On Monday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “On Balance,” former acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf said that there will be “some pain” to make fixes to the H-1B visa program “to actually raise the level, hire American workers, and the like.”
Wolf said, “[A] lot of these tech companies have relied on this H-1B system for a number of years, right? And so, they’re going to be hesitant to give that up. They’re able to pay a lower rate to bring someone in to do not really a high-skilled job. And so, they’ve become dependent on it. It’s built into their business model.”
He continued, “And so, yes, you’re — it’s going to cause some pain to go away from that to actually raise the level, hire American workers, and the like. So, it can be done. But, again, a lot of the high-tech companies, they continue to advocate for this. They will say there are not skills. They will say that the American workers are not trained for this. And I just don’t believe that that’s true. Again, we probably need to attract some global talent in really specialized fields. But a lot of these H-1Bs are not that.”
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