The Scene
Key figures in the US tech industry have softened their support for the H-1B program that brings up to 85,000 skilled workers to the US every year after a revolt from President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration MAGA political base.
Now calls for reform of the program include tech titans like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, as well as their Democratic ally Rep. Ro Khanna of California and a broad coalition that includes Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The shift began in December, when the Trump administration hired an Indian American venture capitalist, Sriram Krishnan, to a key AI policy position, drawing a vitriolic and sometimes racist backlash on Musk’s X. Former Trump aide Steve Bannon called the program “a total and complete scam to destroy the American worker” and demanded “reparations for tech workers.”
A wave of tech industry figures immediately showed support for immigrant tech workers, many of whom have founded or now run the industry’s most successful companies.
But after saying he’d go to war for the H-1B program, Musk tweeted, “I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.”
Andreesen, whose iconoclastic views are often a leading indicator of Silicon Valley thinking, said on the Lex Fridman podcast last month that the social media controversy prompted him to think deeply about the issue. The venture capitalist has long expressed unequivocal support for the H-1B program, even visiting Washington to inform lawmakers.
“We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into,” he concluded.
Andreessen, in a long and multifaceted argument, didn’t advocate getting rid of the H-1B program. Instead, he said the US needs to both bring in highly skilled labor and provide more opportunities to Americans from every background.
But his arguments sound surprisingly like the objections, long dismissed in Silicon Valley, of labor unions and groups representing American-born engineers who believe that a wave of Indian workers has depressed their wages and job opportunities.
