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Sept. 16, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:01:06
Trump's Shifting Immigration and H-1B Policies: With Journalist Lee Fang and Political Science Professor Ron Hira

Lee Fang discusses the controversies surrounding the H-1B visa program and whether the program helps workers or big business. He is joined by Prof. Ron Hira from Howard University.  ------------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Time Text
Root Cause Economics 00:05:55
Good evening.
This is Lee Fong.
I'm your host of System Update.
Glenn is out this week and I'm filling in.
For the last 10 years, the politics of immigration have become more extreme and more predictable.
The left waves signs claiming refugees welcome here, while the right rejoices over Trump's promises to lead the greatest deportation in American history.
What is all too often left out of the conversation is the root cause that brings millions of people into this country.
The biggest factor left unsaid on cable news and in our mainstream political discourse is economics.
Big business interests push our politicians to allow a flood of immigration into this country as an attempt to bring down wages and find more vulnerable workers who are less likely to agitate for unions or better work conditions.
I don't mean to say that business interests are the only concern or only factor involved in this debate.
For the left, there are genuine and persuasive arguments that some immigrants are fleeing intolerable situations in their home countries, war, devastation, discrimination, and violence.
And there are many genuine asylum seekers coming to this country.
The right, meanwhile, will point out that immigrants strain welfare budgets and at times threaten social cohesion.
Republicans are quick to point this out, and they have a point.
Meanwhile, many conservatives forget that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, and those claiming to be, quote, heritage Americans have ancestors who were treated poorly by nativists of the past.
We forget that many of the Irish, Polish, German, Portuguese, and Italian waves of mass migration in the 19th century were met with lynch mobs and xenophobic violence, often from bigots who claimed that Catholic or non-Anglo immigrants were incompatible with the American identity.
But all too often, what's driving the policymaking in Washington has been the influence of big business.
Behind the scenes, you can push aside the heated rhetoric, and for most bureaucrats and politicians, this is all dollars and cents.
Take Tyson Foods, one of the largest meatpacking companies in America.
The company boasted that it would hire thousands of immigrants and lobbied Washington to proactively provide work permits for those who arrived in our country without documentation.
The company reportedly uses child labor and undocumented immigrants, a dangerous and immoral violation of our labor standards.
During the pandemic, we had a live experiment with a reduction of immigration.
Our country experienced a sudden closure of the pipeline of cheap immigration with the closure of the border.
The reduction in foreign workers and foreign worker visas immediately led to a tight labor market and the most rapid wage increases we've seen in a generation, particularly among the lowest paid.
Instantly, corporate interests relying on immigrant labor protested and demanded more cheap workers.
Here's Andrew Masterman speaking in 2022.
He was the head of Brightview, one of the nation's largest commercial landscaping companies.
When he was pressed by investors on their earnings call two years ago, excuse me, three years ago, he said that he would fight back against, quote, wage inflation.
How would he do it?
Quote, any pro-immigration policies that would be implemented will benefit us on increasing the availability of labor throughout the country.
Here's Scott Salmers, the president of ABM Industries, a nationwide building, maintenance, and janitorial company.
He similarly told investors that he's quote a fan of quote guest immigrant labor coming in.
Why?
Well, he said that he was battling labor pressure of a low immigration environment in the early years of COVID.
But they are hardly alone.
The most powerful business lobby groups in America, groups like the Business Roundtable, which represents the CEOs of the largest corporations in America, or the Chamber of Commerce, which represents much of the Fortune 500, they pressured the Biden administration to allow an influx of immigration, according to lobbying disclosure filings and publicly reported events.
The corporate lobby is also deeply embedded in the immigration reform NGO sector.
The National Immigration Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizens are prominent examples of this relationship.
Tyson Foods was among the sponsors of LULAC, which is one of the most aggressive lobbies for immigration reform.
The National Immigration Forum, meanwhile, which has organized coalition efforts to expand guest worker permits and other immigration reforms, similarly received financial support from Amazon, Tyson Foods, Walmart, the Business Roundtable, and the Chamber of Commerce.
Okay, so now the Trump administration is cracking down on mass deportations.
Are we truly going after the root cause of the problem?
Federal law has long provided criminal and civil penalties for employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers.
The business executives in industries such as meatpacking, janitorial work, agriculture, hotels, and restaurants could be held to an account for their role in driving down wages and low-cost immigrant labor.
But that's not happening.
Business executives are, generally speaking, not being arrested or fined for their role in fueling this epidemic.
H-1B Controversies 00:07:32
What's more, outsourcing and various work visa programs are widely exploited by business interests to replace American workers and depress the jobs of white-collar employees.
Take the H-1B program.
Originally designed in 1990 to plug a gap in scientific and technological knowledge and to bring over foreigners of quote distinguished merit and ability, the program has ballooned into a behemoth used to outsource tech jobs, particularly those in information technology.
The Department of Justice has investigated Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and found that that company discriminated against American workers using H-1B visas, refusing to recruit, consider, or hire qualified Americans for more than 2,600 jobs.
The Justice Department, however, ended the issue with a slap on the wrist, a penalty of about $14 million.
That's a mere 0.016% of company revenue.
In 2016, while running for president, Trump called the H-1B program, quote, very, very bad for workers, and declared we should end it.
He campaigned with Disney workers who had been forced to train their H-1B replacements before being laid off.
However, in December, just before taking office, Trump pleaded, many Trump supporters pleaded with the incoming president, asking him to take action or reform or abandon the program.
They cited the fact that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others had laid off thousands of American workers last year while applying for thousands of new H-1B guest workers.
