Open Veils · Answer
Why was h1b program created?
The official rationale of filling genuine skill gaps was built on demographic projections the National Science Foundation itself later admitted were fabricated or wildly overstated. The program was driven by corporate lobbying, not authentic scarcity. Critics from Antony Sutton's tradition of elite-capture analysis through to contemporary labor economists argue H-1B functions as a wage-suppression mechanism dressed in meritocratic language. The 'shortage' framing gave multinationals a permanent lever to undercut American technical workers without the political optics of outsourcing.
Evidence
- The America First Policy Institute has documented that the 1990 legislation was passed 'at the urging of employers' and rested on National Science Foundation projections — later demonstrated to be inaccurate — forecasting catastrophic shortfalls of scientists and engineers by the 21st century.
- Norman Matloff, computer science professor and longtime H-1B critic, has shown through wage data that H-1B workers are systematically paid below market rate for equivalent experience, meaning the program's primary function is cost arbitrage, not talent acquisition.
- The Disney and Southern California Edison cases, in which American employees were forced to train their H-1B replacements as a condition of severance, became the most publicized examples of a practice Hira argues is structurally built into the program's design.