Will Trump Change His Tune on H-1b Visas and Foreign Students with the Influence of Musk?

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have both recently posted on social media in favor of increasing H-1b visas. This CNN article reports the details.  This position is not entirely surprising given the fact that both are tech entrepreneurs. This would be great and a sharp departure from Trump’s position on H-1bs during his first term during which he had USCIS implement new policies that made it more difficult for companies to secure H-1bs for top talent, particularly software engineers. This policy was ostensibly driven by a need to curb fraud within the H-1b system.

My response to anyone who criticizes the H-1b program is threefold:

(1) H-1bs are the basic visa that allow a U.S. company to employ a foreign national worker with at least a Bachelor’s degree. Absent this visa, most companies would have absolutely no way to employ a talented foreign national worker who often went to school in the U.S. and may have already formed valuable business relationships with U.S. companies and U.S. citizens (maybe they are already working on starting a successful company – example: Musk and Paypal!)

(2) H-1b visas are capped at 85,000 annually. This number was set in 1990! – before the internet was even known to most people. The amount of technological development, particularly in computing, and the need for more software engineers and related professions (e.g. Data Scientists, Network Architects, Computer Systems Analysts, ect.) is staggering.

(3) If you divide the number of H-1b visas by the U.S. workforce (85,000/168,000,000), H-1b visas amount to .05% (.ooo5) of the U.S. labor force. The U.S. is one of the largest, globally integrated economies in the world. This number is incredibly small and needs to be increased. H-1b employees help companies thrive which in turn produces more U.S. jobs, not less.

Other statements reported in this CNN article are equally encouraging; namely, that foreign national students that complete degrees in the U.S. should be given longer term status in the U.S., even permanent residency, after they graduate. Trump himself is reported as saying”

• “What I want to do, and what I will do is – you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” Trump said on the “All In” podcast.

This would be incredible and a departure of what some of his advisors, namely Stephen Miller, have said in the past. Stephen Miller has shown animosity to all parts of our immigration system, including foreign students in the U.S.

The logic of granting longer term status to foreign students in the U.S. is also unassailable. Why would the U.S. educate talented foreign nationals, train them in the U.S. (the optional practical training period attached to F-1 student status) and then send them home? When we do this, we are effectively training some of the brightest, young talent in the world and sending them home, sometimes to our political or economic adversaries.

While obviously these are early days, before the true dawn of the second Trump presidency, we are seeing some glimmers of hope in immigration policy.