Trump, however, sided with donors, especially Elon Musk, who has used many H-1Bs for his companies, especially Tesla.
I've always liked the visas.
I have always been in favor of the visas.
That's why we have them, Trump told the New York Post.
I have many H-1Bs on my properties.
I've been a believer in H-1B.
I've used it many times.
It's a great program, said Trump.
It all highlights an uncomfortable dynamic in Trump's coalition.
On the one side are libertarian business leaders who seek economic growth at all costs, often at the expense of American wages and consumer protections.
On the other side, there are populists who oppose immigration for a variety of reasons, many of them economic and cultural.
Trump has attempted to appease both sides.
He's keeping the floodgates of white-collar H-1Bs open, while Silicon Valley and other corporate centers reduce labor costs at the expense of the American worker.
He's also engaging in mass immigration enforcement, but carefully exempting corporate executives from facing any liabilities or consequences for their role in this crisis.
That may appease some in his base who only care about seeing immigrants in chains deported from this country, but it doesn't fundamentally change the dynamic that brought us mass migration in the first place.
For these issues and others, we will turn in a moment to Professor Ron Hira.
He's really one of the most principled experts on outsourcing and guest visa programs.
He's been an outspoken critic of the role of big business groups in exploiting these programs.
Stay tuned in.
I want to welcome our next guest to System Update.
Ron Hira is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University.
Ron is also a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Howard. Ron served on the faculty of Rochester Institute of Technology, and he's really the preeminent expert on outsourcing.
He's a go-to expert on H-1B visas and similar foreign visas for high-skilled immigration.
Ron, thanks so much for joining the show.
Thanks, Lee, for inviting me.
Yeah, we've spoken in the past.
I think this is the first time we've seen each other over video.
But, you know, I've been writing on this H-1B issue for some time.
The politics seemed to keep shifting.
There seemed to be a moment in the beginning of this Trump administration where on social media, you had an explosion of anger around H-1Bs.
It seemed to be kind of a misreading of one of the Trump advisor's tweets, but there was a very genuine concern that, hey, will Trump return to his first administration promises around H-1Bs when he was first running for president in 2016?
He was saying, okay, this is a foreign worker program that claims to be about meeting high-skilled demand in the U.S. economy.
But here are example after example of big corporations bringing in these foreign workers to undercut American jobs.
In some cases, American workers were forced to train their foreign replacements.
This is something that Trump commented on, said, this is a terrible program that we need to end.
He did not end it in his first administration.
There was a question of whether he would reform it in this administration.
And really, there was a push and pull between Elon Musk and some of these other kind of Silicon Valley supporters of the president and the more populist wing of the MAGA movement who have demanded kind of an American first economic policy agenda.
Where do you think this is going?
And what is the Trump administration's current position on this?
Yes, it's really hard to read.
As Trump is wont to do, he kind of jumps on multiple sides of an issue, maybe not even just two sides, but multiple sides.
And he changes his tune as time goes on.
So we're not entirely sure what's going to happen in the near future.
And, you know, some of that might be chalked up to the fact that they've been concentrating on deportations in terms of their immigration policy, but also, you know, personnel as policy.
So part of this is also getting people into the correct positions confirmed, you know, appointed and then confirmed.
So for example, USCIS has a new director who's just been confirmed, Joe Edlow, and he's quite familiar with these issues and even brought up some of the other programs like the optional practical training during his confirmation hearing.
So he's been confirmed.
He's in a position to do something.
And that's important because things can be done administratively by the executive branch without Congress if they want to.
And we saw some of that go on in the first Trump administration.
The other major agency that's engaged and involved in this is the U.S. Department of Labor.
And it's kind of unclear what's going on with the personnel there.
And then, of course, Congress could get involved, but they're kind of sitting on the sidelines.
Indian Employer-Worker Programs 00:15:20
This will really be driven by the White House.
So to the extent that the folks who are driving immigration policy in the Trump White House want something to be done, then those folks in the agencies will start to take action.
And especially the Republicans, but not just the Republicans in Congress, will take their cue from what the White House wants.
So I think the best way to read this right now is that the White House hasn't wanted to do anything to fix the problem.
Could we just zoom out and describe what is the H-1B visa?
Where did it come from?
And how many visa holders are in this country?
How is it kind of reapplied?
And just kind of describe the program generally, please.
Yeah, sure.
So the H-1B, there's a lot of ink that gets spilled around it, but it's one of a variety of guest worker programs.
So these are not immigrant programs, so they don't get permanent immigration, and that's important.
I'll come back to that in a second.
It's support to make this distinction that these are guest workers.
They're guests in the U.S. as long as they're working under the conditions of their visa.
And that's important, too, because employers hold the visa, and so the employers have a lot of control over those guests.
So these are guest worker programs.
This particular one, the H-1B, is a skilled guest worker.
By skilled, what we mean is that to be eligible for an H-1B, the worker has to have at least a bachelor's degree, a college, a four-year college degree.
And the position will require generally a four-year college degree.
So you can imagine pretty much any white-collar job that requires a bachelor's degree is eligible.
And as long as the worker has at least a bachelor's degree, then they'll be eligible for the H-1B program.
So the types of occupations go from accounting to journalism, but it's been really dominated over the last 35 years, not from the beginning, but maybe 30 years or so in the tech industry, in particular in computers, more so computing occupations, information technology, even more so than science or engineering or anything like that.
And it's employer-driven.
The reason it gets a lot of attention is twofold.
One, it's the largest of our skilled guest worker programs.
So it's not the only one.
There's an alphabet soup of other ones like the L1 and the L is in LARI, the OPT.
