An Indian-origin professor of Washington's Howard University and long-time critic of the H-1B visa programme, Ronil Hira, has recently explained why American employers favour hiring H-1B workers over domestic talent. Speaking to journalist and host Glenn Greenwald about the controversy surrounding the visa programme, Hira argued that the H-1B is designed in a way that benefits companies by lowering labour costs and limiting worker mobility.
“Most of the people who are coming to the US on H-1B visas have ordinary skills, skills that are abundantly available from American workers," he said. "Employers prefer the H-1B workers because they can both be legally paid less than American workers, and secondly, they're controllable, they're indentured to the employer. So it's a no-brainer for the employers to prefer the H-1Bs."
Also, H-1B workers are tied to their sponsoring employers for their legal status, making them less likely to switch jobs or report workplace abuses, the professor added.
H-1B's weak worker protection
Hira criticised the programme for offering “very weak worker protection,” which he said is why Silicon Valley and major corporations support it. “That’s why employers love it, that’s why Silicon Valley loves it and that’s why most workers don’t love it,” he told Greenwald.
Not immigration, but labour policy
The professor clarified that the H-1B programme is often wrongly linked to immigration. “It’s not an immigration issue but a labour issue. You are intervening into the labour market, injecting workers here. You should have a high bar to inject workers who have fewer rights, who are sort of second class in a lot of ways, and their worker protections are just very weak,” he said.
While acknowledging that some highly skilled individuals do enter the US through H-1B, Hira argued that many roles filled by visa holders could be handled by American workers. He cited examples at Disney and the University of California, where American employees were reportedly asked to train their H-1B replacements, calling for reforms to ensure the programme addresses genuine skill gaps rather than cost-cutting.
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