee for applicants to the H-1B visa programme, sparking anxiety among Indian workers and employers.
Musk was speaking to Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on his podcast, released on Sunday evening, and also touched on a range of other issues from tariffs to immigration.
During the conversation Musk maintained that America has “long benefitted” from talented Indian migrant workers, but acknowledged concerns about the “misuse” of the H-1B visa programme.
H-1B visas are given out through a lottery, and outsourcing and staffing firms have often been accused of manipulating the system using tactics such as submitting multiple entries for the same worker, or using the visa to hire low-cost contract workers rather than for specialty occupations.
“We need to stop the gaming of the system,” Musk said.
The biggest way Indians game the system is what I call the “My Cousin Sanjay” problem.
“Hey, we need to get my cousin Sanjay from Pune into the country. He knows Sharepoint, so let’s write a job opening so narrowly tailored that only he can meet the requirement, then we can open a visa rec for him.” So they’ll write a rec that says that Sharepoint and ability to speak Marathi are hard requirements. So the thousands of Americans who know Sharepoint are never given a chance to get the job.
“But I’m certainly not in the school of thought that we should shut down the H-1B programme…which some on the Right are. I think they don’t realise that that would actually be very bad.”
Multiple things can be true at the same time:
- There are excellent, highly skilled, highly educated foreign employees out there who can help America’s economy grow, people with Masters and Doctorates in engineering, computer science, mathematics, nuclear physics, medical degrees, etc. It’s generally a net benefit to get those people in American jobs.
- A lot of the Indian workers being brought over are not the most highly skilled or education, they’re someone who has relative or friend already over here willing to lie on the visa forms to enable chain migration.
- For highly skilled tech work that can be done anywhere in the world with the Internet, it’s more economically advantageous to employ them in the U.S. than abroad.
- Many Indians are going to be harder workers than Americans for a number of reasons, some economic, some cultural. Having one or two of those guys on, say, a 30 man team, is probably going to be a net benefit.
- But working harder than Americans is is only a secondary concerns, as most company’s only want H-1Bs because they’re cheaper than Americans.
- And companies prefer H-1Bs to green card holders because they’re only a few steps above indentured servants. One reason Indians work such longer hours is they’re scared of their visas being cancelled. It’s frequently an abusive relationship.
- You have too many Indians (or Chinese) on your team and you risk group-think, especially since so many come from a kiss-up, kick-down culture. You need crazy Americans (and, more specifically, crazy American men) there to tell a manager when their ideas are lousy and why. Indians will rarely do that for a superior.
- Indians are starting to dominate not just temporary employees, but temporary and contract firms, and some people headhunting for American jobs are still in India. Also, anyone with an Indian accent for a company from New Jersey is overwhelmingly likely to be useless.
- I’m old fashioned enough to think that American jobs should go to Americans unless there’s a really compelling reason otherwise.
- If we’re still importing employees, better we import them from India (or anyplace else in the non-Jihadi Anglosphere) than Somalia or Haiti.
According to data released this month by a think tank, H-1B visa approvals for Indian outsourcing companies have fallen to the lowest level in a decade.
In this financial year, the top seven Indian companies had only 4,573 H-1B petitions approved for initial employment, a 70% drop from 2015 and 37% fewer than 2024, according to the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).
Trump’s policies “could lead to higher denial rates and other problems for employers”, the NFAP report warned.
Oh no, they’ll have to pay market rates to hire Americans!
I think the $100,000 via application fee should kill most (but not all) the abuses. Another reform could be to set a minimum threshold of a $150,000 salary for an H-1B job, which will probably price Cousin Sanjay out of the market. And more scrutiny from the three agencies involved in the H-1B process (Departments of Labor, Homeland Security and State) should help cut down the chain migration problem.
As an American who’s been out of work for a goodly portion of the last two years despite hundreds of job applications, I’ve got to say that not letting Elon Musk have as many grindcore Indian visa employees as he wants strikes me as a more than acceptable price for reforming the process.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Tags: Border Controls, Department of Labor, DHS, Elon Musk, H1B visa, immigration, India, National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), New Jersey, Nikhil Kamath, State Department
Someone with @data_republican’s chops should FOIA the data on H-1B employment, what skills come up the most often, and how those compare to what our universities teach.
For decades now *THE ENTIRE SCHOOL SYSTEM IN THE USA* pushes STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM. Maybe it’s STEAM, maybe it’s STREAM, but every school makes a giant fuss about Science, Technology, Engineering, Math education. K12, universities, the works.
If they can’t find American’s, then what the *FUCK* are all these schools doing? I would say woke shit, but not when everything is stem Stem STEM.
So let’s see some real data comparing what’s in the H-1B job requirements, and what college grads are being taught. And if the universities indeed aren’t teaching the necessary skills, apply pressure. Bring up their endowments. Bring up the ever-increasing ratio of non-teaching faculty to students.
You touch on it, but cultural incompatibility should not be underestimated as a reason to limit immigration from India and China.
H-1B’s are a serious national security threat in any industry which produces goods used by the Departments of War, Justice, and Homeland Security; as well as the IC. Even naturalized citizens have poor security records in these industries.
Over two decades ago a friend of mine who worked for Southern California Edison had his group replaced by H1b people from India after they were forced to train them or get no severance pay.