And we've heard a little bit about the B1 in the news recently around the Korean Hyundai plant.
But it's a skilled guest worker.
There's probably about 600,000 people.
We don't really know because the government doesn't actually count people who leave the country.
They only count the people who come in on an H-1B.
And people on H-1Bs can convert over to a green card and permanent residence.
So real immigration, which is really what we want, I think, in terms of our immigration system, because the H-1B places workers in a precarious position.
They're indentured in essence.
They're dependent on their employer, and that gives an enormous amount of power to that employer.
And that distorts their employment relationship, but it also distorts the labor market at large, so the workers who are competing with them.
So it's really important because it's very large.
It's the largest of the skilled guest worker programs.
And it's a non-immigrant program that has the potential to do some good, but by and large, it's been used for cheaper indentured workers.
Could you explain the distinction?
I've seen the, if you look at the rhetoric around this visa program, many of the advocates say that it's filling a crucial skills gap that companies can't find talented STEM-related workers, you know, people in engineering and computer science.
How does this visa work?
And what do you say to those claims?
Yeah, so it's clearly not designed to fill skills gaps.
There's really zero connection between hiring an H-1B and an actual need in the labor market or that this particular worker brings some specialized or unique skills.
So there's nothing in the regulations.
There's nothing in law that requires an employer, for example, to even look for a U.S. worker before hiring an H-1B or to demonstrate that H-1B worker has any kind of special skills that's not easily found in the U.S. labor market from U.S. students who are graduating and they're graduating, especially in computer science and tech, into a really lousy labor market and they're competing with these H-1B workers.
So it's really just a matter of whether the employer wants the H-1B worker and the employer wants the H-1B worker because they're a lot cheaper and they're controllable.
They're indentured to that employer.
So it's not a surprise if you gave two candidates to an employer and you said, here's somebody you can pay less than market rates who you can control, or here's somebody who has power and agency and can leave you and is going to command a market rate, a U.S. worker, they're going to choose the H-1B worker.
You know, the eligibility standards for H-1Bs is not very high.
It's just a bachelor's degree.
And that's about it and a willingness of an employer to sponsor them.
You know, this area is interesting because it's often the debate around this is clouded by a lot of inflammatory rhetoric, some around racial identity.
There are critics of H-1B and other kind of foreign visas that have used bigotry.
You know, there's many of these visas go to Indians.
And so you're seeing kind of really hateful rhetoric on social media against people of Indian descent, kind of conflated and twisted around these genuine concerns around wages and outsourcing.
But, you know, on the kind of flip side of that, you see many corporate lobbyists, people who represent the big tech lobby and other major industries that benefit from these visas, hiding behind concerns around bigotry to kind of dispel any kind of advocate for the American worker, for the American middle class, as lumped in those hateful bigots.
Don't listen to those labor unions.
Don't listen to the folks who are criticizing efforts to drive down wages or outsource or insource with foreign workers because those are all hateful people.
They aren't actually concerned about wages.
Do you see this?
Yeah, I think it's really unfortunate.
And I'd say a few things, obviously.
First off, personally, I'm Indian American.
You know, my parents were immigrants from India.
And my wife is an Indian immigrant.
She came as a child.
And my father-in-law actually came in on the predecessor of the H-1B, the H-1, and his first job when he came to the U.S. initially and then got permanent residence.
So, yeah, I know the Indian community is involved in it.
And I see the sort of despicable and hateful things that are said, but these things are misdirected, right?
Really, it should be directed towards this is an issue between employers and workers, right?
Are you siding with Wall Street and Profit and the CEOs?
Are you siding with workers?
And that's really how we should see this.
Every guest worker program in the world, whether it's high-skilled like H-1B or lower-skilled in the U.S. like H-2B or H-1A, which means that you don't need a bachelor's degree, H-2As in the agriculture, farm workers and the like.
Or if you're in the United Arab Emirates, right, if you've ever been to, you know, Dubai or Abu Dhabi, you'll see they rely on a lot of guest worker programs.
These guest workers are vulnerable to abuse, right?
So you really should be looking at this through the lens of, are you on the side of the employers, the corporations who are exploiting this, or are you on the side of workers?
And workers, meaning H-1B workers in this case, guest workers, if they're on H-1B or L1, as well as U.S. workers, because H-1B workers are being put in a really bad position.
Now, I would say that this is not, I think it was kind of misreported, misunderstood back in December when Elon Musk, you know, and there was a big blow up.
It was really kind of framed as this is an internal squabble between MAGA and the sort of tech bros that are supporting Trump.
When in fact, the longer history of the politics of H-1B, you've got very, you know, sort of worker-friendly, worker-oriented Democrats who've been fighting for reform alongside with pretty conservative Republicans.
So for example, Dick Durbin, who's the number three senator, pretty liberal Democrat from Illinois, has worked very closely with Chuck Grassley over the years to try to get real legislative reform.
Chuck Grassley's a Republican conservative.
You see Bernie Sanders, for example, as progressive as they get, worker-friendly as they get, speaking out about it.
And then you've got Indian American Congressman Rochana, who has also acknowledged that there are problems with the H-1B program and that it needs to be reformed.
And the other thing to keep in mind is a lot of people who work in the tech industry are Indian American like me.
So they may have come in on an H-1B or they may have been the child of an H-1B or an immigrant green card holder.
And they're in the tech industry and they're being disadvantaged by this exploitation of the program and the loopholes to bring in cheaper indentured workers that compete with them, undercut their opportunities, undercut their wages.
And in some cases, as you mentioned, even forcing them to train their replacements.
So this is not a, it should not be a racial and ethnic issue.
