Is the H-1B visa program taking jobs from American-born workers?

The Trump administration has escalated its crackdown on legal immigration pathways that involve foreign workers and students. The most recent example of this is suspending eight major tech companies, including Microsoft and Adobe, from using the H-1B visa program to help workers get U.S. permanent residency.

To better understand the economic ramifications of this, Kimberly Adams spoke with Zeke Hernandez, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The following is a lightly edited transcript. Listen to the full conversation using the player above.

Kimberly Adams: Let's start with some background on this specific visa program, the H-1B. Remind us how companies use it and how prevalent it is.

Zeke Hernandez: Yeah, the H-1B visa is the main avenue for firms to hire skilled workers. Firms can hire H-1B workers for up to six years on this visa, and then they can choose to sponsor them for a green card for permanent residence after that period. And for the last 20 years, there's only been 85,000 H-1B visas available per year. So the demand for them is much much higher than the number available.

Adams: The Trump administration wants to suspend certain companies from using this program, and part of the accusation is that these companies are using this visa program to prioritize foreign workers over American workers. How common is that in reality?

Hernandez: The short of it is that the evidence does not support that, and in fact, it shows the opposite. It shows that for every H-1B worker hired in an area, jobs and wages for U.S. college-educated natives go up, and also there is strong evidence showing that when firms miss out on hiring these H-1B workers, they actually take those jobs outside the United States because there aren't enough U.S.-born workers in these areas.

Adams: So where is the Trump administration getting this?

Hernandez: I don't know. They're not getting it from strong empirical evidence. There has been a longstanding interest group that really dislikes the H-1B program. Those groups mainly point to anecdotes. Those cases are real, but there's a difference between an anecdote of occasional abuse of the program and the systematic evidence that tells us that the program has been very good for U.S. companies and U.S. workers.

Adams: What has the U.S. economy historically gained from immigration?

Hernandez: Well, so much. These people who come here to work, particularly those that are skilled, that tend to come on the H-1B program, they have an enormous, enormous effect on entrepreneurship. The very same day that the crackdown on Microsoft and other companies happened, the president did a ceremony to honor six of the CEOs of the largest tech companies, five of whom are foreign-born, like Jensen Huang of Nvidia. And so, remember, you're not just getting bodies that work; you're getting brains that innovate, and the beneficiaries of those things are not foreigners; they're Americans.

Adams: The Trump administration says, as you've kind of laid out there, that it wants the United States to be a leader in high-tech industries. Leaders from the companies targeted by this latest crackdown say that cracking down on H-1B visas actually undermines that very goal. What do you make of that argument?

Hernandez: It's spot on. If you want the United States to have some of the best artificial intelligence talent in the world, that talent needs to be trained by people who are already the best in the world. And as it turns out, well over half of Ph.Ds in AI in the United States are foreigners, right? Why would you make it harder for companies to hire those foreigners? And so I think once you realize that both sides can win, and that the economic pie can grow as they interact together, then you don't have to act out of fear. You can start making it more possible for firms to hire these workers for the benefit of American consumers, American businesses, American taxpayers.