Michelle Hackman

You know, Mexicans are rapists and refugees are all terrorists.

And his movement, you know, sort of involved a lot of, you know, we want to hire more Americans.

We don't want jobs to go to foreigners.

And so naturally, the H-1B visa became sort of a target in that broader rhetoric.

But during the first Trump administration, you had a lot of competing voices.

You know, Jared Kushner was in the White House, and he was sort of a more old-school Republican, pro-business voice.

He was a bigger fan of the H-1B visa program.

And so the story of the first Trump administration was you definitely had the MAGA right, hates the H-1B.

A lot of other big business owners, including, you know, big tech, love the H-1B.

And so you see this sort of like policy tug of war taking place where overall, like nothing really happens.

You know, maybe denials for the visa go up a little bit, but for most of the Trump administration, it's not like they made major changes to the program.

You saw sort of a marginal around the edges, Trump and Biden both trying to tweak policies, you know, to make it so that people who are paid better are getting H-1B visas as opposed to people who are being paid lower than Americans, for example.

But I wouldn't say anything like particularly ideological happened with the H-1B under Biden.

But while Trump was out of office,

This sort of tug of war that was happening in the first Trump administration went away and the MAGA right was sort of allowed to like foment and cement its anti-H1B feelings.

You had people sort of using more and more strident sort of racist anti-Indian language to the point where when Trump is sort of elected for the second time, you see tweets from people basically saying, oh, God, you know, we can't be hiring Indians to work at the White House.

It's going to smell like curry.

You had Elon Musk come into this administration.

And then really, really publicly exit.

And it was after he exited that this tug of war that we'd been talking about of, you know, America first, anti-immigrant voices on one side and sort of more pro-business, you know, big hiring voices on the other side goes away.