It should be all about whether we care about workers or not and a fairness in terms of employment policy and employment law.
You know, it does strike me, though, that although there are many Democratic champions, you mentioned Dick Durbin and Bernie Sanders, who's an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, for a party that has centered its 20th century identity around labor unions and concerns around the working class, blue-collar, and broad middle-class concerns,
where there's been opportunity in recent administrations in the Biden administration, certainly in the Obama administration, and in Congress, where Democrats have often had, over the last two decades, a majority in both houses, they have not championed efforts to reform H-1B.
It's really been kind of the outlier, very politically savvy amendments that are added to bigger bills because it's hard to fight against these explicit efforts.
But for a party that has made its heart and soul around fighting for the working class, they have not really championed this issue.
Why do you think that is?
Yeah, it's hard to say, but I will agree with you that not only have they not championed the issue, they've actually made things much worse.
So the Obama administration has made things worse in lots of ways.
The Biden administration made things much worse by actually adding loopholes into the H-1B program, expanding the OPT and other skilled guest worker programs.
And it's not because they didn't know what was going on.
In fact, Jared Bernstein is very familiar with the program and used to be at EPI and knows a lot of the work on H-1B.
Cecilia Rouse actually had a really great op-ed back in 2002 about the exploitation of these programs.
And she was also chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Biden.
So just from a personal standpoint, I think it's hugely disappointing that the Democrats, but it's also one of the reasons why I think people have walked away from the Democrats, because while their rhetoric is about working class Joe and labor union Joe, Biden, that is, they haven't actually, when they've had power and they've had power and they could do a lot of things, even without Congress, they could have done things through the executive branch, through regulations and the like.
They've actually made things worse rather than trying to address them in any way.
And, you know, I think this also, you know, sort of raises in stark relief that this is not really a partisan issue.
This is a populist elite.
So it's the populists on the left in the Democratic Party, whether they're independent like Bernie Sanders or other populists, versus the elites, the establishment within the Democratic Party.
And I think you see that playing out also on the Republican side.
So this is the quintessential example of the elites getting their way in both parties.
It's sort of the bipartisan BUI partisan approach.
There's a lot of money at stake.
That's right.
And, you know, a lot of the reporting has been based on the reach of Silicon Valley that when Democrats are in power, they kind of reverse their promises on some of these labor-centric concerns and are very open to the demands of Facebook, Meta, Google, Amazon, others on the H-1B issue and other kind of immigration-related concerns or skilled foreign worker concerns.
And Republicans are likewise very similar on that regard, but also a little bit more generous on the tax side for giving these tech companies what they want.
In addition, something I've written about recently and something that you've kind of commented on, there are a number of IT specialist firms that are kind of dual American Indian that come in and are very adept at working with major companies and helping them with their kind of, they're kind of burrowing in as their IT contractors, as outside IT contractors, and they're heavily dependent on H-1B's.
firms like Infosys and Tata, Cognizant, and others.
Could you talk a little bit about the role of these firms?
Because they also have a considerable political reach.
They've lobbied extensively within both parties.
They have a lot of relationships within the Democratic Party.
Yeah, so with the Silicon Valley side, what's been fascinating to me is it's been so important to them that in fact, celebrity CEOs have come out and either written the op-eds or actually testified before Congress.
So Bill Gates from Microsoft famously, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO at the time, Michael Bloomberg, who's the chair of Bloomberg News, all have said, we need vastly more.
Lottery Instead of Merit? 00:13:21
We need infinite number of H-1B.
So certainly they, you know, to them, it's a no-brainer.
We need lots more.
Now, their motivations are multifold.
And part of it actually ties into these outsourcing firms that have dominated really, they've had a plurality of the visas over the last 20 years.
And we have data going back 20 years of who gets the visas.
So, you know, when you think of H-1B super specialized skills, you know, in reality, these are people with ordinary skills.
Most of the firms that are getting them are in what we call IT services, so information technology services firms rather than product firms.
So they're not making software per se.
They're not writing, they're writing software code, but they're not making software products like Outlook or Word or making an Apple iPhone.
What they're doing instead is working in the back offices of big banks and insurance companies.
If you think about the biggest consumers of information technology, what is an insurance company?
It's really an information company, right?
They're not making a physical product.
They're handling information, which means that they buy a lot of computers, a lot of software, and they have to have that maintained and updated and customized.
So that's where these outsourcing firms come in.
And every Fortune 500 firm has a lot of big IT, both hardware as well as software, mostly software, but they need lots of people working on it.
So these outsourcing firms, so instead of citing bank hiring its own people to maintain their systems, their IT systems, they hire these outsourcing firms to come in and manage and do that.
Now, this is important because these are labor-intensive jobs, right?
Meaning that most of the cost is labor cost.
And because of the way the H-1B is set up, it's set up basically to invite these firms to pay lower than the market rate.
So they can save.
It's basically wage arbitrage.
So this is the sweet spot for them, right?
You've got something where you don't really need super specialized skills.
You need people with ordinary skills.
But the real key differentiator in your business model is that you can get somebody cheaper.
And so if you can get cheaper and the government is inviting you to do it cheaper because of the way the rules are set up, that you can hire an H-1B cheaper, they come in.
And so they flooded the market with this.
And then they facilitated the transfer of the work.
Their incentive is to transfer as much work offshore to India, in particular to my cousins in India, because the wages there are rock bottom.
You know, you can hire a technologist there, an IT person with a decent degree for about $5 an hour.
Here, it might cost you $80 or $90 an hour.
So your incentive is to transfer the work, but you can't transfer it all.
