Before last fall’s presidential election, Kevin Lynn had spent seven mostly fruitless years trying to stop American companies from relying heavily on foreign workers to do white-collar jobs.
The advocacy group Mr. Lynn leads, now called the Institute for Sound Public Policy, occasionally made a splash. An ad campaign in San Francisco public transit stations and trains ginned up some media attention, much of it disapproving, and he goaded President Trump into stopping the Tennessee Valley Authority from outsourcing about 200 technology jobs. But mostly it was crickets. Even a first-term push by Mr. Trump didn’t have much impact.
Then, suddenly, the issue burst into public view, culminating in Mr. Trump’s decision last month to charge employers a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa used to hire a skilled worker from abroad.
“Our voices are being heard,” Mr. Lynn said in an interview. “Some are really resonating now.”
So what explains the sudden resonance? Part of it is the fierce advocacy of some of Mr. Trump’s loyal supporters, like the right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who helped elevate the issue after the election. Ms. Loomer shouted out Mr. Lynn’s group, whose rhetoric also skews “America first.”
Perhaps more important is the job market. Though college-educated foreign nationals are a small portion of the overall labor force, they make up a substantial proportion of computer-related fields, about one in five of the roughly 2.3 million software developers in the country, according to census data.
For a long time, these foreign workers did not appear to be a major drag on the employment prospects of American workers. But as tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of people since 2022 and the unemployment rate in computer fields has shot up, especially for recent graduates, the issue has moved to the foreground.
“There was a string of layoffs in that time period,” said Stephen Schutt, a software developer who has collaborated with Mr. Lynn to push for changes to the H-1B visa and related programs. “We see how everything is abused, the risk to the overall system. How if this continues there’s a real chance that people who are born in America won’t be able to get jobs.”
The Loss of Basic Coding Jobs
The stated rationale for the H-1B program is to help employers when they have trouble filling positions requiring certain specialized skills. But many employers have long relied on the program for routine skills that are not in short supply, according to Ronil Hira, a political science professor at Howard University. The practice appears to be common in computer-related fields.
Though employers can use the visas for jobs as varied as medical doctors and fashion models, almost two-thirds of H-1B applications approved during the last fiscal year were in computer fields, according to federal data. The median salary in the jobs for which employers sought initial H-1B applications was just above $100,000, roughly the median for all computer and information-technology jobs in the United States.
The typical computer worker in the for-profit H-1B program “is doing work at the intersection between basic coding and tech support,” said Kirk Doran, an economist at the University of Notre Dame.
Mr. Doran and other economists generally agree that, even with this gap between the H-1B program’s rationale and its use, the visa remains a net benefit to the U.S. economy. One recent study compared firms that won the lottery for an H-1B visa with firms that lost. It found that the losers employed fewer native-born workers — suggesting that the H-1B helps companies create jobs for more people than just the visa holder.
But studies also suggest that specific categories of workers — namely, those with experience and skills that are similar to those of the visa holders — have lost out. “The native-born workers most like the H-1B visa holders are those likely to be the losers from the H-1B program,” said Jennifer Hunt, an economist who studies immigration at Rutgers University.
As long as employment in the tech industry was growing rapidly, this did not appear to be a huge source of agita. There were enough jobs for everyone, more or less. Only 85,000 of the visas are available to for-profit companies each year; they last for three years and can be renewed once. But as the industry began to shed jobs this decade, several tech workers said in interviews, foreign labor became a growing concern.
One employee who specializes in designing user interfaces, and who requested anonymity for fear of hurting his future job prospects, said his department of about five people was eliminated by his employer in 2024. That same year, the company applied for about a dozen H-1B visas, according to federal records. The employee, who filed a charge of discrimination on the basis of national origin with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said the H-1B hires appeared to work on projects he had worked on. It took him more than six months to find a new job.
A second worker, a machine learning engineer who also requested anonymity, said he had been laid off three times from positions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area from 2020 to 2024. All three layoffs, he said, followed the same pattern: He was told that a contractor, who appeared to be on an H-1B visa, would take over grunt work so he could focus on more sophisticated tasks. In each case he was laid off within about 60 days of meeting the contractor.
Several workers expressed frustration over American companies that outsource work to large consulting firms like Tata and Infosys. The companies apply for thousands of H-1B visas each year, according to federal records. Even supporters of visas for skilled foreign workers say these firms often abuse the H-1B program, though some experts argue that Mr. Trump’s recent directive could make the problem worse.
A Flawed System?
Mr. Lynn credited the softening job market with putting the H-1B issue on the political radar. “In August, when legislators went back to their districts during recess, I have been told by several people that their constituents were saying: ‘Why can’t my kid get a job? And why are there so many Indians?’” he said.
The son of a longtime union member, Mr. Lynn supported Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential primaries and later volunteered for Dr. Dean’s political action committee, Democracy for America. But he drifted from the Democratic Party during President Barack Obama’s first term, when he felt outnumbered by supporters of liberalized immigration.
Since then, Mr. Lynn hasn’t always fit neatly into either political coalition. His criticisms of employers’ use of foreign workers often win cheers from the president’s nationalist supporters and can strike those on the left as crude.
In December, Mr. Lynn was among the first on X to point out that a venture capitalist Mr. Trump had tapped to be a White House adviser was sympathetic to increasing “skilled immigration.” Ms. Loomer cited Mr. Lynn’s group while posting on the topic, which set off a social media eruption pitting Mr. Trump’s prominent tech-industry backers against prominent immigration-skeptics who backed him.
Tax filings show that Mr. Lynn’s group has typically received several hundred thousand dollars a year from a foundation that supports groups seeking stricter limits on immigration. But even fellow immigration restrictionists have generally not made skilled labor their top priority.
Mr. Lynn argues that H-1B visas are just one piece of a flawed system that has allowed foreign tech workers to displace Americans.
Another frequent target of his is the so-called permanent labor certification, or PERM, process, in which companies sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency, often after they enter on H-1Bs. Under the program, employers must demonstrate that they couldn’t find a U.S. worker to fill the job. But critics complain that employers simply go through the motions with no intention of hiring a U.S. worker because they already have a foreign worker in mind. Some large employers, including Facebook and Apple, have resolved federal government lawsuits or investigations over such accusations in recent years.
Mr. Schutt, the tech worker who has pushed to rein in programs like H-1Bs, is part of an informal network that has sought to draw attention to the PERM program, partly by applying for the jobs themselves. He estimates that he has applied to well over 1,000 ads with the telltale sign of a PERM job — like a print-only newspaper advertisement — and gotten zero offers.
“It’s just a weird dynamic where I know I’m never going to be considered because it’s not a real job opening,” he said by email.
Some workers have more pressing concerns. Alexander Karinsky, a longtime New York-based I.T. worker who was laid off from the marketing firm WPP in 2023 and replaced by a group of workers in Bangladesh, said the experience was “one of the most shocking events of my life.” But he said clamping down on H-1Bs wouldn’t stop multinationals like his former employer from simply hiring workers abroad.
Mr. Lynn argues that all these issues are connected. “Globalization is the trunk of the tree,” he said, “and offshoring, outsourcing, H-1Bs are the branches.”
Robert Gebeloff and Aaron Krolik contributed reporting.
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, downward mobility and discrimination. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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