The H-1B visa program helps corporations replace US workers with cheap foreign laborers who lack basic rights. It also makes America wealthier.

These twin truths are at the heart of our nation’s debate over the policy.

Officially, the H-1B program aims to provide temporary visas to foreign workers who possess rare intellectual skills. And it has helped Silicon Valley giants attract top talent, while enabling hundreds of thousands of foreign-born people to enter the United States and earn far higher wages than they would have received back home.

For these reasons, factions on both the left and right see value in the H-1B visa.

Trump-aligned tech moguls like Elon Musk argue that it fuels innovation and national prosperity. Many Democrats, meanwhile, feel compelled to defend H-1B visa holders’ economic contributions, particularly when these guest workers become subject to xenophobic attacks.

Yet the H-1B visa has also attracted criticism from progressives and reactionaries alike. They argue that, in practice, many companies don’t use the visas to secure exceptionally skilled workers — but rather, exceptionally exploitable ones: An H-1B visa holder’s right to be in America is contingent on the sponsorship of their employer, which limits their bargaining power with their bosses, and may even force them to tolerate abuses, such as wage theft.

What’s more, by providing employers with this hyperexploitable pool of labor, the H-1B visa undermines the wages and employment of native-born tech workers, in the tellings of both socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and far-right podcaster Steve Bannon. (More ignobly, some aligned with the latter figure disdain the program because H-1B visa holders are heavily nonwhite.)

The H-1B’s proponents and detractors both make some reasonable points. In recent years, IT staffing firms and outsourcing companies have gamed the H-1B visa system, securing nearly half of all such visas through various subversions of the program. These companies typically do not seek out specific individuals with hard-to-find talents, but rather, interchangeable junior-level workers with lower wage expectations than their American counterparts. Meanwhile, H-1B workers’ vulnerability to deportation does enable abusive practices by some employers.

And yet, despite these flaws, the H-1B program has likely been economically beneficial for native-born Americans. Studies suggest that increasing the admission of H-1B visa holders boosts the innovation at US tech firms, lowers prices for American consumers, and actually lifts wages for US workers.

Fortunately, the H-1B’s economic benefits do not derive from its most exploitative features. The fact that the H-1B system has been gamed by low-value outsourcing companies makes it worse for innovation. Similarly, were highly skilled H-1B workers given permanent legal residency — rather than a time-limited visa that they could lose the minute they’re laid off — they would simultaneously be less vulnerable to exploitation and more capable of contributing to the US economy in the long term.

Therefore, the H-1B visa system should be reformed — or replaced — in a manner that makes America’s high-skill immigrants both more numerous and more free.

Why the H-1B visa system is broken

When Congress created the H-1B visa, it intended to give US employers access to workers they could not find domestically — specifically, those who possessed extraordinary, hard-to-find skills.

But this is not how many companies actually use the program.

Part of the problem lies with the way that H-1B visas are allocated. Demand for the visas far outstrips their supply; 446,000 people sought an H-1B visa in 2023, but only 85,000 received one. The government therefore distributes the visas through a lottery: Every worker who appears remotely qualified is entered into a drawing, in which winners are chosen at random.

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