And so they use the H-1Bs for the cheaper labor on site in the U.S. and then also to liaison with the offshoring firms, part of the firm.
And so these companies, they try to maximize their use of these visa programs because, you know, why hire a U.S. worker if the government, the U.S. government is giving me an opportunity to make an extraordinary amount of profit by hiring and exploiting the guest worker program.
And could you walk the viewer through the lottery system and how these visas are actually distributed?
I don't think that's very well known or very well understood.
Yeah, so we're, you know, there's about 600,000 H-1B workers, but each year there's a cap on new H-1B workers who can be here, who can come in as new H-1B workers.
85,000 new H-1B workers can come in.
And your visa is good for three years and can be renewed for another three years.
So that's how you get the 600,000, right?
Those are people that are being renewed.
But each year you get 85,000.
Well, because this is such a big giveaway, a profitable giveaway to these companies, they flood the application period when it opens for 85,000.
So last year, for example, there were 300,000 applications on the first day the window opened for the 85,000 slots.
So you have 300,000 applications chasing 85,000 new slots.
And in government wisdom, again, because of politics and whatnot, instead of choosing the best 85,000, right, the best 30% or so, the highest quality, however you want to measure it based on merit, they run a random lottery.
So the cheap $60,000 a year IT worker who's going to replace an American worker has got the same chance as somebody who's making $500,000 a year in AI.
So the government, instead of selecting the best, you imagine like selective colleges and universities just choosing their freshman class based on random, right?
Just by whether someone meets a minimum qualifications instead of trying to put together the best sort of class.
So we've got this kind of crazy system, but it highlights that this has nothing really to do with merit or competence.
This really has to do with gaming the system.
And everybody in the industry knows that this is what's going on.
And everybody in the government knows that this is what's going on.
And the elites know that this is going on.
And they keep looking the other way.
So for example, Commerce Secretary Howard Luttnick recently called the H-1B program a scam, the visa program a scam.
Well, he's the commerce secretary.
They have power to do something, but they're going to give 85,000 jobs away by random lottery in about two and a half weeks in October 1.
Well, they seem to kind of act like they don't have power, that their hands are tied.
But as I understand it, the statute's not even clear in terms of how this doesn't have to be through a lottery, but they could through regulations or some kind of administrative action reform this.
They don't need an act of Congress.
And of course, working with Congress, which is highly indebted to and influenced by campaign donations from the affected industries, they could just do it on their own, whether it's the Biden administration or now the Trump administration in terms of reforming this process, right?
Yeah, in fact, the Biden administration on their campaign website when they were running in 2020 against Trump, they said, we're going to reform this.
This is one of the first steps we're going to do.
We're going to choose by highest wages and most merit rather than through a random lottery.
And then lo and behold, they put in two industry lobbyists into the White House running immigration policy.
And instead of fixing it, they actually made things worse and expanded the loopholes so that, in fact, some additional employers were exempt.
In the case of the Trump administration, they've been dragging their heels.
And they have a playbook.
Back in the first Trump administration, Trump 45, they actually issued a number of regulations.
One on this, replacing the lottery with a wage, choosing highest wages as a proxy for highest skilled or most merit.
But they also had other ones where they were going to reform the way the minimum wage is set so that it's closer to a market wage so that if you hired an H-1B, they wouldn't be paid less than U.S. workers.
They could issue that.
They could reissue a number of things that they had planned.
So they have a playbook there.
It's not complicated, not surprising.
And they could get that done administratively.
They could also put pressure on Congress to add riders to legislation to fix it sort of more permanently through statute.
These wouldn't be complicated fixes.
In the case of replacing the lottery, it would be a half-page bill that would be amendment that would be added to a bill.
And that's certainly doable.
It's just a matter of whether the White House would push behind it.
It'd be hard for anybody to vote against that, including on the Democratic side.
No, that's a good point.
And as part of the one big, beautiful bill, there's a lot of immigration policy tucked into that.
They could have made this a priority.
I'm just, you know, as someone who has, I think, fairly nuanced positions on immigration, you know, I understand a lot of the arguments on both sides.
It does kind of move me that, you know, this is an administration that has used some very draconian measures against kind of regular people, farm workers, people here who are working blue-collar jobs, but came here illegally, but are not applying that same level of pressure.
And there are many statutes they could draw upon to enforce actions against employers, against the big corporations who lured these workers here for lower wages, who are exploiting their labor to undercut American workers.
The Trump administration has a lot of tools at its disposal to go after big business.
They haven't really done so so far.
Yeah, there's a lot of enforcement tools that they're leaving on the table that they're not exercising, that they have control over, even aside from the rulemaking that they could do.
And this isn't because they don't know what's going on.
Trump himself actually campaigned with Leo Pereiro and some of the Disney workers who trained their H-1B replacements back in 2015, 2016.
And Stephen Miller was Jeff Sessions' communications director.
Jeff Sessions held, chaired a hearing, chaired the immigration subcommittee about all of these issues.
So Stephen Miller is very well versed in all of this.
They traveled around with those Disney workers and made a big deal, made a lot of hay out of it during the campaign against Hillary Clinton.
So it's a matter of they know what to do.
I know what to do.
They know what to do.
They can do it.
And there's a variety of things that they can do that they know how to do, either statutorily or by enforcement or by executive action.
They've just sat on their hands, which is remarkable given all of the kind of, I think, kind of crazy stuff they've done in other areas of immigration policy.
This is an anti-worker program.
But you also don't see the Democrats standing up and saying, hey, Trump, calling him on his claims that he's on behalf of the working class.
I mean, this would be a perfect opportunity for the Democrats to call out him being a hypocrite on this issue.
