Most H-1B criticism focuses on the wage gap, and for good reason — but there's a second mechanism getting less attention: remote work. H-1B holders can work remotely from low-cost regions of the United States, which strips away the traditional justification for the visa (bringing talent physically to where it's needed) while still undercutting American workers on price.
The wage numbers alone are stark enough. A senior computer engineer in India earns roughly $16,000 to $28,000 a year; an entry-level American engineer earns around $58,000. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that between 1994 and 2001, the influx of foreign tech workers suppressed U.S. computer scientist wages by up to 5% and cut domestic employment in the field by up to 10%. That's not a rounding error — that's a labor market being reshaped.
Roughly 19% of the STEM workforce is now foreign-born, a share that exceeds their proportion of the overall U.S. workforce. Combine that with a visa structure where workers are hoping for a green card and therefore have every incentive to accept lower pay and worse conditions without pushing back, and you get a compliance dynamic baked into the program's design — not an accident of it.
The proposed fix worth taking seriously is the American Tech Workforce Act, which would restrict remote work specifically for H-1B holders and push companies back toward hiring locally. It's a narrower, more targeted intervention than an outright ban, and it goes after the specific loophole — remote arbitrage — that's easiest to abuse and hardest to detect from the outside.
The program's original pitch was that it fills gaps American workers can't fill. A visa holder doing the same job, remotely, for less money, from a lower cost-of-living metro isn't filling a gap. It's substituting labor. Closing that particular door doesn't require dismantling the whole program — it requires admitting what it's actually being used for.
Read the original reporting: The visa that ate America's tech jobs (Blaze Media).