Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor - How Does the H-1B Visa System Work?
Aired: 2025-01-10
Duration: 11:33


=== H-1B Work Visas: A Miserable Fraud (04:54) ===

[00:00:00]  There's been a lot of talk about H-1B work visas.
[00:00:04]  72.6% of the people who come in on them are Indians.
[00:00:08]  12.5% are Chinese.
[00:00:11]  And only about 2% are white.
[00:00:14]  But naturally, the sample visa you find on the internet is for a Frenchman.
[00:00:19]  The whole thing is a miserable con on American workers.
[00:00:23]  A way to bring in cheap foreigners to undercut wages.
[00:00:27]  But how?
[00:00:28]  Does it work?
[00:00:30]  I thought a company couldn't hire H-1Bs unless it advertised for Americans and couldn't get them.
[00:00:36]  Boy, was I wrong.
[00:00:38]  Every year, hundreds of thousands of foreigners get jobs Americans never even heard about.
[00:00:44]  What a miserable fraud.
[00:00:46]  The original H-1 visa goes back to 1952 to let in foreigners of distinguished merit and ability to perform The law has been turned upside down.
[00:01:13]  Now, unlike every other work visa, the more recently established H-1A and H-1B visas are set up to lead directly to permanent residency.
[00:01:25]  And they are not limited to people of distinguished merit and ability.
[00:01:30]  Believe it or not, even cooks and cashiers can get them.
[00:01:35]  There's supposed to be an annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas.
[00:01:40]  President Clinton temporarily raised the cap for three years to 195,000, but caps don't mean much.
[00:01:48]  Besides the 65,000, there are an additional...
[00:01:52]  20,000 visas for people who have earned a master's degree or higher in America.
[00:01:57]  There is no cap at all on H-1Bs used for work in universities and research institutions.
[00:02:05]  And these limits are only for newly issued H-1Bs, which are for three years.
[00:02:11]  There's no cap on renewals.
[00:02:14]  And that is how you get annual totals like these from 2016 to 2023.
[00:02:20]  In 2023, the first figure of 118,948 is for brand new H-1Bs.
[00:02:28]  That's almost 34,000 more than the theoretical limit of 85,000 if you add the two caps of 65,000 and 20,000.
[00:02:38]  And as you can see, there were more than 260,000 H-1B renewals that year for a total number of 386,318.
[00:02:50]  You're supposed to be able to renew a three-year H-1B only once for another three years.
[00:02:56]  But there are all sorts of rules for getting around this.
[00:03:00]  And foreigners, yes, foreigners can get special Defense Department H-1Bs that are good for 10 years.
[00:03:09]  How many people are here on H-1B visas?
[00:03:12]  That number is in this H-1B Authorized to Work report.
[00:03:17]  But the most recent figure is only up to third quarter 2019, when there were 619,327 foreigners working here on H-1Bs.
[00:03:29]  If you have one of those visas, you can bring over all your children under 21 and your spouse, and spouses can legally work.
[00:03:38]  I bet you never even thought about that.
[00:03:40]  According to some estimates, several hundred thousand spouses have jobs.
[00:03:46]  Jobs, I suppose, Americans just won't do.
[00:03:49]  As I mentioned, unlike other work visas, H-1Bs are meant to be a route to adjusting your status to Lawful Permanent Resident, or LPR.
[00:04:01]  The estimated total number of H-1B non-immigrants who have adjusted status in fiscal year 2017 to 2019 is 96,798.
[00:04:14]  That's more than $32,000 a year, which means that every year, just over 5% of H-1B workers get a green card and no longer need a visa at all.
[00:04:27]  Next step, citizenship.
[00:04:30]  Visas are supposed to go only for theoretical and practical application of highly specialized knowledge, but all sorts of people get them.

