Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia isn't a fringe voice on this — he says there's bipartisan support behind the scenes for ending the H-1B program outright, and his description of it doesn't pull punches: "a scam … perpetrated on the American worker for far too long."
Moore's specific charge is one that should sting anyone who lived through the "learn to code" era: American workers told to retrain for tech, only to find the jobs on the other side of that retraining handed to H-1B holders who, in his telling, are paid less rather than more skilled. He calls it a "rigged market," controlled by government and corporate lobbyists rather than by actual labor economics.
The numbers back up the scale of what's being defended. An estimated 619,000 H-1B workers were in the U.S. as of 2021, almost certainly higher now. Microsoft alone had 2,273 H-1B visas approved in a single year — while its Xbox division laid off 1,600 employees. Eighty percent of H-1B holders who become permanent residents do so through employment-based green cards, meaning the program functions, in practice, as a slow-motion immigration pipeline as much as a temporary-labor one — which is a legitimate policy conversation to have, but a different one than "we can't find qualified Americans."
A federal judge already struck down the $100,000 fee as an unconstitutional tax, which means the legislative and executive tools available here are narrower than they looked a few months ago. That raises the stakes on efforts like Moore's, since a court-vulnerable fee isn't a durable fix on its own.
What's notable is where the pressure is coming from: not just labor advocates on the left, but a Republican member of Congress describing the exact same dynamic — American workers displaced, wages undercut, oversight absent — that critics on the other side of the aisle have been raising for years. When "learn to code" and "H-1B replacement" show up in the same sentence from a member of Congress, that's not spin. That's a pattern too visible to keep dismissing.
Read the original reporting: Demand to end 'scam' visa program replacing American workers surges (Fox News).
Photo: United States Capitol Building, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.