A clash over an obscure immigration policy has been brewing for months within Trumpworld, one that could threaten the Republican administration’s unlikely alliance with Big Tech.
The H-1B visa process has always been divisive, but the debate over the renewable 3-year specialist visa, popular in the tech world, has taken on a new intensity. Prominent tech leaders in the Trump coalition have squared off against an explicitly xenophobic MAGA wing that opposes H-1B on economic and identity grounds, given that the majority of H-1Bs go to Indian people.
Roughly 60 percent of the hundreds of thousands of H-1B visas in use each year go to computer-related jobs, and companies that have sought to align with Trump, like Palantir, Oracle, and Tesla have all used the program.
Amazon, which donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund and does billions of dollars of business with the government, was the single largest sponsor of H-1Bs in 2025, according to a Newsweek analysis.
The fight has been brewing since December, when tech industry Trump backers and future DOGE leaders Elon Musk argued such programs were “essential” because many Americans were not smart enough to do the job and that American culture “venerated mediocrity.”
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk wrote on X, adding, “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
The comments set off a brief but fiery MAGA civil war, with far-right figures like Laura Loomer, now an influential outside advisor to the Trump administration, sharply criticizing the program while also demeaning people from India more broadly as “third-world invaders. Online trolls, meanwhile, harassed Trump’s Indian-born AI advisor Sriram Krishnan. The same day President Trump took office, the White House announced that Ramaswamy, the child of Indian immigrants, would exit from DOGE.
This summer, the administration’s criticism of H-1B visas — along with accompanying right-wing invective online against Indians — roared back, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick decrying the program as a “scam” in August, and Vice President JD Vance hammering tech companies for the “bullsh**” story that they can’t find enough American workers.
The Department of Homeland Security is widely thought to be planning on introducing a rule sometime this year that would tilt the H-1B process, which currently operates as a lottery issuing 85,000 new visas per year, towards the highest-paying jobs first.
The scorched-earth political debate around the H-1B program in the tech world has long obscured the visa’s original intentions, according to former Democratic Rep. Bruce Morrison of Connecticut, who led the passage of the 1990 law that ushered it in. The legislation came on the heels of the Reagan administration tightening penalties for illegal hiring and giving legal status to millions who had previously arrived in the country illegally. This was all meant to encourage employers to seek foreign workers through long-term, legal means like green cards.
Instead, Morrison told The Independent, large-scale immigration reforms in Congress stalled and tech companies have come to rely heavily on H-1Bs, while backlogs in green card approvals span from decades to centuries for large nations like India.
“They have intentionally done this with full knowledge of what they’re doing,” Morrison said of the tech sector.
“That tells you they see something there that’s beneficial to them, and I think the something is lower costs and greater control,” he added.
Studies suggest H-1B holders, who lack any real leverage with their employers, are paid averages of between 10 and 20 percent less, despite ostensible requirements they be paid at levels approximating their domestic competition.
Further complicating the debate is that leading tech figures, and the president himself, often offer dubious or shifting rationales about H-1Bs.
During his first run for president, Trump vowed to “end forever” the widespread use of the program, and his first administration sought to tighten the program and stepped up H-1B rejection rates.
By the 2024 election, however, Trump completely reversed, telling the tech-focused All-In podcast that summer he would deliver on industry pleas for more H-1B visas to secure top talent. The Republican went even further, suggesting all foreign college students get a green card upon graduation because “you need brilliant people,” though he later backed off the proposal.
As the Musk-Ramaswamy comments generated controversy online later that winter, Trump explicitly praised H-1Bs, calling himself a “believer” who used the “great” program “many times.”
Tech figures like Musk and the hosts of All-In, meanwhile, frequently describe the H-1B program as a way to recruit the best of the best — during the December blow-up, Musk compared foreign hiring to assembling an all-star U.S. NBA team with a few top foreign players — though that’s not quite the case. The H-1B program uses a lottery system and only requires that applicants have a bachelor’s degree to apply. There’s an entirely separate immigration category for true international stars of their respective fields.
The H-1B program has always been a controversial one, but what’s new now is the identity-focused dimension of opposition to it, according to Professor Gabrielle Clark, a political scientist at California State University, Los Angeles.
“Opposition to the H-1B program, in its current form, did not originate with the nativism and xenophobia on the right,” she told The Independent in an email. “In fact, American labor groups such as the AFL-CIO have historically been the main political actor asking for more protections for American workers from H-1Bs. The current anti-immigrant climate, however, has brought more attention to the program and heightened racialized opposition.”
At the ground level, tech workers who have themselves used H-1Bs have a complicated set of opinions.
One Indian-born worker, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely, described being both a success story and a cautionary tale of H-1B.
Despite spending over a decade working on high-level tech projects at major U.S. financial institutions, he’s watched as he’s been paid less, and he has been stuck waiting to receive a green card that was approved in 2017.
“It’s like purgatory,” he said, adding, “I’m all for immigration reform. I’ve been part of the system since 2009 now. There’s been zero change, zero improvement.”
He said the image of Indian workers taking all the best jobs is not an accurate one, though he admits he does know individuals who are part of the transnational Indian tech consultancies who recruit some three-quarters of H-1B workers, providing scores of lower-skilled H-1Bs to less prestigious companies.
Others have warned that major cuts to H-1B, or changes to favor blue-chip tech jobs, could harm smaller companies, school districts seeking specialists like language instructors, and businesses looking to hire lower-level recent grads.
“Although the H-1B program is not perfect, it benefits the U.S. because it helps create an open and inclusive economy by attracting foreign talent and bright foreign students, often who were educated in the U.S.,” California-based immigration attorney Curtis Morrison told The Independent.
Axing the program entirely would “create a lose-lose situation,” Morrison added.
Bruce Morrison, a former congressman from Connecticut, said he hopes the discourse around temporary workers can move beyond a narrow focus on H-1B to reform deeper issues like the overall immigration system and the training and education of future U.S. workers.
“We’ve brought out the worst fears and concerns of the public, rather than play to their actual support of immigration in certain forms with certain constraints,” he said. “Now we have a disaster on our hands.”
Rather than reframe the debate, the Trump administration has largely gone on the attack.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller last month accused India of “cheating on immigration policy,” the same month the administration put a 50 percent tariff on the U.S. trading partner.
Domestically, the administration has revoked thousands of foreign student visas, punished and arrested Indian nationals on campus for their views on Palestine, and cut billions from the top universities.
The former H-1B worker said in the face of the current political and economic climate, he’s already seeing companies outsource tech labor to other countries, a trend that accelerated in the wake of the pandemic’s remote work evolution.
He argued the continued stasis on immigration reform, as well as the continued demonization of Indian people, will harm the U.S. overall. He pointed to the example of the chief executives of both Alphabet and Microsoft being born in India, and wondered if the next such leader would start their career or company in another country instead.
“These people, and folks like me, I’m proud of the work which I have done,” he said. “There’s a lot of pride in working in a career that is making the overall economy stronger.”
However, as he awaits permanent residency after nearly two decades in America, he’s been considering an option that once would’ve been inconceivable. He’s now looking at open positions in India, where his skills are in demand.
