Yes, American Corporations Exploit H-1B Visas to Lower Wages

The first major rift in the Trump coalition boiled over with anger at H-1B visas. The program is widely exploited to lower American wages via foreign workers.

This commentary was published in partnership with Unherd.

Cognizant, a tech firm in New Jersey, routinely obtains over 5,000 H-1B work visas a year, which it uses to bring foreign workers over to manage IT and cyber security projects. It’s a business strategy that has turned the company into a powerhouse valued at over $40 billion. And it’s an arrangement that has become commonplace among tech giants.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft all rely on a funnel of such workers; Meta is classified as "H-1B dependent" over its unusually high foreign visa workforce. And as layoffs hit Silicon Valley last year, the tech industry ramped up applications to bring in even more foreign personnel.

But in a moment of political realignment and worker uprising, a reckoning may be coming.

In October, a jury found that Cognizant engaged in systemic discrimination against American workers, in favor of thousands of South Asian workers on H-1B visas. The trial unearthed damaging facts about the system — namely, that Cognizant gamed the visa lottery process with fake applications and sought to depress wages with visa-dependent foreign talent.

“The entire business model is built on the back of cheap Indian labor,” said one former director at the firm. The people who are on visas are the people Cognizant wants.”

And now the H-1B visa has caused the first major rift in the Trump coalition as MAGA squares up to Silicon Valley.

The touchpaper was lit by Sriram Krishnan, Trump’s adviser on artificial intelligence policy, with his announcement that he wants to lift the country cap on the permits. Many interpreted his tweet to refer to the overall cap on the number of H-1B permits, which currently sits at 65,000, plus an additional 20,000 for those with degrees from American graduate schools.