Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia isn't mincing words. "I think the H-1B visa program is a scam, and it's one that has been perpetrated on the American worker for far too long," he told Fox News Digital. His argument traces a straight line through two generations of broken promises to American workers: "Essentially, we shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas and people were told to 'learn how to code.' Well, now they're being replaced with the H-1B visa workers on the coding jobs as well."
That sentence should land hard for anyone who lived through the manufacturing hollowing-out of the 1990s and 2000s and was told, in effect, to retrain for a knowledge economy that would be more secure. Coding was supposed to be the safe harbor. Moore's point is that it wasn't — it became just another occupational category where employers found it cheaper to import labor than to pay competitive wages to the American workers who did exactly what they were told.
Moore says he's not a lone voice in Congress on this, even if he's currently the loudest one. "I might be the loudest. Some people are quietly talking about it, but I have had many, many of my colleagues here in Congress come up and talk with me since I've started talking about this and thank me for speaking up." That's a telling detail — not that colleagues disagree, but that they're saying this quietly, which suggests the political risk of speaking up publicly still outweighs the substance of the argument for a lot of members.
The numbers back up the anger. As of 2021, roughly 619,000 H-1B workers were in the U.S., a figure almost certainly higher today. Moore points to Microsoft specifically: the company was approved for 2,273 H-1B visas in 2026, the same year it laid off 1,600 Xbox workers. Amazon, Cognizant, Infosys, IBM, and Microsoft all appear as major users of the program — a mix of Big Tech household names and outsourcing firms whose entire business model runs on visa labor arbitrage.
Moore goes further than most H-1B critics by comparing the program's effects to illegal immigration — and arguing the visa version is worse. "I think in many aspects it is actually worse than the illegal immigration problem that we have as it relates to work in this country," he said, framing H-1B as a legally sanctioned displacement mechanism rather than an enforcement failure. He argues the program disadvantages the young Americans doing everything right: "We're sending all of our kids to college, trade school or what have you...and we're coming in with H-1B visas and displacing them with lower skilled, lower paid workers."
It's worth noting that a previous attempt at a $100,000 H-1B application fee was struck down by a federal judge as exceeding executive authority — a reminder that fixing this through the courts or a single administration's fiat has real limits. Moore's push to abolish the program outright, rather than tinker with fees, is a different kind of bet: that enough members of Congress, publicly or otherwise, actually agree with him.
Read the original reporting: Fox News on Rep. Riley Moore's H-1B abolition push.
Hero image: Official portrait of Rep. Riley Moore, 119th Congress. Public domain (U.S. government work), via Wikimedia Commons.