A clash over an obscure immigration policy has been brewing for months within Trumpworld, one that could threaten the Republican administration’s unlikely alliance with Big Tech.
The H-1B visa process has always been divisive, but the debate over the renewable 3-year specialist visa, popular in the tech world, has taken on a new intensity. Prominent tech leaders in the Trump coalition have squared off against an explicitly xenophobic MAGA wing that opposes H-1B on economic and identity grounds, given that the majority of H-1Bs go to Indian people.
Roughly 60 percent of the hundreds of thousands of H-1B visas in use each year go to computer-related jobs, and companies that have sought to align with Trump, like Palantir, Oracle, and Tesla have all used the program.
Amazon, which donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund and does billions of dollars of business with the government, was the single largest sponsor of H-1Bs in 2025, according to a Newsweek analysis.
The fight has been brewing since December, when tech industry Trump backers and future DOGE leaders Elon Musk argued such programs were “essential” because many Americans were not smart enough to do the job and that American culture “venerated mediocrity.”
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk wrote on X, adding, “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
The comments set off a brief but fiery MAGA civil war, with far-right figures like Laura Loomer, now an influential outside advisor to the Trump administration, sharply criticizing the program while also demeaning people from India more broadly as “third-world invaders. Online trolls, meanwhile, harassed Trump’s Indian-born AI advisor Sriram Krishnan. The same day President Trump took office, the White House announced that Ramaswamy, the child of Indian immigrants, would exit from DOGE.
This summer, the administration’s criticism of H-1B visas — along with accompanying right-wing invective online against Indians — roared back, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick decrying the program as a “scam” in August, and Vice President JD Vance hammering tech companies for the “bullsh**” story that they can’t find enough American workers.
The Department of Homeland Security is widely thought to be planning on introducing a rule sometime this year that would tilt the H-1B process, which currently operates as a lottery issuing 85,000 new visas per year, towards the highest-paying jobs first.
The scorched-earth political debate around the H-1B program in the tech world has long obscured the visa’s original intentions, according to former Democratic Rep. Bruce Morrison of Connecticut, who led the passage of the 1990 law that ushered it in. The legislation came on the heels of the Reagan administration tightening penalties for illegal hiring and giving legal status to millions who had previously arrived in the country illegally. This was all meant to encourage employers to seek foreign workers through long-term, legal means like green cards.
Instead, Morrison told The Independent, large-scale immigration reforms in Congress stalled and tech companies have come to rely heavily on H-1Bs, while backlogs in green card approvals span from decades to centuries for large nations like India.
“They have intentionally done this with full knowledge of what they’re doing,” Morrison said of the tech sector.
“That tells you they see something there that’s beneficial to them, and I think the something is lower costs and greater control,” he added.
Studies suggest H-1B holders, who lack any real leverage with their employers, are paid averages of between 10 and 20 percent less, despite ostensible requirements they be paid at levels approximating their domestic competition.
