Can the Dems Outflank Trump on Immigration?

The governor’s race in the red state of Ohio is a toss-up, according to the latest polls. The primaries aren’t until May, but the presumptive nominees for the November general election are Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.

I don’t know enough about the state’s politics to place Acton on a spectrum, but she led the state’s COVID response, and her website hits the usual Democratic messages: “reproductive freedom”, unions, education, and health care.

But starting last week, she’s been alluding to a less predictable issue: the H-1B visa program.

The H-1B visa is an increasingly unpopular foreign-worker scheme, ostensibly intended to bring in high-skilled workers, but in fact providing cheap, controllable white-collar foreign workers, mostly to IT.

Acton hasn’t specifically come out and said she’s against the H-1B racket, but she’s been hitting Ramaswamy for his defense of importing foreign workers, which he justified back in December by saying American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long”, as exemplified by the fact that young people didn’t root for the nerdy characters in 1990s sitcoms.

Acton has naturally turned that into a message that Ramaswamy thinks “Ohioans aren’t succeeding because they’re lazy and mediocre and watching too much TV.”

The reason she only launched this implicit (and almost certainly insincere) critique of the H-1B program last week is that President Trump teed it up for her. During last Tuesday’s interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, he strongly defended the H-1B program (though the examples he cited, like the Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, which ICE raided, aren’t apropos). Even as Ingraham pushed back, Trump insisted Americans “don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles.’”

(I don’t know about making missiles, but in the tech industry, H-1Bs not only aren’t training anyone, they frequently have to be trained by the Americans they’re hired to replace.)

This week, Trump again argued for importing foreign workers, saying this time that they’re needed to teach Americans how to make computer chips.

These statements — combined with the president’s recent comment that he wants to bring in 600,000 students from Communist China — have understandably upset Trump supporters, with some catastrophizing about the death of MAGA and the president’s surrender to the Swamp.

There is both less and more here than some seem to think.

On the one hand, none of this should be surprising, since Trump has expressed his fondness for foreign-worker programs — both high- and low-skilled — for as long as he’s been in politics. See here for just one example I addressed in these pages during the 2016 campaign.

Also, actions are what count, and in both terms, the Trump administration has taken steps to limit abuse of the H-1B program. This year, it has imposed a $100,000 fee for foreigners entering on an H-1B visa, and issued regulations to make it more likely that the genuinely highly skilled are the ones who get the visas.

Despite this, Trump really has given an opening to any Democrat with the wits to exploit a wedge issue.

Of course, Democrats aren’t going to morph into restrictionists — open immigration is practically a litmus-test issue for the party now. Both elected and rank-and-file Democrats are in the streets opposing — often violently — the deportation of any illegal alien, even rapists and murderers.

But the one aspect of the broader immigration issue where the Democratic party line still allows dissent is precisely the aspect Trump has been highlighting — guestworker visas. The AFL-CIO switched sides on immigration in the mid-90s (after leading the anti-amnesty cause in the lead-up to the 1986 amnesty bill), but it is still comfortable criticizing guestworker visas. That’s why, for instance, the union-adjacent Economic Policy Institute has gotten away with publishing important and valuable work highlighting the problems with both high-skilled and low-skilled foreign-worker programs.

Likewise, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley have for years partnered on important H-1B reform legislation, the latest version of which includes Durbin’s fellow Democrats Sanders and Blumenthal as co-sponsors.

How can the administration limit the political danger posed by the president’s recent comments? Post hoc cleanup by Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent isn’t going to be enough. Actions are needed.

The $100,000 entry fee is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. I wouldn’t say it’s purely kabuki, but the fact is that the legal basis for the fee means it’s only for foreigners entering on an H-1B visa, not those entering on other visas and then adjusting their status; nor does it apply to renewals. This means that few, if any, H-1Bs will be subject to the fee.

Likewise, with the recent regulations changing the lottery selection system. (Yes, this supposedly high-skilled program awards visas by lottery.) The new regs don’t get rid of the lottery but instead turn it into a kind of raffle, with applications offering higher salaries getting what amounts to extra raffle tickets.

To avoid being outflanked on this issue, the administration is going to have to step up its game. Abolishing the H-1B program altogether would be the ideal solution, but Congress isn’t going to do that, and the president’s tech supporters wouldn’t be pleased.

But there’s much that can be done short of abolition. First, DHS can modify the proposed rule on the lottery by getting rid of the raffle-ticket system and limiting it to only the highest-paid applications. This would satisfy the president’s (and IT’s) stated desire for admitting the “best and brightest” while eliminating altogether the use of H-1B for less-skilled workers (like entry-level coders, not to mention public school teachers and 7-Eleven cashiers).

Also, the Department of Labor is reportedly working on a regulation to raise the “prevailing wage” that has to be paid by employers of H-1Bs. “Prevailing wage” is not what it sounds like, and in fact is just another of the many Orwellian lies that suffuse our immigration system. Preventing employers from using H-1B visas to undercut comparable American workers is imperative.

Next, the administration should end the illegal Optional Practical Training program. This scheme was transformed from a brief internship for foreign students after graduation (which was already contrary to the immigration law) into a full-blown foreign-worker program, first by the George W. Bush administration, and then expanded further by Obama. In this scheme, former foreign students who majored in STEM fields can stay and work for up to three years, often while they try to snag an H-1B visa. The employment of these fake students is literally subsidized by the American taxpayer, because, as “students,” their employers don’t have to pay Social Security or Medicare taxes, making them preferable to Americans or even green-card holders.

Making these changes would be an important message that the Trump administration’s commitment to American workers is not just talk, reassuring its own voters and foreclosing any Democratic attempts at wedge-issue politics. If the president’s recent comments end up lighting a fire under the administration to follow through on these changes, Trump may well be able to turn a PR problem into a political win.