Yeah, please correct me if I'm wrong.
But I've followed this issue and it just seems like a freebie that if the polls are correct, and I believe they are, that Americans are genuinely concerned about immigration and foreign workers taking their jobs.
They're concerned about outsourcing jobs being moved to Mexico or China or anywhere else in the world.
This is something that is incredibly politically salient.
It's a jump ball.
Democrats could seize the issue, whether on H-1Bs or other similar outsourcing efforts, and they're totally missing in action.
Bernie Sanders has put out some very interesting statements earlier this year, but I'm not aware of anything beyond that from most of the Democratic Party.
Yeah, you know, the Congressional Progressive Caucus actually about four years ago put out a very interesting and pretty sharp letter also calling the Trump administration to do something about this.
So they can do it if they want to.
They've chosen not to do anything.
But for sure, you would think this would be a simple issue.
You know, again, this is an anti-worker program, right?
It's not just bad for U.S. workers.
It's bad for H-1B workers, too.
They're put in a bad, precarious position.
And if you actually talk to them and the leading organization that represents them, Immigration Voice, they actually call themselves basically indentured servants.
They're in indentured servitude, right?
Which is a huge contrast from what the tech Titans talk about and big business talks about in terms of what the H-1B is.
These folks themselves are suffering, and that's bad for them.
It's also bad for U.S. workers.
And what the industry's done, and there's a whole visa industrial complex, kind of like the military industrial complex, where they spread money into think tanks and elsewhere and into the press and press releases.
And they're up on the hill all the time.
I know, because I worked up on the hill a few years ago, and you would see them constantly talking about false claims of shortages, workforce shortages, and all that kind of thing.
And so it shapes kind of the atmosphere in the minds of people.
But this really is, they've divided and conquered in a lot of ways.
They've divided the guest workers, the non-immigrants who are being exploited from U.S. workers.
And so instead of uniting as like workers against these employers and calling on reform, we've got this kind of people are confused about what's happening.
White-Collar Offshoring Mystery 00:02:18
In terms of the outsourcing and offshoring, of course, Trump and Peter Navarro have made a big deal.
And the trade rep Bob Lighthizer and the new one, Greer, James Greer, made a big deal about the trade deficit and the offshoring of especially manufactured goods to Mexico, to China.
And even, you know, you see in the New York Times editorial board, they've kind of changed their tune a little bit, not quite entirely.
But what's interesting about that is there's a huge amount of white-collar offshoring, offshoring of services.
So software, all the big four accounting firms, huge, huge presence and huge employment in India.
But no one pays attention to that.
And the reason is we don't measure trade in services.
So, you know, when a toy comes or a computer comes across in Long Beach, you know, in the port of Long Beach, it gets counted, right, in the trade data in terms of trade in goods.
There's a physical product.
When those electrons get traveled, you know, over the internet from Deloitte, you know, India to Deloitte in the U.S., no one's paying any attention, right, of that trade that's going on.
And that's international trade.
And it's a huge amount.
And no one knows how much of that is going on.
But because it's not visible, because we're not counting it, no one knows that.
And it hasn't become a focal point, including in the Trump administration.
We could count those things, but we've chosen not to.
And I know this goes back to, actually, I wrote a book back in 2005 called Outsourcing America.
And one of the first things I called for in terms of my policy solutions was we need to get a handle on how much of this is going on.
And let's see how much trade in services is going on.
And I could tell you that the official data that's from the Census Bureau totally undercounts and miscounts what's happening in terms of the amount of offshored white-collar work that's there.
And we're talking about millions of jobs, not just to India, but to Argentina and other low-cost countries.
Worker Voice Grows 00:03:26
If we had that visible, maybe people would start to actually, if you don't see a problem, you don't know that it exists.
And that's kind of what's going on on the outsourcing of white-collar work.
You know, I get the sense, and sometimes, you know, it's dangerous to rely on social media.
It's a funhouse mirror that magnifies some things that are trivial.
But I do notice a larger and larger number of people speaking out on various platforms, especially X, but some of the others, about this kind of constant pressure against white-collar workers that, you know, it just seems like we're at a certain tipping point where new wage growth, especially for Gen Z, is very low.
Young people are not getting jobs who are very educated in fields that are high skill in finance and engineering and computer and tech related jobs.
There's also this kind of looming threat around AI that AI seems to be really kind of automating a lot of these jobs and maybe not in a whole scale way, but shipping away a new job growth.
And this kind of growing realization.
H-1B is, of course, not the only visa program.
You've mentioned many others, but it's kind of the shorthand for all of these types of programs that represent a certain type of outsourcing of American jobs.
And it just seems that there isn't a labor union or a group that specifically speaks for these types of workers, but there's a growing voice on social media of an economic anxiety and anger that the politicians are not working for these types of people who are being displaced constantly.
And again, it's not just one factor.
It's maybe the slowdown in the economy.
It's AI.
It's these visa programs.
It's kind of everything.
But people are starting to feel the heat.
Yeah, so there's a lot there.
And I could try to address a lot of it.
I'll try to pick a couple of things.
So one on the labor union side, you know, labor unions have been engaged to some extent on both the visa stuff as well as on offshoring and outsourcing of white-collar work.
But the reality is that there's a very small number of engineers and even a smaller number and share of computer workers who are unionized.
And most of the computer workers who are unionized are in the public sector.
So they work for government organizations.
So it's less than 1%.
I mean, we're only at 6% in terms of overall in terms of the private sector workforce.
But, you know, so the unions are going to go where their members need them to go.
And so there isn't that worker voice.
And there's no way to channel that right now.
