H-1B visas: A brief history of the US foreign labour permit
The long-standing conflict between employers and workers over granting foreigners permission to work has led to compromises and curbs for over a 100 years.
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Republicans are feuding over how many people can obtain H-1B visas, permits that allow foreign professionals to legally work in the United States. Today an estimated 600,000 foreigners with H-1B visas have tech, academic, medical and other jobs.
Two of President-elect Donald Trump’s most influential – yet informal – advisers, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, want to expand the programme to help Silicon Valley’s tech companies recruit what they call “excellent engineering talent.” Other conservatives with strong Trump ties, such as Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, see this immigration program as a “scam” and a cheap labor program as pernicious as “illegal immigration.”
Although Trump, who previously criticised the programme, has sided with Musk and Ramaswamy so far, based on my research I doubt the conflict between the sparring GOP camps will go away anytime soon.
I am a public law scholar who studies the history of foreign workers in America. In the book I’m now writing, I describe the long-standing conflict between employers and workers over granting foreigners permission to work in the US. That struggle has yielded both compromises and new layers of bureaucracy for more than 100 years.
Foreign labour
The fight over the employment of foreign labor began in the late 19th century when Congress passed several laws to stop labour migration in response to pressure from American workers.
These restrictions further...
