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.)