Blaze Media ran a column recently that I keep coming back to, titled, accurately enough, "The visa that ate America's tech jobs." The core data point isn't new to anyone who's followed this fight, but it's worth restating because it's the whole argument in one line: NBER research on the 1994-2001 period found 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%. Foreign-born workers now make up about 19% of the STEM workforce — a share larger than their share of the workforce overall.
Here's the part that should be the actual scandal, and mostly isn't: H-1B holders can legally work remotely from anywhere, including a location entirely unrelated to their employer's headquarters. That's not a loophole in the sense of some clever workaround — it's a straightforward reading of rules that were never updated for a world where "work" and "physical presence in the sponsoring office" got decoupled. Combine that with a $16,000-to-$28,000 senior-engineer salary in India against a $58,000 American equivalent, and you don't need anyone to be acting in bad faith for the incentive structure to relentlessly favor offshoring the role, one remote H-1B hire at a time, without ever triggering the political optics of an actual factory closing.
Sen. Jim Banks's American Tech Workforce Act, which would restrict this remote-work arrangement specifically, is the correct scale of fix — narrower than a blanket freeze, targeted at the mechanism that's actually doing the wage damage rather than at the visa category as a whole. I've been critical this week of maximalist H-1B bills that can't distinguish a hospital's genuine need from a staffing shop's arbitrage. This isn't that. Closing the remote-work gap targets the exact lever making the arbitrage possible in the first place.
The wage-weighted lottery I praised a few days ago and this remote-work restriction aren't in tension — they're the same theory of the case from two different angles. One raises the price of gaming entry into the program. The other closes the exit ramp that let winners of the old lottery quietly offshore the job anyway. Do both, and you've actually built a program that selects for scarce skill instead of cheap labor.