There's no organization.
I'm a member of IEEE.
I'm an electrical engineer.
And they can't, they're a transnational, multinational organization.
And while they have a U.S. office, they're really skittish about coming out strongly talking about these because they've got members that are benefiting from it too.
So you don't have that U.S. worker voice.
And nothing has really coalesced in terms of an organization, much to my chagrin.
Job Loss Dismissed 00:04:29
Again, I wrote about this more than 20 years ago saying that we need that kind of organization.
I just didn't know how to do it myself.
So maybe hopefully something will come out of that.
The other part is that I think there's a systematic belief amongst the elites, and this is reinforced by economists, of dismissing and diminishing workers who lose their jobs, the adverse effects.
So if you lost your job, right, think about it, like you might have a family member who's lost a job.
I know my late father, you know, lost his job in his late 40s.
He was an engineer.
And it devastated the family, but it devastated him individually, right?
There's a lot of costs, both economic costs, financial costs, you know, to the family, but also, you know, to him emotionally, psychologically, etc.
So job loss is something that's very serious.
And imagine you training your replacement.
Your government is telling you there's a shortage of these workers.
And this is Leo Pereira's story, but it's thousands of times over.
U.S. workers are being told this H-1B worker is being brought in because there's a shortage of your skills.
And then Disney's telling you, hey, you got to train your replacement here on H-1B.
And by the way, there's no real job on the other side because you know the job market, right?
It's devastating on multiple fronts.
But what economists have done is they've manipulated their discussion around job loss and they've sort of dismissed what those individual losses are to those people who do lose their jobs, whether it's training their replacement or because the job market's lousy, or as we've got young people graduating now competing against guest workers on optional practical training, foreign workers that are being imported that has nothing to do with shortages or anything like that.
They're losing their job opportunities, their wages, and they're going to be affected for their career.
That's what we know from the 07-08 recession when people graduated in a bad market.
They never recover throughout their career.
So economists have really taken that and twisted it.
And so you see these major think tanks just kind of blow off the concerns that workers had.
And there's a parallel here with what happened in the blue-collar sort of rust belt, where for years we were told it was no big deal that these cities in West Virginia and Ohio and Pennsylvania shrunk because manufacturing got offshored.
They'll just find other jobs.
They'll learn how to code or do something else.
The labor market is dynamic.
The American economy is dynamic and it'll keep creating jobs.
So they're looking at kind of the top line, like unemployment rates and maybe employment overall.
They're not looking at the quality of the jobs nor the real job loss.
Now, there are data that do show this, something called the Dislocated Worker Survey.
But most of these economists who cover trade and offshoring and the mainstream, they're really pretty dishonest about, I have to say, I've been at this for a long time.
I'm not an economist, but I know the issues and know the data very well.
They're very dishonest because they sort of cherry pick and ignore these losses.
So if we concentrated on that a lot more, I think we would see much more.
It's just not evident because people aren't looking at the right data and they're not collecting the information that's needed to expose it.
And so the economists will read the articles that have been in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere about recent grads having difficulty finding jobs.
And they'll say, oh, that's just anecdotes.
It doesn't really matter.
It's not real data.
We economists know better.
But we know what happened in the Midwest, right?
You had an opioid epidemic, right?
Because people were so depressed, right?
Because they lost their jobs and there was no hope for anything better than working in retail at the Target or at the Walmart or the Dollar General, right?
I mean, we hollowed out that.
You're seeing that also in the white-collar area.
It's just they tend to be in cities.
And so it's kind of hidden these losses.
Voices From The New Right 00:06:17
So I think it's a really important point and we need to really expose that more and analyze it more.
But somebody's got to take an interest in doing that.
And there's no funding to do that kind of work.
Yeah, well, I want to pick up on that and just kind of ask you a personal question.
And I want to preface it by saying I talked to a lot of very principled advocates on foreign policy issues who are concerned about U.S. overreach in terms of our military in Yemen and Israel and Afghanistan and other parts of the world.
And for folks who have kind of historically been coded or aligned with progressive institutions, they've seen a lot of opportunity in building bridges with the MAGA right, that there are certain voices within the Republican Party that are very populist, that are very outspoken on kind of breaking the neoconservative dogma that kind of shapes a lot of foreign policy in Washington, D.C.
And I want to ask you, and for folks who kind of engage in that, who have been historically aligned with the left, there is an attempt to stigmatize them, to sideline them, to basically censor them and remove them from the good graces of the progressive movement or whatever kind of think tank or congressional job that they might have, some of the doors close.
As someone who's incredibly principled and working on an issue that is historically aligned with the left, but now that there are opportunities to work with the MAGA populists on the right, there are people in Congress, as you mentioned, there are voices within the Trump administration who have identified very publicly this issue.
And we know where they stand.
Maybe they don't have the power within the administration to act.
But there are certainly opportunities there for kind of a progressive MAGA coalition on outsourcing and some of these visa issues.
Has that affected you personally?
Have you been able to work within EPI and other places in D.C.?
Has there been pushback personally for kind of reaching out or speaking out on this?
Yeah, so I'm speaking today on, you know, from my Howard University purge.
So, you know, one of the advantages of being an academic is that I can speak my mind somewhat freely.
But what I would say is it's been fascinating to me to watch what's called sometimes called the new right.
So I think of Oren Cass and American Compass and the work they've done to try to influence and transform the thinking on the conservative side, especially in the Republican Party around trade and many of these kind of populist issues.
