Chapter 1: What are President Trump's views on illegal immigration?
So President Trump has been pretty consistent about his feelings regarding illegal immigration to the U.S. All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But when it comes to legal pathways to immigration, Trump's feelings are harder to gauge.
The president has gone back and forth on H-1B visas, the ones for high-skilled workers in industries like tech and medicine. He has said that he has himself used these visas to hire people, and he recently pushed back against Laura Ingraham of Fox News, a MAGA loyalist, to defend these visas from right-wing attacks. You also do have to bring in talent.
Well, we have plenty of talented people here. No, you don't. No, you don't. So why is President Trump supporting a program that his MAGA base doesn't like? That's coming up next on Today Explained from Vox.
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Chapter 2: How does Trump view high-skill work visas like H-1B?
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H-1B visas have been a simmering issue on the right for years now. A couple months ago, we had The Wall Street Journal's Michelle Hackman on to explain. She said there's been a lot of legitimate abuses of the program.
A lot of these visas actually go to companies. There's sort of a whole business model that's sprung up around the H-1B visa of sort of IT companies who staff almost their entire companies with primarily Indian men on H-1B visas. And their model is that they do IT a little bit cheaper than a lot of companies' in-house IT offices.
And so what's happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that a lot of companies have actually laid off their internal IT and hired these sort of IT external companies on H-1B visas to come work for them instead.
This week, we got Michelle back on the line to walk us through the latest. She says this H-1B visa mess all started back in 2016.
When Trump takes office, he obviously has all of this anti-immigrant rhetoric. 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.
Yeah, you can see how it can find itself in the crosshairs of America first.
I know the H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use and I shouldn't be allowed to use. We shouldn't have it. Very, very bad for workers.
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Chapter 3: What conflicting opinions exist within Trump's administration regarding H-1B visas?
It is a nasty trick over here that if you're a computer programmer, when you filed your H-1B visa and you become a manager three or four years later, which is what's normal in the tech industry, it's a different job. Person became from software developer to IT manager. That is a drastic change. New salary, new department, new job duties. Sounds amazing, right? Wrong.
So therefore people start to continue doing the same job they did when they started the H-1B process, which means that they're stuck in limbo and they're also making below market salaries. So the opponents of H-1B visas are correct. in the fact that this system is abused and that it does impact U.S.
salaries. You know, one of the things we just learned about was kind of how Trump has sent out mixed signals when it comes to H-1B visas. A lot of parts of his administration have talked against the visas, while he has said in other instances that he finds them to be somewhat effective. Now, they've announced a $100,000 fee on every H-1B visa application.
So from your perspective, as someone who has leaned on this as an entrepreneur, what would that fee mean for you?
A startup. It works on fumes. You don't have that kind of money. The Googles and the Microsofts and the Oracles, they've got big money. So $100,000 is nothing to them. But to the companies that really need the deep talent to be able to do world-changing innovations, we're on tight budgets. $100,000 is... Unaffordable.
So if I hear you correctly, you're saying the people who are most affected by this proposed fee are the ones in your sphere, maybe not those big companies or even, but the ones who are reliant on folks who use these visas, but that $100,000 would be crippling too.
Yes, it basically shuts off the system. About two years ago, I was looking to start my medical diagnostics company that's going to now be able to detect diseases. I'll bring it to the United States when the time is right. But the skills I needed for that were electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, experts in plasma physics, thermodynamics. I needed lab technicians.
A lot of skills that you can't readily find in the United States. I needed top-notch mathematicians who understood biology, all right? There are very few of those in the United States, and if they exist, they're outside Silicon Valley.
So at first I was looking to raise money over here, build my company over here, and then I realized I simply can't find, I looked, I mean, it's not that I didn't, you know, try, I looked for talent. So I started looking on LinkedIn for experts across the globe. And there were quite a few of them in India because they still have universities that teach these things. So I was looking to hire them.
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Chapter 4: How did the Biden administration impact H-1B visa policies?
Absolutely, I owe the United States everything. I wouldn't be where I am. I wouldn't be able to do these innovations. I wouldn't have had the opportunities if it wasn't for America. This is my country. I consider myself 100% American and my loyalty is to America. This is why it pains me that I had to build my technology in India.
Even though I love India also, I wanted to build my technology here. And I could have raised the money I needed to build the technology here, but not dealing with all the nightmares and the stigma around H-1B visas and then the delays, the $100,000. Because at the end of the day, even if I raise $20 million from Silicon Valley, I'm still a startup.
I can't afford $100,000 fees on every employee I hire.
A question I have for you is, you know, what do you think the solution is? I mean, we're coming at a point now where H-1Bs have been kind of politicized for several years. There's been so much back and forth about what the right level should be. You get back and forth messages from the White House itself.
From your perspective of someone who has experienced kind of the system firsthand, what would be the biggest thing that the country could do to make your life easier?
Well, number one, free the people who are trapped in immigration limbo. There are about 1 million people who are here legally. I mean, they're working for American companies, paying taxes. They can get a green card immediately, all right? You'd have half a million people buying houses, okay? That would boost the American economy more than his tariffs can, more than anything else can.
And then get rid of the stupidity, $100,000 fees and so on. No.
Mm-hmm.
Is some of what we're kind of subtly talking about here a kind of American cultural thing, too, that we think that, like, you know, because of maybe because of our education system or because of maybe something of the American worker are just not fit for the emergence of jobs that we have right now?
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