Indian-origin Howard University professor says H-1B visas have no connection to US worker shortage

Howard University professor Ron Hira said H-1B visa programs that allow US companies to hire skilled labour from outside the country have no connection to merit or shortage of US workers for those specific jobs.

Ron Hira, whose parents were Indians and came to the US on similar visas has long been a critic of the H-1b visa programs as he argued that companies misuse these programs to outsource cheaper employees instead of giving work to US graduates. In 2016, he gave a testimony in the Senate on immigration and detailed that both his parents were from India and his wife is an India-born. And hence to testify against this visa program was very meaningful to him personally.Amid the ongoing H-1B row, triggered by the release of the latest H-1B figures of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Roh Hira said that H-1B workers get selected by a random lottery and not the best and brightest. The USCIS revealed that the administration selected 120,141 H-1B visa applications for 2026, which is the lowest since 2021, but US tech workers claim that the number is huge given the massive layoffs that are happening in companies.

USCIS makes selections by lottery every year when the agency receives more H-1B electronic registrations than permitted. The annual H-1B limit is 65,000 plus a 20,000 exemption for individuals with an advanced degree from a US university.

The H-1B figures for 2026 have puzzled MAGA, as they expected a crackdown on H-1B from the Donald Trump administration. During the major H-1B row that involved Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy supporting the program, President Donald Trump said he was in favor of H-1B, though he has taken a stern stance on illegal immigration. Republican leader Virgil Bierschwale questioned whether the 2026 H-1B figures reveal that the employers have already chosen the employees they will fire as no new jobs are being created. "This 2026 visa approval gets me. Over a year ahead of the current date, they already have approved visas. And they must have a job to have a visa. Which means the employer has already picked out the employee they plan on firing since they are not creating new jobs.

How is this not fraud at every level?" Bierschwale wrote.

"A huge chunk of H-1B petitions are for jobs that don’t even exist. Indian IT body shops are notorious for hoarding H-1B workers, hoping to lease them out later. If there’s no client, they get “benched”—which is illegal. But exploiting desperate migrants is a business model too profitable to quit," X handle US Tech Workers wrote.