Arjun Singh  0:03  
Arjun from the levers, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun. Singh, it was the Christmas war that almost tore Maga apart over the holidays, some of Donald Trump's biggest supporters broke out into open warfare, and it was all over immigration, but not illegal immigration. This time, some of Trump's most loyal supporters took aim billionaire Elon Musk and his support for visas for highly skilled immigrants. These visas, which have nominally been used for highly skilled scientists or doctors to come work in the US, have been around for a long time, and while the rhetoric on X was fiery and in many cases simply anti immigrant, they did bring a truth to light that multinational corporations have been exploiting America's broken immigration system for decades. So today, on lever time, we're going to see what led to a civil war within Trump's coalition. We'll hear from an immigration attorney, a professor who's been studying this issue for decades, and Congressman ro Khanna about the complexities of America's guest worker system and how multi billion dollar companies have used it to improve their bottom line at the cost of their employees.

The other week, when most Americans were in the midst of a holiday break, Steve Bannon, one of the architects of Donald Trump's rise to power, was angry.

Steve Bannon  1:24  
Let me repeat this. The program from top to bottom, is a scam and a con. There is nothing in this program that should continue to exist, nothing the workers are here on this should be deported as soon as the 15 minute that we're going to start deporting on the afternoon of the 20th of January, deport them. Now, Bannon

Arjun Singh  1:45  
is a pugnacious guy, a brawler, and he's been credited with pushing Trump to embrace a right wing form of populism, one that's also infused with nativism, the idea that America is for Americans only. And just then you heard Bannon railing against immigrants. But this time, he wasn't upset about what he normally is illegal immigration. No. This time, Bannon was angry at immigrants who are legally here and has something called an h 1b visa, a type of visa that allows highly skilled foreign workers to live in the US

Steve Bannon  2:16  
deport all of them now, and let's hire people that check the top box? Yes, I'm a citizen of the United States of America. Bannon's

Arjun Singh  2:25  
rant was in response to a rollicking debate on social media kicked off by Trump's decision to appoint an Indian immigrant as a White House advisor, and it was illustrative of the uneasy alliance Trump has made between rancorous Nativists, people who view immigrants as a cultural and national security threat, and the hyper libertarian capitalists of Silicon Valley, many of whom are immigrants themselves, Donald Trump has always had a pension for demonizing immigrants throughout his career, even before he became president, Trump would cast immigrants as thieves out for American jobs.

Donald Trump  3:01  
So with immigration, you better be smart and you better be tough, and they're taking your jobs, and you better be careful. You better be careful. Usually,

Arjun Singh  3:10  
Trump was referring to illegal immigration, especially migrants coming across the southern border. And this fiery rhetoric is usually overlaid with racist tropes, and that attracted the recent support and praise of a click of right wing tech billionaires, including Elon Musk, like there

Elon Musk  3:26  
was a massive increase in IRS personnel, and instead of adding people to the border patrol, like this is totally backwards towards

Arjun Singh  3:35  
the end of the election, Musk intervened on Trump's behalf and spent more than a quarter billion dollars to help him get elected. That cemented the relationship between Trump and some of Silicon Valley's most influential investors, and that's been a long time. Conflict inherent in Trump's time as a politician. Trump's electoral base is amongst people like Bannon Nativists and protectionist types who see immigrants as a threat, but then the other side of his coalition are mega capitalists like Elon Musk, an immigrant himself who believes America's strength is derived from its industrial prowess, and that's why Maga broke out into a war over Christmas and the h 1b visa became The talk of the town on the political right

now. This fight between Bannon and musk wasn't really about h 1b visas. It was broadly about immigration overall, and it's a fight that's probably not going to die down anytime soon, but the debate also unsurfaced the controversial legacy of the h 1b visa. Last week, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders came out with a statement arguing that h 1d visas have been harmful to American workers, especially American engineers, and that they've been abused by major corporations to bring cheap labor to the US. We're going to dive into that argument in a second, but first, I think we should talk to a

Elizabeth Goss  4:57  
lawyer. My name is Elizabeth Goss. I'm a. US immigration attorney. I've been practicing for a few decades. My previous experience was working in house at a university, managing visas services for that institution and our office, we are an all women firm, and we represent startups to mid sized corporations. We specialize in entrepreneurship, so highly focused on business immigration, Liz

Arjun Singh  5:22  
is intimately familiar with the h 1b process, and one thing she explained to me is that h 1b candidates have to apply for a lottery to even be considered for an application, and that's because the government only permits up to 85,000 applicants per year applying for the lottery and being given a number can take two to three months in and of itself, and if someone gets a number, then it's another multi month process to be granted a visa.

