America’s broken legal immigration system is replacing US workers by design
Over 83% of H-1B visas went to entry-level workers paid below median wages, while the OPT program lets 400,000 foreign students take key jobs.
The overwhelming majority of Americans instinctively grasp that illegal immigration undermines rule of law, hurts American workers and erodes our way of life. Now, more and more people are waking up to the disturbing reality that our sprawling web of legal immigration programs is just as bad, if not worse, than illegal immigration for many hardworking Americans.
We need a complete overhaul of the legal migration system, which is enabling Big Tech companies and countless other American corporations to quietly replace American workers with visa-sponsored immigrants.
That starts with confronting the H-1B program head-on. H-1B has been marketed to Americans as a tightly enforced, rigorously vetted, merit-based system that admits only the world’s best and brightest for highly skilled jobs that few Americans can do. In reality, it is a loosely monitored system that allows cheap and often entry-level workers to occupy jobs that Americans would gladly fill.
The numbers bear this out. Last year, for example, the Department of Homeland Security reported that 83% of H-1B visas petitioned for between 2020 and 2024 were for entry and junior level employees with salaries set well below the local median wage. This March, the Department of Labor found that the minimum wages employers are required to pay H-1B workers are set $19,000 lower than what U.S. workers earn in the same occupations and locations.
The OPT program is arguably an even more egregious abuse of our immigration system. It allows foreign students to stay in America for up to three years after they graduate college as long as they are working, or at least as long as they report to be working through a portal that isn't very closely monitored or vetted.
OPT has no cap on the number of participants, no requirement that the employer at least try to hire Americans before looking to this program, and no legal minimum salary that prevents employers from undercutting American workers by hiring these OPT workers for cheaply.
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Worse still, because it allows participants to remain on a student visa and thus enables companies to avoid payroll taxes, OPT further incentivizes employers to hire foreigners over Americans.
OPT was never passed by Congress, and most Americans have never heard of it. Yet, today, it is allowing more than 400,000 foreign students to take jobs in attractive sectors like technology and engineering.
This isn’t because of a shortage of American talent. Far from it. The Center for Immigration Studies’ analysis of the 2022 Census data shows that more than 11 million working-age people in the United States with STEM degrees are not working in any STEM job.
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The OPT and H-1B programs are connected. A foreign student, from India for example, can come to the United States on a student visa, remain employed here for years after graduating through the OPT program and obtain an H-1B visa through that same employer. Thanks to the "dual intent" provision that corporate lobbyists pushed into the Immigration Act of 1990, that student could use that job to pursue permanent residency.
Both programs are also riddled with fraud. In May, President Donald Trump's fraud task force identified more than 10,000 cases of foreign students in the OPT program claiming employment with suspect or nonexistent employers. And in June, Fox News reported that police had uncovered an entire network of Indian universities selling counterfeit degrees used to obtain H-1B visas.
Faced with fraud on this scale and corporate abuse this brazen, it's tempting to settle for case-by-case fixes: deport the students making up fake employers, shut down the diploma mills, criticize each individual company filing for H-1Bs rather than hiring Americans.
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These are all reasonable steps to take, but none of them alone will actually solve the structural problem.
That’s because the way Big Tech companies and other major corporations fire Americans and replace them with foreigners who obtain fraudulent degrees isn’t a bug but a feature of our broken legal immigration system. That system was designed by corporate lobbyists and exists to bring foreign workers into America en masse while asking as few questions as possible.
It is time for a new approach. The only long-term solution is to overhaul our legal immigration system and end both the H-1B and the OPT programs for good.