Donald Trump’s return to the white house has sparked significant debate on the future of birthright citizenship and the H1-B visa. Trump in fact has already signed an executive order on the second day of his presidency to end birthright citizenship as a whole in the United States. This prevents Americans born from immigrants within the United states their right to citizenship if it does get successfully implemented but let’s get back to the H1-B Visa. The H1-B visa, established under the immigration act of 1990 allows U.S employers to hire foreign professionals in specialty occupations requiring theoretical expertise and distributed based on merit until demand greatly exceeds supply, then it becomes a lottery system with the max cap of distribution being 85,000 in any given year. It provides opportunity to many immigrants but is a crucial part for developing sectors, especially tech in the United States.
We need to understand that this is the first time a U.S president has challenged both birthright citizenship and developmental immigration in the last century, so what has changed? The debate over the H1-B Visa started when Trump appointed an Indian American named Sriram Krishna to his cabinet as a leader of AI policy and he explicitly claimed online that we need to increase the distribution of high skill immigration visas(H1-B) to develop such an important sector which is revolutionizing American industry. It led to significant debate online and sparked immense civil debate amongst the Right Wing Republican party in question about if it is necessary or not. Leaders of the Right Wing party such as Vivek Ramswamy and Elon Musk extended on the side defending the H1-B visa by Mr. Ramaswamy claiming that the debate “boils down to the c-word:culture.” Both of them essentially argue from the standpoint that the H1-B visa is necessary to bring efficient engineers from nations that celebrate a culture of efficiency and competitiveness to bring America’s economy forward.
The opposing side that goes against promoting the H1-B visa and even removing it come from prominent figures such as Bernie Sander and Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon claims that the H1-B is a “scam of the highest order” for the American economy and Bernie Sanders claims the H1-B provides a gateway for corporation to abuse low income immigrants and pay them less then if they hired Americans to maximize output in the economy with little focus on the quality of life for the workers. H1-B visas sparked such a prominent debate being just 3% of total legal immigration with a total of around 583,420 legal immigrants using the H1-B visa right now or .35% of the American workforce. Madeline Zavodny tells us in the “Impact of H1-B Visa Holders On the U.S Workforce” that even a “1 percentage point increase in the share of workers with a H1-B visa in an occupation reduces the unemployment rate by about .2 percentage points.” She also states that “a 1 percentage point increase in the share of workers with an H-1B visa in an occupation boosts the earning growth rate in that occupation by about .1 to .26 percentage points.”
A removal could be detrimental for specializing industries, especially the tech sector. The tech industry is a primary beneficiary of the H-1B visa and a removal of it would exacerbate talent shortages for giants such as Alphabet Inc. (Google), Microsoft, and Meta Platforms Inc. These tech giants have historically depended on the H-1B visas to fill extremely specialized roles and a lack of it could greatly slow down development. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, states “ H-1B visas are essential for the innovation economy. Without them, we risk falling behind in global competitiveness.” A removal may be critical for efficiency and is in debate by corporate leaders. Companies in tech rely on H-1B at large because they fill in the talent gap existing in the U.S currently as Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, in a 2025 panel on immigration and innovation states “ The simple truth is that U.S universities produce only about 65,000 STEM graduates annually at the level needed for top tier tech jobs. The rest come through H-1B.”
A possible removal also affects higher education and finance as a whole with 79% of graduate students in computer science currently being foreign born and over 22% of quantitative analyst roles being filled by H-1B holders. Goldman Sachs even believes up to 12 Billion economic losses could occur yearly with their CEO, David Solomon, greatly supports the upcoming of H-1B visa holders due to beliefs in their talent.
Whether or not the proposal is enacted, Trump’s plans to dismantle the H-1B system has already chilled foreign applications and millions of citizens across America who are concerned about the future of skilled immigration. In the global war for development, talent is a valuable commodity with policy being the force that controls it. The competitive edge lost from the U.S may be too valuable of a loss for a current America to realize.
Written by Aniruddh Sajan