Elizabeth Goss  5:45  
When a candidate first comes in, the attorney has to assess what kind of position is this. You have to meet a specialty occupation requirements. A specialty occupation is defined as a position that requires at least a bachelor's degree in a specific field. The underlying theory behind the h 1b visa is that an individual has to be paid at least what a US worker would be paid, or greater. Otherwise they cannot be hired. And there's two checks for this within the system. One, you have to find what's called a prevailing wage. And that prevailing wage is typically either you can find a wage on the BLS website at Department of Labor, it's what the government specifically states is required for this visa. Or you can potentially get a private survey. So that's step one. And then the second step is you have to do an assessment of the company's actual wage, so you have a prevailing wage, and you also have to do the assessment on the actual wage, so you have to look at the company, what is the for this category of worker, what is their wage band, and the individual has to be offered the wage the higher of the two. So the government wage might actually be lower than what the company offers, but they cannot undercut the US worker by offering that foreign national less than some someone similarly qualified for that position. And so that is something that is certified. You have to file a labor condition application with the Department of Labor, confirming the facts of all that, and then that has to be certified by Department of Labor before you can even file with the immigration service

Arjun Singh  7:10  
for a smaller, mid sized firm the kind that Liz represents, this can be expensive and clearly, time consuming, and it should be said that there are very good reasons a company may be bringing on a skilled worker from abroad. For example, there's an ongoing shortage of physicians in the labor market, and many have argued that the key to solving it is allowing physicians to emigrate to the US. Or a company may want to hire somebody who's been studying in the US for several years, but will need an H, 1b to continue living here as a worker. And in Liz's experience for smaller companies, not places like Amazon or Tesla, the h 1b process can sometimes be too costly for some firms to even bother with in the first place. I talk with

Elizabeth Goss  7:50  
the international students, for example, looking for jobs all the time, and they say, you know, I really want to work for this company, but on their website, it says they don't sponsor. And I said, then move on, go. You know, look at companies that will sponsor who are willing to do that. Like I said, we represent the mid to smaller size companies, and our employers, typically, when they're bringing people to us, it's because they've gone through a pretty rigorous recruitment process and they've identified this person as the candidate that they really need for them to get to that point. Like I said, if there was an alternative, my guess is that they would take it because they wouldn't have to pay me or the government. Part of

Arjun Singh  8:26  
the reason the h 1b debate has engulfed the right wing ecosystem for the last two weeks is because it touches on two themes that are critical to maga's ideology. One is that American workers are being screwed over by multinational corporations, and also that America has a uniquely exceptional culture. In the case of the latter, Trump advisor, Vivek Ramaswamy, kicked a hornet's nest when he suggested that American culture had the wrong priorities. According to Vivek, and these are his words, not mine, he argued TV shows like Saved by the Bell and friends created a culture that valued the prom queen over nerdy kids in America and that instead, more American kids need to be participating in weekend math competitions, otherwise they would keep losing jobs to foreign born workers, and that didn't really land well with members of Maga. Here's comedian Tim Dillon, for example, responding to Vivek, I

Tim Dillon  9:22  
understand what he's saying. I wasn't a fan of friends. I like Frazier. I understand we need more math competitions and shit like that. But this is the type of shit that is going to eat that movement from the inside. He's basically going out there and saying, by the way, we need to import people, because no one in this country is up to the task.

Arjun Singh  9:45  
According to Liz, though, some of her clients have told her that if they didn't need to go through the h 1b process, they wouldn't.