About the same time my Sister-in-Law was in Seattle and tried to get a job with Microsoft. She had experience from previous jobs and good degrees, and went to more then one interview but she saw they hired only people from India likely H1b people. She took a job with another company in Seattle.
I started working in the Silicon Valley in 1986. I was a network engineer. I worked for IMSAI (See the movie War Games) and Xerox-PARC (inventor of the wintel industry). It was a great place until BILL GATES OF MICROSOFT started importing Indians to work at Microsoft. This was not because there was not enough talented American Workers. It was Gate’s way of trying to stop the competition in America that GATES was facing from other American companies – see Netscape. This H-1B Visa problem is another failure on GATES’ head. He needs to be deported to the Congo.
It’s not _just_ that the H1-Bs work cheaper, they also drive the average down, and that then shows up in the various industry average salary surveys, which the companies use as an excuse to pinch salaries for _everyone_.
The old: “we’re not giving raises this year, our research shows our salaries are ‘within industry norms’.”
Also note: The news always talks about H1-Bs _per year_. But the visas aren’t good for a single year, they’re good for 3 to 6 years, so the real numbers of H1-B workers is FAR higher that they like to imply.
Many Indians are going to be harder workers than Americans for a number of reasons, some economic, some cultural.
Hahahahahahaha!
You’ve never worked with them I see.
I’ve worked with several, including majority Indian (or American born Indian) employees.
I have a friend who joined the State Dept AFTER working for years in the tech industry. Pretty rare considering how State is full of International Relations and French grads who never worked at a non-government job.
He said H1B was a total scam, that the applications he saw were TOTALLY capable of being filled by Americans, it was just a way to keep wages down.
Headline story in Reuters, tonight:
‘Exclusive: Trump administration orders enhanced vetting for applicants of H-1B visa’
By Humeyra Pamuk – December 3, 2025
“The Trump administration on Wednesday announced increased vetting of applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, with an internal State Department memo saying that anyone involved in “censorship” of free speech be considered for rejection.”
I worked for 30 years in high-level, high-tech consulting for the who’s who of the global elite of the American tech sector. Any suggestion that Indians are, as a whole, highly educated, talented, or motivated, or even particularly hard working is completely unwarranted. The advancement of Indians in the US tech sector is driving almost entirely by ethno-nepotism. Put an Indian in charge of a team/project/department and within two years the group will be 80-90% Indians, 10-15% Asian, and a few token whites. Promotions go exclusively to Indians. This is universal in the tech sector.
I may be unique in that I have had not one, but two, H1B visas and left the US again after both of them. In both cases I believe my visas were applied for (and then granted) for legitimate reasons and I believe that in general the US should want people like me (and arguably ought to make it easier for people like me to obtain green cards and eventually citizenship. Though I doubt I, personally, would take the US up on that).
However, there is no doubt in my mind that a minimum salary of $150k and a $100k non-refundable application fee would kill the business models of the consulting body shops that dominate H1Bs today. The companies that wanted me in the US would have paid no problem. In fact I think you could do better still by auctioning the visas with those conditions as a minimum. If you need a top expert in some field then you’ll pay them $250k and be willing to pay the US government $250k or more to be sure to get them. If you are Mr Gupta who needs a dozen sysadmins or programmers for a contract, probably not.
I work with multiple H1-B engineers and scientists.
The first thing you need to understand is that a Masters or Doctorate from India, China or Canada is not the same as an MS or PhD from a US University.
The second thing that I deal with, every day, is a lack of critical thinking skills on the part of foreign nationals. I don’t know if it is not taught or if it is a cultural thing, but I frequently will review a proposed series of experiments and have to ask the engineer: “What question are you trying to answer here?”
Often, the answer is a shrug.
Other times I design the experiments for them and they just carry them out. This is technician work. I’m sure you could hire a US born tech for what you pay an H1-B engineer.
On the one hand, you could say that I have job security, but you also need to consider that anon is correct – these low cost engineers depress everyone’s incomes.
Guest is also correct – I have observed the cultural nepotism. I am of the opinion that some foreign nationals deliberately do not improve their language skills so that they only interact with people of their culture and don’t need to talk to us anglos.
The H1-B Indenture thing has been going on for so long – when I got my first tech cubical job in in the late 1980s it was already a well established thing – that it has skewed the entire education pipeline for several generations of tech-oriented American native born college students, driving a lot of the “we can’t find any Americans for this job” situation. Multiple generations of students have assessed where the indentures were concentrated, and aligned their education elsewhere.
Say there’s a ton of Computer Science engineer positions being filled by H1-B indentures, but not so many analog EE positions. The well informed college students will pick a field of study where indentures are less prevalent and thus driving down the pay scales!and soaking up less of the openings, less significantly.
After three or four decades of this biased selection driving the student loads, which in turn drive what U.S. University Engineering departments get new teaching position and which do not, some specialties are now basically ceded to the indentures for new grad hires, with the ladders in those field populated by green card and naturalized workers, who are fully bought in to that flow, even if somehow they don’t play games to hire cousins as described in the article.
The real question is where these ceded fields will go with, for example, coder positions being so heavily impacted by the code-trained LLMs.