The Scene
Key figures in the US tech industry have softened their support for the H-1B program that brings up to 85,000 skilled workers to the US every year after a revolt from President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration MAGA political base.
Now calls for reform of the program include tech titans like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, as well as their Democratic ally Rep. Ro Khanna of California and a broad coalition that includes Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The shift began in December, when the Trump administration hired an Indian American venture capitalist, Sriram Krishnan, to a key AI policy position, drawing a vitriolic and sometimes racist backlash on Musk’s X. Former Trump aide Steve Bannon called the program “a total and complete scam to destroy the American worker” and demanded “reparations for tech workers.”
A wave of tech industry figures immediately showed support for immigrant tech workers, many of whom have founded or now run the industry’s most successful companies.
But after saying he’d go to war for the H-1B program, Musk tweeted, “I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.”
Andreesen, whose iconoclastic views are often a leading indicator of Silicon Valley thinking, said on the Lex Fridman podcast last month that the social media controversy prompted him to think deeply about the issue. The venture capitalist has long expressed unequivocal support for the H-1B program, even visiting Washington to inform lawmakers.
“We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into,” he concluded.
Andreessen, in a long and multifaceted argument, didn’t advocate getting rid of the H-1B program. Instead, he said the US needs to both bring in highly skilled labor and provide more opportunities to Americans from every background.
But his arguments sound surprisingly like the objections, long dismissed in Silicon Valley, of labor unions and groups representing American-born engineers who believe that a wave of Indian workers has depressed their wages and job opportunities.
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Reed’s view
The H-1B program is genuinely rife with abuse. In ten years as a tech reporter, I’ve written about how consulting firms game the system by bringing in low-level workers doing jobs that skilled American workers could do better, if for higher pay.
At the same time, the program’s impact has been immensely positive at the high end. Many of the most talented entrepreneurs have entered the US through the H-1B program, adding immeasurable economic value to the country.
And there’s the paradoxical reality that getting rid of H-1B may only accelerate attempts by companies to cut down on software labor with AI (something already quietly happening).
Even before generative AI upended coding, companies were hiring remote software developers around the world to save money and avoid taxes. Unlike factory workers, software jobs can be moved offshore with the click of a mouse, and it’s nearly impossible to put tariffs on the product.
The good of the H-1B program outweighs the bad. But the bad, as Musk and others have pointed out, would not be difficult to fix.
And Andreessen makes a compelling argument that there is a much bigger problem than a broken H-1B system. For some reason, the US is failing to capitalize on its own brainpower.
This is not a xenophobic or even really a nationalistic point. He argues it’s not just poor, white Americans being left behind: It’s Americans of every race and background who, in his view, have been deprioritized by a system that has evolved to look for solutions outside its own borders rather than tackle the hard problems within.
If the H-1B program, with a cap of 85,000 people a year, can make a huge impact on the country, even a small improvement in the education system in a country of 330 million people could be even bigger.
And this may sound hopefully naive, but for an issue so uncontroversial that Bernie Sanders and Marc Andreessen largely agree, you’d think there’s a good chance something could get done in Washington.
Room for Disagreement
“The biggest misunderstanding about high skill immigration stems from people thinking that the market opportunities in tech, and tech-adjacent fields, are zero sum. This essentially imagines innovation is finite and we’re all fighting over the same job or opportunity pool,” wrote Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie on X. Levie essentially argued that H1-B is so overwhelmingly productive that the inefficiencies are negligible. Getting rid of it would be a disaster.
“This is how you lose the tech war within one or two generations. There’s simply no good game theory in anything that reduces our talent access.
Yes, we absolutely have and need to continue to educate and train incredible talent that grows up in the US, but equally having access to the world’s smartest talent has always been a huge advantage for America.”
Notable
- Libertarian think tank Cato Institute laid out the arguments for the H-1B program during Trump 1.0, when the program was first on the chopping block.