Elizabeth Goss  9:52  
I'm representing people in these small entrepreneur ventures. I have one particular client that I've just seen time and time. Again, create and recreate and build. And he's using a lot of international labor, you know, statisticians, PhDs in science and in math. And even he jokes with me, he always says, Look, if there was an American I could hire I love you. Liz, but I'd rather just hire somebody than have to pay you.

Arjun Singh  10:19  
Like any policy tool, however, programs can be abused and crafty. Corporations can find loopholes in them. The H 1b program is no different, while many are brought here to fill a specific need, stories abound of major multinational corporations abusing the system. One example is Disney, which was accused of bringing in average talent, and what probably made Elon Musk the worst messenger for the h 1b program is that he probably abused it this past year at Tesla in April, the electric car company laid off nearly 15,000 American workers, and workers there have said that a lot of them were senior American staff, who were replaced With Junior and lesser paid foreign born workers.

Ron Hira  11:01  
The program is being filled by mostly ordinary skilled foreign workers, and these are jobs that can and should be filled by US workers. And what it does is it depresses US workers, American workers, wages. It undercuts their bargaining power in significant ways, particularly when they're in the h 1b workers are concentrated in specific sectors, like the tech sector, but what it also does is it creates perverse incentives for employers, and so what employers have done is they've substituted using cheaper foreign workers through the h 1b instead of investing in workforce development, for example,

Arjun Singh  11:41  
after the break, we'll look at how the h 1b program has been abused in a way that hurts American and h 1b workers. We'll be right back.

Ron Hira  11:58  
So the h 1b program, like any guest worker program, is vulnerable to abuse. The key is for the government to set up rules to provide rock solid worker protections. And those worker protections are both for the h 1b worker, so that they're not being cheated out of wages or being abused in any way, but also for us workers. And so those protections are really important, and you get those protections in a couple of different ways, but the key way is really around wages. The problem is that the government has set them below the market levels in a significant way, so that you've got companies that have built business models around actually substituting for US workers, rather than complimenting US workers. This

Arjun Singh  12:43  
is Ron Hira, a professor of political science at Howard University and an expert on how H, 1b visas have been used. In particular, his research has spotlighted how major companies, especially IT companies, have been able to abuse the program and hurt domestic workers, in some cases, being so blatant as to have American workers literally train their replacements,

Ron Hira  13:04  
Cognizant Infosys, Tata Consultancy, Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, their whole business model is really one of labor arbitrage or wage arbitrage. They see an opportunity where they can replace or substitute US workers with these cheaper h 1b workers both because their wages are lower, h 1b workers wages are lower, and legally, the government allows this. And secondly, they have control over those workers, so they have bargaining power, and so they can be a lot cheaper. And they've created these business models that really subvert the whole point of the program, which was to fill labor shortages. So instead of filling labor shortages, what you're doing is actually displacing US workers. As

Arjun Singh  13:46  
hero said, this is not the purpose of the h 1b program, which he said has merit. But while some firms, like the ones that Liz Goss represents, are using h 1b in specialized cases, hero has spent decades researching how a cottage industry has sprang up around companies, effectively rigging the process. So

Ron Hira  14:03  
there's a what I call an h 1b visa industrial complex. And what you've got to realize that the h 1v visa seems kind of like a minor thing, kind of obscure, but in reality, it's worth 10s of billions of dollars of easy profits through wage arbitrage for both employers as well as universities. And what's happened is they've become very powerful, that coalition of it's not just tech companies, but it's also the outsourcing companies. And those outsourcing companies are it outsourcers. They sell to the fortune 1000 firms.

Arjun Singh  14:43  
Basically. What hero is saying is that a lot of big companies now use a third party to run their IT systems, rather than doing it themselves. And some of these companies make windfall profits. One of them cognizant, for example, brought in $19.4 billion in revenue in 2000 23 in addition to revealing how companies like Cognizant have utilized h 1b visas to outsource work here, his research has also demonstrated how these immigrant workers are exploited by these companies, because the h 1b visa is contingent on employment by the employer who sponsored the visa. Initially, a lot of workers are shackled to these companies unless they find a pathway to permanent citizenship or they find a new employer willing to let them transfer their visa to a new company. Hero believes there needs to be visa reform urgently. Since the H 1b inception, these kinds of abuses have taken place. And to Hera, it's not just about going after bad actors poor government standards for what defines a prevailing or market wage for h 1b eligible positions are hurting both visa holders and American workers as well. He argues that companies should have to prove that they underwent a legitimate recruitment process to find a domestic worker before hiring someone on an h 1b and one person who agrees with that is Congressman ro Khanna. You

