President Donald Trump’ defense this week of the controversial H-1B visa, intended for skilled foreign workers and heavily used by Silicon Valley’s technology industry continues to divide the Make America Great Again movement, as a Bay Area business group expressed approval of the President’s recognition of immigrants’ contributions.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham broached the topic of the “H-1B visa thing” in an interview broadcast Tuesday, telling the President, “If you want to raise wages for American workers you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.”
Trump responded, “I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.”
To Ingraham’s reply that America has “plenty of talented people,” Trump said, “No, you don’t. You don’t have certain talents.”
Silicon Valley’s technology giants are consistently in the top 10 direct recipients of the visa, and also employ many H-1B workers through staffing companies that often pay below prevailing wages according to research by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. This year, Meta received 6,294 direct H-1B approvals, Google received 5,552, and Apple, 5,382, federal government data show.
Peter Leroe-Muñoz, head of technology and innovation policy at the Bay Area Council, which represents businesses including Google, Apple and Meta, said of Trump’s comments that “it’s important that the administration recognized the key contributions of immigrants to our talent pipeline.” The H-1B program, Leroe-Muñoz said, “is incredibly impactful in terms of helping to maintain and grow our tech leadership in Silicon Valley.”
Blowback to Trump’s comments — made as Silicon Valley CEOs and other influential figures from this region have gained unprecedented access to the White House — came immediately.
Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women For America First — which organized the “Save America” rally that preceded Trump supporters’ Jan. 6 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol — lamented in a social media post Tuesday about Trump’s H-1B statements, “Where is my President?”
Trump’s willingness to upset members of his base by defending the H-1B appears to be payback for donations by Silicon Valley technology companies and tech CEOs to his new White House ballroom and January inauguration, said San Jose State University emeritus professor of political science Larry Gerston.
“Trump has been defined as the transactional president — this is just another transactional exchange,” Gerston said. “It’s hard to believe that CEOs and their companies contributing millions of dollars for the inauguration, or a ballroom … do so without expecting something in return.”
The White House called Gerston’s assertion “a baseless opinion.” Google, Apple and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.
Dismay among Trump supporters over his defense of the H-1B continued to reverberate.
“What an atrocious thing to say,” actor Kevin Sorbo, a conservative influencer who played Hercules on TV in the ’90s, posted Wednesday to his 2.5 million followers on social media platform X. “This will cost republicans the midterms.”
Ken Cuccinelli, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security in Trump’s first administration, said Thursday on Ingraham’s show that Congress for decades had used the H-1B to favor big technology companies over American workers. “It’s been very detrimental to America and Americans,” Cuccinelli said.
Lawyer John Miano, who represented a group of American tech workers in a long-running but unsuccessful lawsuit over the H-1B and the H-4 visa for H-1B holders’ spouses, responded to the President’s statements with bitterness.
“Trump clearly has decided to throw the people who supported him through three elections under the bus and has aligned himself with the billionaire class,” Miano told this news organization. “He supports replacing Americans with cheap foreign workers.”
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in an emailed statement Thursday that Trump “has done more than any president in modern history to tighten our immigration laws and put American workers first.”
Rogers called Trump’s imposition of a $100,000 fee for certain new H1-B visas in September “a significant first step to stop abuses of the system and ensure American workers are no longer replaced by lower-paid foreign labor.” The Trump administration “is protecting American workers by restoring accountability in the H-1B process, ensuring that it is used to bring in only the highest-skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations and not low wage workers that will displace Americans,” Rogers said.
Trump in his first administration cracked down on the H-1B, dramatically increasing denial rates for new visas in 2018, mostly targeting staffing companies. A rule issued in Trump’s first term that raised minimum pay was snuffed out by a lawsuit by the Bay Area Council, Stanford University and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Under President Joe Biden, another rule from Trump’s first term, to replace the lottery-based H-1B allocation system with a wage-based program, was set aside.
Trump, an immigration hardliner who in 2016 assailed use of the H-1B as a “cheap labor program,” had sparked MAGA-world turmoil in December after he was quoted in the New York Post calling the H-1B program “great.”
Outrage over Trump’s latest H-1B comments was not universal among MAGA supporters and conservatives.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday said Trump was “right” about the H-1B, adding, “We must distinguish clearly between companies that need to hire critical world-class talent from other countries vs companies that simply hire lower cost non-US employees to increase profits.”
Trump loyalist Steve Bannon, a vitriolic H-1B foe, sought to defuse the furor over Trump backing the H-1B. On TV show Real America’s Voice on Wednesday, Bannon said Trump had been “pretty hermetically sealed” from information about H-1B-related damage to incomes and job opportunities for American workers. “We’ve got to get to what information he’s getting,” Bannon said, “and make sure that the information is accurate.”