How Does the H-1B Visa System Work?

Not in your favor, whitey.

This video is available on Rumble, BitChute, Odysee, and X.

There has been a lot of talk about H-1B work visas. Seventy-two-point-six percent of the people who come in on them are Indians, 12.5 percent are Chinese, and only about 2 percent are white, but naturally, the sample visa you find on the internet is for a Frenchman!

The whole thing is a miserable con on American workers—a way to bring in cheap foreigners to undercut wages. But how does it work?

I thought a company couldn’t hire H-1Bs unless it advertised for Americans and couldn’t get them. Boy, was I wrong. Every year hundreds of thousands of foreigners get jobs Americans never even heard about. What a miserable fraud.

The original H-1 visa goes back to 1952, to let in foreigners “of distinguished merit and ability” to “perform temporary services of an exceptional nature.”

Europe was still recovering from the Second World War, and the idea was to bring over outstanding Europeans, and the H-1 was not a route to citizenship.

The law has been turned upside down. 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, and they are not limited to people “of distinguished merit and ability.” Believe it or not, even cooks and cashiers can get them.

There is supposed to be an annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas. President Clinton temporarily raised the cap for three years to 195,000, but caps don’t mean much.

Besides the 65,000, there are an additional 20,000 visas for people who have earned a master’s degree or higher in America. There is no cap at all on H-1Bs used for work in universities and research institutions.

And these limits are only for newly issued H-1Bs, which are for three years. There is no cap on renewals. That is how you get annual totals like these from 2016 to 2023.

In 2023, the first figure of 118,948 is for brand new H-1Bs. That is almost 34,000 more than the theoretical limit of 85,000 if you add the two caps of 65,000 and 20,000. And as you can see, there were more than 260,000 H1-B renewals that year, for a total number 386,318 in 2023. You’re supposed to be able to renew a three-year H-1B only once for another three years, but there are all sorts of rules for getting around this. And foreigners—yes, foreigners—can get special Defense Department H-1Bs that are good for 10 years.

How many people are here on H-1B visas? That number is in this “H-1B Authorized-to-Work” report, but the most recent figure is only up to third quarter 2019, when there were 619,327 foreigners working on H1Bs.

If you have one of these visas, you can bring over all your children under 21 and your spouse, and spouses can legally work.

I bet you never even thought about that. According to some estimates, several hundred thousand spouses have jobs—jobs I suppose Americans just won’t do.

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. The “estimated total number of H-1B nonimmigrants who have adjusted status in FY2017-FY2019 is 96,798.”

That’s more than 32,000 a year, which means that every year, just over 5 percent of H-1B workers get a green card and no longer need a visa at all. Next step: citizenship.

Visas are supposed to go only for “theoretical and practical application of highly specialized knowledge,” but all sorts of people get them. And an employer does not—I repeat, does not—have to try to hire Americans first.

All he has to do is fill in a Labor Condition Application, or LCA, online.

It might take three minutes. It says the foreign worker will get the “prevailing wage,” and that hiring a foreigner will not make working conditions worse for Americans. Who checks that? LCAs are “reviewed by the Department within seven (7) working days for completeness and obvious errors or inaccuracies.”

That is bureaucratese for rubber stamp.

Only if you have so many H-1B workers you are classified as “H1-B 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.

Yep, they let cheaters back in the game, and who’s going to check whom they tried to hire?

A huge percentage of these applications are filed by middlemen—headhunters—and most of them aren’t even American companies. Here are the top 12 H-IB applicant companies for 2021. See where it says Outsourcing/offshoring? If that column says “yes,” those companies are body shops that find cheap foreigners to work for American companies. Out of the top 12, only Amazon, Google, and Facebook are hiring H-1Bs for their own account.

Number 2, Infosys, based in Bangalore, India. Number 3, Tata, Mumbai, India. Number 4, Wipro, Bangalore. Number 5, Cognizant, is in New Jersey, but was founded in India and run by Indians. Number 8, HCL, Noida, India. Number 10, Deloitte India, supports H-1B applications. Number 12, Tech Mahindra, Pune, India.

How do you make money doing this? 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. Client pays you $60,000 for the H1B worker, you pay the worker $50,000.

Sometimes, the headhunter just steals wages. 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.

[link] Amazon only recently reached the top spot in the H-1B sweepstakes. In 2016, it was number 10, way behind the Indians. But as you can see, all it did was cut out the middleman. The green chunks for both males and females are Indians. The red chunks are Chinese.

Sometimes American companies get caught. In 2021, Facebook had to pay a $5 million fine and pay up to $9.5 million to the Americans it refused to hire.

Foreigners can H-1B visas for rock-bottom jobs. VisaPAL is a site that tracks who gets what. How about this?

The top row is for a 7-11 cashier who got $25,000 a year in East Haven, Connecticut, followed by visa application date and job start date. In 2015, a cashier in Chino, California slipped in for $18,000 a year.

Here are dancers and cooks. The dancer’s H-1Bs came through in 2010, but I don’t think even then the prevailing wage for a ballet dancer in New York City was under $20,000. And not one of those cooks was making even $30,000. I wonder how many of those cashiers and cooks are now US citizens. And what was the standard for H-1Bs? Highly specialized knowledge? What a joke.

The system is full of weird complications. 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.

Tech bosses are always complaining about a shortage of American STEM workers, but that’s bosh.

This 2022 article from a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute carefully demolishes that argument.

Bosses just want cheap labor.

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.

Some laid-off Americans had to train their replacements. Even the New York Times didn’t like that: “Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.”

In 2016, candidate-for-president Donald Trump slammed the H-1B system. [0:35 – 0:44] Candidate Bernie Sanders was an H-1B skeptic.

He “lambasted tech companies for hiring visa holders at the same time they’re cutting other staffers.”

Even candidate Hillary lashed out against US IT workers having to train their H-1B replacements, calling the employers “callous and insensitive.”

When he was president the first time, Donald Trump ordered a review of the H-1B system, but nothing came of it. Now, of course, he’s changed his tune: “Trump supports immigration visas backed by Musk: ‘I have many H-1B visas on my properties’.”

Cooks and cashiers, Mr. Trump? The Indians in his circle, AI-chief Sriram Krishnan and Vivek Ramaswamy, want loads more H-1B visas, especially for Indians.

Three million of them in America—14 times as many as in 1980 — just aren’t enough.

And I guess the $27.6 billion in remittances Indians shipped back home to India isn’t enough, either.

What a deal! Take jobs from Americans and spend your paycheck in India, not America.

Donald Trump says he’s going to make America great again. This is not the way to do it.