And that's a welcome change, you know, because back in 05 when outsourcing was in the, you know, literally on the covers of every magazine and news publication, you know, you had basically the response was, you know, the world is flat from Tom Friedman, which was, you know, just he's a spokesperson for the big businesses and supposedly a Democrat, but who knows, you know, what that really means.
So I think it is complicated.
I think there's not much money on the left to really fight for these kinds of issues.
I think that's a big problem.
And so, you know, the labor unions have to focus on, you know, choring up what they've got.
And I think they're rightly concerned.
For example, the Trump administration has been attacking them in a big way.
So I tend to stay out of, I stay in my lane into the things I actually know really well.
I hate these pundits who can opine about everything.
But it is disappointing, I think, on the progressive left that there aren't more voices.
But I would say, you know, EPI has given me a platform.
They've been supportive along the way to, you know, raise and help me with some of my work and getting the messaging out and things like that.
And it's welcome that all of a sudden you've got folks on the conservative side that are like, you know, worker-oriented, worker-centered.
Now, their solutions may be a little bit different in terms of how they approach it, but I think they have given some intellectual cover, for example, to the tariffs and some of the trade policies of the administration.
And my sense is that, you know, the American Compass and there's other organizations that they really have weighed in a bit on the immigration and visa issue.
I don't think they know as much about the white collar offshoring and outsourcing.
And you heard Eric Schmidt, for example, who's a senator from Missouri, speak out about H-1Bs, and that's a new voice that's there that we didn't see before.
But, you know, the other voices were like Sherrod Brown, who lost, right?
He's a progressive Democrat, and he was always on reform bills.
Bill Pascral from New Jersey, who was a progressive and had some constituents, a representative Democrat from New Jersey, who had constituents who trained their replacements and was actually the originator of some of the reforms back in 2001, 2002.
Bob Reich, when he was in the Clinton administration, talked about this.
So if somebody looked at this sort of objectively and logically, they'd say, yeah, these things really need to be reformed.
The thing is, it's not a priority for them.
And, you know, in the reality, there's got to be money behind it.
And academics chase money just like everybody else.
And so unless you've got a foundation that's going to fund you to do these things, you know, few people are going to take up the mantle, much to the chagrin of my wife and family.
I've spent a lot of time on this, mostly unfunded on it.
No, I think that's a tragedy.
And, you know, for viewers at home, it's not like there's, you know, I get a lot of comments when I talk about this issue and they say that there's no money on the left.
Well, look at the Tides Foundation 990s or many of the large liberal charities and foundations.
Shocking Misinformation About H-1B 00:04:03
There are hundreds of millions of dollars that are donated, but a very small proportion of that goes to economic populist issues.
It's right there in the data.
It's not hidden.
I'm not saying the other causes are not worthy, but, you know, I think Ron's kind of laying it out that very little is spent on this specific issue or even broadly other than economic justice issues.
And if I could add a couple of quick things, just, you know, a lot of the think tanks, the people who work in think tanks, you know, I don't work in a think tank.
I'm affiliated with one.
There's a lot of soft money, right?
So meaning that you've got to raise money and the people with the money are the ones who are going to decide on the agenda.
And if it's not what they want, then you're not going to get funded to do it.
So you're not going to end up doing that kind of work.
And there's a lot of groupthink in the academic world.
You know, you'd be shocked at how little people actually know about the details of any of this.
And they don't read much.
You know, I've been shocked by some of the very prominent economists who've written H-1B, written a book on H-1B.
There was somebody recently from Wharton who wrote a book, and it was literally called The Truth About Immigration.
And he got basic facts like, hey, employers don't have to look for U.S. workers before hiring an H-1B worker.
He got that basic fact wrong in a published book that was called The Truth About Immigration.
And, you know, The Economist in a Cover Story got it wrong.
And, you know, and the New York Times has gotten it wrong.
I've had the AP fix one of their Explainer articles that got it wrong.
You know, this basic notion that people believe you have to demonstrate there's a shortage of U.S. workers before hiring H-1B.
It's totally false.
But I can guarantee you nine people out of 10 in Washington who do policy work on this stuff believe that to be true.
And then that bleeds up to, for example, Joe Biden, when he was vice president campaigning for Obama, made that statement to a reporter in Iowa when he was campaigning for him that, you know, that I know the H-1B well, as Biden would want to do, and say, you have to prove there's no American who can do the job before hiring an H-1B.
So those have real world, you know, consequences, you know, and congressional staff.
So I could go on.
I mean, I've spent so many times trying to correct reporters, trying to correct the record, just getting the basic facts out.
If anybody looked at this objectively, they'd be like shaking their heads.
He's like, you got to be kidding me.
This is how it works.
We set this up so that we could undercut, we could exploit these guest workers and we could be undercutting some of our own best and brightest people with this just to give some extra money to companies who are rich beyond belief.
And remember, this is not a small issue.
And I've had people tell me, oh, this is your minor issue that you work on.
These companies like the outsourcing firms like Cognizant and Infosys and TCS, they're worth tens of billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars.
And they employ hundreds of thousands of workers.
So most people, when they think about IT tech workers, they think Google and Apple.
Most of the workforce in IT and information technology are working at those back offices of the big banks and the Fortune 500 companies.
That's where the people work.
Those are the plum jobs, really.
That's the bread and butter of the tech job.
So there's a lot of misinformation, but it's purposeful, right?
By the elites because they're protecting themselves and pulling the wool.
And they've been successful.
And maybe that's a damning statement on my own efforts in trying to correct the record.
No, I'm just incredibly heartened that you're doing this work.
So few people are speaking out on behalf of the American worker and particularly on white-collar jobs.
So I just want to thank you again for this great interview, Ron.
Thanks for joining System Update.
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