Ro Khanna  16:00  
look at it from many places, and it seems like okay, all this wealth is piling up in Silicon Valley and Seattle and New York and LA Austin, but where am I? Where is my family? So until we solve this income inequality, this geographic inequality, it's hard to create an environment that understands it champions the importance of immigrants, and we have to link immigrant wealth generation and job creation to places that have been left out of a modern economy. As the child

Arjun Singh  16:29  
of Indian immigrants and a member of the House whose district is based in Silicon Valley, Khanna, has a unique perspective on this debate.

Speaker 1  16:37  
Well, first I would prioritize the h 1b is much more based on the wages that are going to be paid, higher wages, as opposed to right now, where it's a lottery in outsourcing companies like Cognizant win a lot of these positions. Second, I would make sure that there's a path after someone's on an h 1b quickly to getting a green card, because ultimately it's the green card that gives them freedom and allows them not to be underpaid. Right now you have people perpetually on h 1b, getting it extended, moving around for years. Third, I would be much more clear on enforcing you can't have an h1 be used to fire an American existing worker. Right now there are companies that abuse it where, basically they're getting cheaper labor in and displacing American workers. So

Arjun Singh  17:20  
far, we've been looking at a very important but technical aspect of the debate that's erupted around H, 1b, visas. Now it's clear that these visas have been taken advantage of, and as here, as research has shown, American workers have been hit because of companies resorting to staffing their ranks with cheaper labor. And these abuses are clear and they're documented. But look, I feel like I'm not addressing the elephant in the room. One aspect of this debate that happened within the ranks of Trump's coalition was about nativism and, frankly, racism. Prominent members of the Maga movement, like Laura Loomer, a conservative activist outright, said that they didn't want more Indians coming to the US on the platform once known as Twitter, posts that were shared 1000s of times claimed that there was an infiltration of American society by Indian people, and this was clearly a motivating factor for a very vocal faction of Trump's base. In some cases, people like Loomer were holding up prominent Indian immigrants who are now citizens of the US as examples of how Americans were being displaced. I mean, on Christmas Eve, Loomer, and I'm quoting her here, referred to Indian immigrants as, quote, third world invaders. I will be honest here. One reason I can't ignore this is because I am also the son of Indian immigrants, one who spent his entire life in the US and is also an American worker. The same is actually true of ro Khanna and Ron Heera, and as you heard, both of them believe the h 1b process is directly hurting American workers, and that reform is drastically needed. Yet I wondered how they reckoned with the racism displayed against Indians and Indian Americans over the last couple weeks. Here's what ro Khanna said. Well,

Speaker 1  19:06  
look what was there going to have elements of a society that are uncomfortable with recent immigrants, new immigrants, but the Indian American story is one of extraordinary progress in terms of being embraced, accepted, respected by the American people. And I would argue, for a young Indian American starting out in society today, it's far easier to pursue their dreams, whether that's in politics, whether that's in starting a podcast, whether it's in pursuing an acting career, than it was when I was growing up in the 1980s the important thing is for the Indian American community to engage in society and philanthropy and community activities, to continue to be part of the fabric and tell our story

Arjun Singh  19:55  
like any issue. Nothing about the h 1b debate really fits into a neat political. Diagram, while immigration has been a core strength of the United States, its abuse by multinational corporations has led to worse labor conditions for American workers, including Indian Americans, to point out that truth isn't an endorsement of the racist idea that immigrants inherently hurt our country, though some of the greatest aspects of America are because of people who emigrate here, and as we learned today, many of these immigrants are also exploited themselves. So this isn't about American workers or foreign workers or Indian American workers and white workers. No, this is an issue strictly about corporate power and the ability of big companies to exploit government loopholes and regulations and especially exploit workers, immigrant and non immigrant alike.

Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me Arjun Singh, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean stockh. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell.