Playing to the gallery
For those who have followed Trump's journey to and through the White House, his latest executive order restricting the hiring of H-1B workers is not surprising. After all, Trump came to office with the promise of making America 'great'. He promised to bring back American manufacturing from abroad and secure American jobs at home. Needless to say, his actions really struck a chord with anti-immigrant proponents who broadly blame much of America's woes on the open nature of immigration in the country. The idea that immigrants are taking lower salaries to take away the jobs of hard-working Americans is central to such an imagination. For his part, Trump has used the rhetoric of migration and its ills whenever it suited him. Aside from his grandstanding plans of building a wall, Trump has frequently and specifically targeted the trend of US tech companies favouring the hiring of H-1B visa holders. The H-1B visa programme was conceived to provide a way for foreign workers with specialised skills and knowledge to work in the US. As of 2019, the US had nearly 400,000 H-1B visa holders residing in the nation. Predictably, 65 per cent of these work in computer-related occupations. More importantly, 72 per cent of these workers are Indian. Why would India's 'good friend' Trump target a category of legal immigration that is overwhelmingly used by Indians? The answer lies in the pandemic and the falling political fortunes of Trump. Trump has based much of his re-election bid on the twin promises of making the economy better and 'fixing' immigration. With the pandemic causing a record loss of jobs in the United States and tarnishing Trump's claims of a booming economy, he has fallen back to delivering on other election promises that he can publicly do something about before the November elections. In June, he ordered a temporary halt to visas for foreign workers through the end of the year. His current escalation has come with a grand show of making an example of the Tennessee Valley Authority, an organisation that was planning to outsource some of its technology contacts to other companies with foreign workers. Citing the instance of TVA laying-off dozens of its American workers and outsourcing these technology jobs to H-1B workers, Trump fired the TVA Chairman whom Trump had appointed to the position. Subsequently, TVA 'acknowledged' Trump's intent and has shown support for the new executive order. Trump furthermore stated that given the climate of rampant intellectual property theft, outsourcing IT jobs could become a national security issue. This is not the end to Trump's tinkering with the H-1B programme, the White House has indicated that it is now working on a merit-based immigration bill. Further changes in the pipeline may also include wage requirements for H-1B applicants and measures that restrict the spouse of the H-1B holder from working in the US.
Obviously, such proclamations have not uniformly gone down well. Trump's June halt on visas for foreign workers saw him being the target of a lawsuit filed by 174 Indians in the US District Court in the District of Columbia. Following the issuing of the executive order, the IT industry body Nasscom stated that Trump's order seems to be based on misinformation. Nasscom further stated that such measures would only hurt the US economy's ability to bounce back from the pandemic and impact its capabilities in innovation and R&D. Closer to home, big technology players such as Google's Sundar Pichai, Tesla's Elon Musk and Microsoft President Brad Smith have also shown their disapproval of the executive order.
As a side note, it is interesting to note that tech companies have not been the only beneficiaries of the H-1B programme. To a lesser extent, the US Government itself relies on the programme to meet its hiring needs. In 2019 for instance, a Bloomberg review noted that the US Department of Labour had issued 2,000 H-1B visas in the first nine months of the year. This was after a 2017 executive order by Trump that directed US employers to hire American.
