The H-1B visa debate is becoming an increasingly contentious issue on the right. But what should be an opportunity to reform a system that plainly needs it has instead become another occasion for everyone, from everyday Americans to politicians, to display their ignorance and argue as though the American economy were not a system built on productivity, innovation, and competition, but merely a government jobs program.
A post on X went viral yesterday claiming that, since 2022, roughly 706,000 tech workers had been laid off in the United States while about 670,000 H-1B visas had been issued to Indian nationals over the same period. The numbers promptly touched off the predictable conservative tirade against the program.
There are, however, several problems with that comparison.
706,457 tech workers laid off since 2022.
670,693 H-1B visas issued to Indian nationals in the same period.The pipeline never slowed down- even as Americans lost their jobs by the hundreds of thousands and were permanently displaced. pic.twitter.com/OoMvg44EAn
— Expose H1B Fraud (@JobsNowPaper) September 22, 2026
First, the 706,000 figure is questionable because it does not distinguish among U.S. citizens, other noncitizens, and H-1B visa holders. It could therefore represent some combination of all three, not a clean count of Americans displaced from tech jobs, however satisfying that assumption may be.
Second, the 670,000 figure appears to count approved petitions, not newly issued visas. From 2022 through 2024, 76 percent of H-1B approvals for Indian nationals were renewals, meaning they involved workers already in the United States rather than a fresh influx of foreign hires.
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Third, the story becomes more complicated still when you account for net employment. From 2022 through 2025, the same period cited in the post, more than 100,000 net new tech jobs were created and filled in the United States. About 70 percent went to U.S.-born workers, according to the underlying figures. The post instead implies a net loss of American-held positions. The available data point in the opposite direction: net job growth, with most of those gains going to Americans.
Now, onto the broader point: Is it acceptable that roughly 30 percent of new tech jobs went to foreign workers? Well, that depends on how one views the U.S. economy. Is it little more than a jobs program meant to reserve every position for Americans, or is it an engine of productivity and prosperity?
There is a glaring lie at the center of the H-1B debate: that prosperity comes only when Americans hold all of the jobs. That jobs and prosperity are a fixed pie. When did conservatives begin believing in the fixed pie fallacy?
Foreign workers can help grow a sector that creates new jobs, the vast majority of which still go to Americans. The economy is not zero-sum, no matter how badly some people want it to be. And the benefits do not end with the jobs themselves. Growth in the tech sector contributes to a stronger economy by making everyday goods and services cheaper, driving technological breakthroughs that can cure disease and save lives, and creating still more jobs across the economy. Treating every foreign hire as a job stolen from an American ignores how growth and an economy actually works, and reduces the American economy to something a socialist or progressive Democrat would: a government employment program.
This is not to say the H-1B program has no problems. It plainly does. But identifying the problem correctly points toward a solution rather than the usual demand to burn down the whole system and call it good policy.
The problem is not that the United States admits skilled foreign workers, nor that foreign workers automatically displace Americans. The problem is that the H-1B program has historically done a poor job of choosing which workers receive its limited visas, creating many of the abuses conservatives are right to be frustrated by.
As Daniel Di Martino, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies immigration economics, has argued, the program’s lottery system can give a highly paid, specialized worker the same chance of selection as a lower-paid applicant. It also creates incentives for employers to submit large volumes of registrations, rewarding scale and gaming the system rather than identifying the workers most likely to drive innovation, productivity, and job growth.
Di Martino proposes replacing the lottery with a wage-based ranking system that accounts for a worker’s age and intended location. Under that approach, companies seeking scarce, valuable talent would have a clearer path to hire it, while firms built around lower-wage, high-volume staffing would lose much of their advantages.
In other words, change the incentives and let the market do the sorting. The current H-1B system is not much of a market at all; it is a lottery that rewards volume, encourages gaming, and can favor cheap labor over truly scarce talent. Change the incentives, and you change the results.
Those who insist the answer is simply to reject foreign labor are not operating from the premise that an economy exists, first and foremost, to be productive. They are defending a glorified government jobs program, one in which the goal is not to create more opportunity or prosperity, but to make sure no foreigner gets a job before an American, regardless of what that costs Americans in innovation, wages, lower prices, and future jobs.
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