=== Foreign Worker Headhunting (05:16) ===

[00:04:39]  And an employer does not.
[00:04:41]  I repeat, does not have to try to hire Americans first.
[00:04:46]  All he has to do is fill in a Labor Condition Application, or LCA, online.
[00:04:52]  It might take three minutes.
[00:04:54]  It says the foreign worker will get the prevailing wage and that hiring a foreigner will not make working conditions worse for Americans.
[00:05:03]  Who checks that?
[00:05:05]  LCAs are reviewed by the department within seven working days for completeness and obvious errors or inaccuracies.
[00:05:14]  That is bureaucraties for rubber stamp.
[00:05:18]  Only if you have so many H-1B workers you are classified as H-1B dependent, or you have already been caught out as a willful violator of the rules, only then do you have to claim you tried to hire Americans first.
[00:05:35]  Yep, they let cheaters back in the game.
[00:05:38]  And who's going to check?
[00:05:40]  A huge percentage of these applications are filed by middlemen, headhunters, and most of them aren't even American companies.
[00:05:51]  Here are the top 12 H-1B applicant companies for 2021.
[00:05:57]  See where it says, outsourcing, offshoring?
[00:06:00]  If that condom says yes, those companies are body shops that find cheap foreigners to work for American companies.
[00:06:07]  Out of the top 12, only Amazon.
[00:06:10]  Google and Facebook are hiring H1Bs for their own account.
[00:06:15]  Number two, Infosys, based in Bangalore, India.
[00:06:20]  Number three, Tata, Mumbai, India.
[00:06:23]  Number four, Wipro, Bangalore.
[00:06:26]  Number five, Cognizant is in New Jersey, but was founded in India and run by Indians.
[00:06:33]  Number eight, HCL, Nodiyah, India.
[00:06:37]  Number 10,
[00:06:38]  Deloitte, India supports H-1B applications.
[00:06:42]  Number 12. Tech Mahindra in Pune, India.
[00:06:47]  How do you make money doing this?
[00:06:49]  Like any headhunter, you charge a fee for each foreigner you send to an American client and or you skim off part of his salary.
[00:06:57]  Client pays you $60,000 for the H-1B worker.
[00:07:01]  You pay the worker $50,000.
[00:07:04]  Sometimes the headhunter just steals wages.
[00:07:07]  This 2021 report found that the big Indian body shop HCL, which sends workers to Disney, FedEx, and Google, was stealing at least $95 million a year from H-1B workers.
[00:07:21]  Amazon only recently reached the top spot in H-1B sweepstakes.
[00:07:26]  In 2016, it was number 10, way behind the Indians.
[00:07:31]  But as you can see, all it did was cut out the middleman.
[00:07:35]  The green chunks, For both males and females, those are Indians.
[00:07:39]  The red chunks are Chinese.
[00:07:42]  Sometimes American companies get caught.
[00:07:45]  In 2021, Facebook had to pay a $5 million fine and pay up to $9.5 million to the Americans it refused to hire.
[00:07:54]  Foreigners can get H-1B visas for rock-bottom jobs.
[00:07:59]  VisaPal is a site that tracks who gets what.
[00:08:03]  So how about this?
[00:08:05]  The top row is for a 7-Eleven cashier who got $25,000 a year in East Haven, Connecticut.
[00:08:12]  This is followed by application date and job start date.
[00:08:16]  In 2015, a cashier in Chino, California slipped in for $18,000 a year.
[00:08:24]  Here are dancers and cooks.
[00:08:26]  The dancers' H-1Bs came through in 2010.
[00:08:30]  But I don't think the prevailing wage that year for a ballet dancer in New York City was under $20,000.
[00:08:38]  And not one of these cooks was making over $30,000.
[00:08:43]  I wonder how many of those cashiers and cooks are now U.S. citizens.
[00:08:48]  And what was the standard for H-1Bs?
[00:08:51]  Highly specialized knowledge.
[00:08:54]  What a joke.
[00:08:56]  The system is full of weird complications.
[00:08:59]  There is a lottery for applications that exceed the caps, and Indian headhunters load the dice for their customers by filing dozens of online applications for the same guy.
[00:09:12]  Tech bosses are always complaining about a shortage of American STEM workers, but that's Bosch.
[00:09:18]  This 2022 article from a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute carefully demolishes that argument.
[00:09:26]  Bosses just want cheap labor.
[00:09:29]  And this table shows that from 2016 to 2021, while real wages, the orange bars, grew for other professions, they shrank in computer, math, and engineering jobs, where H-1B competition is worst.

=== Trump's Criticism of H-1B (01:52) ===

[00:09:44]  Some laid-off Americans had to train their replacements.
[00:09:47]  Even the New York Times didn't like that.
[00:09:50]  Pink slips at Disney, but first, training foreign replacements.
[00:09:56]  In 2016, candidate for president Donald Trump slammed the H-1B system.
[00:10:02]  I know the H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use.
[00:10:08]  We shouldn't have it.
[00:10:09]  Very, very bad for workers.
[00:10:11]  Candidate Bernie Sanders was an H-1B skeptic, too.
[00:10:15]  He lambasted tech companies for hiring visa holders at the same time they're cutting other staffers.
[00:10:22]  Even candidate Hillary lashed out against U.S. IT workers having to train their H-1B replacements, calling the employers callous and insensitive.
[00:10:33]  When he was president the first time, Donald Trump ordered a review of the H-1B system, but nothing came of it.
[00:10:40]  Now, of course, he's changed his tune.
[00:10:43]  Trump supports immigration visas backed by Musk.
[00:10:48]  I have many H-1B visas on my properties.
[00:10:52]  Cooks and cashiers, Mr. Trump?
[00:10:54]  The Indians in his circle, AI chief Sriram Krishnan and Vivek Ramaswamy, want loads more H-1B visas, especially for Indians.
[00:11:06]  Three million of them in America.
[00:11:09]  Fourteen times as many as in 1980, just aren't enough.
[00:11:13]  And I guess the $27.6 billion in remittances Indians shipped back home to India, that's not enough either.
[00:11:22]  What a deal!
[00:11:23]  Take jobs from Americans and spend your paycheck in India, not America.
[00:11:29]  Donald Trump says he's going to make America great again.