US signals intention to rethink job H-1B lottery
Foreign worker program represents betrayal of US computer science students, advocacy group argues
- Thomas Claburn
- Sun 20 Jul 2025 // 14:00 UTC
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) intend to reevaluate how H-1B visas are issued, according to a regulatory filing.
The notice, filed on Thursday with the US Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), seeks the statutory review of a proposed rule titled "Weighted Selection Process for Registrants and Petitioners Seeking To File Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions."
Once the review is complete, which could be a matter of days or weeks, the text of the rule is expected to be published in the US Federal Register.
Based on the rule title, it appears the government intends to change the system for allocating H-1B visas the current lottery to some system that will favor applicants who meet specified criteria, possibly related to skills.
The H-1B visa program, which reached its Fiscal 2026 cap on Friday, allows skilled guest workers to come work in the US. As of 2019, there were about 600,000 H-1B workers in the US, according to USCIS [PDF].
The foreign worker program is beloved by technology companies, ostensibly to hire talent not readily available from American workers. But H-1B – along with the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program – has long been criticized for making it easier to undercut US worker wages, limiting labor rights for immigrants, and for persistent abuse of the rules by outsourcing companies.
Change cannot come soon enough for Kevin Lynn, executive director of Institute for Sound Public Policy, a non-profit that advocates for US workers and the reform of guest worker programs.
Lynn in a blog post on Thursday argued that schemes like H-1B, the accompanying H-4 EAD spousal visas, and OPT, have betrayed America's computer science graduates.
"In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science," Lynn wrote.
"That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82 percent of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma."
US government policies, he argues, favor foreign workers over American students.
Recent college graduates are facing a tougher job market than other demographic categories, with a Q1 2025 unemployment rate of 5.8 percent compared to 4.0 percent for workers on average, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For recent graduates in computer science, the US unemployment rate was 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent for computer engineering as of February 2025.
A survey by recruiting firm ZipRecruiter published earlier this year found that 25.8 percent of those who majored in computer science, information technology, or data science wish they had chosen to focus on a different subject.
Lynn blames programs like H-1B for taking jobs away from US computer science students.
"The H-1B visa program has exploded from 363,503 workers in 2011 to 685,117 in 2022 – an 81 percent increase," he wrote. "Between 60 percent and 70 percent of these visas go to workers in computer occupations, directly taking entry-level positions from American graduates."
Ron Hira, associate professor of political science at Howard University and a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which advocates for progressive labor policy, told The Register that the concerns Lynn has raised are valid, though a narrow framing of a complex issue.
"There's no doubt that the H-1B and OPT work program – and the OPT is not supposed to be a work program, but it really is – have really nothing to do with merit or competence or any kind of labor shortages," Hira said.
"So those are fundamental flaws in the program. And then, on top of that, both of those programs allow employers to pay a lot less than market wages. So there's no doubt that those programs distort the US labor market in very negative ways for workers who are in that market."
Hira, co-author of Outsourcing America, has testified numerous times before Congressional committees about US immigration policy. He has argued that the H-1B program amounts to what has been described as an "outsourcing visa" because it allows tech service companies like Cognizant, Tata, Wipro, Infosys, IBM, Accenture, and Deloitte to ship US jobs overseas.
He explained, "When they go into a client – often a Fortune 500 company – they'll say, 'We will take over your IT department and we'll offer you what's called a global delivery model. We'll try to offshore as many of the tasks as possible because we'll pay my cousins' – literally, my cousins in India – 'eight bucks an hour or five bucks an hour,' which is a good wage."
"They have basically a 70-30 kind of model where 70 percent of the work gets done offshore, and 30 percent of the work – because of the nature of the tasks are geographically sticky – has to stay on-site. But instead of hiring and using Americans, they'll bring in H-1B workers who can be paid less, are indentured to the employer, but also act as liaisons to the 70 percent of workers who are offshore."
Hira said 40 percent of H-1B visas go to middlemen with that sort of business model.
Other avid fans of the H-1B program include US tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Uber, and Walmart. According to Hira, these companies "had significant shares of their certified H-1B positions assigned as Level 1 or Level 2, the two lowest wage levels in fiscal 2019, both of which are below the local median wage."
Hira claimed that companies offering salaries at these levels typically are able to pay their workers 20 to 40 percent lower than local median salaries for relevant occupations.
Understanding the impact of offshoring, however, has been difficult, he said, because the US government has chosen not to collect that information. "This has been a long-running issue, of trying to measure white collar offshoring, really doing it in a serious way," he said. "And I've been calling for that for more than 20 years."
Despite talk about AI taking jobs, Hira said that's just a way to distract from what's going on.
"It's hard to get any real data on how much impact AI is having, but the companies certainly have a lot of PR cover by pointing to [AI]," Hira said. "They'll use different terminology. So IBM used to call it 'rebalancing the workforce,' and they would call their layoffs 'resource actions.' But you know, Microsoft's doing similar kinds of things. The fact that they can point to AI gives them cover from scrutiny."
Hira says that fixing the flaws in these programs is relatively straightforward, has bipartisan support, and largely can be done through administrative actions. He argues that the US Department of Labor (DOL) should:
Implement its final wage rule, Strengthening Wage Protections for the Temporary and Permanent Employment of Certain Immigrants and Non-Immigrants in the United States;
Require secondary employers of H-1B workers to attest that they will not adversely affect wages and working conditions;
- Use agency auditing powers to ensure program compliance;
- Enforce the "actual wage" component of the H-1B prevailing wage rule;
- Work with USCIS to curb skill level misclassification.
He also proposes that USCIS should replace the random selection of H-1B visas with a system that prioritizes highest wages, and should revisit its vacated rule, Strengthening the H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Classification Program.
Congress, he said, should take a page from Canada and revise the H-1B program to require employers to actively recruit US workers and hire qualified American applicants prior to hiring an H-1B worker. Finally, he says Congress should require random audits of all H-1B employees to hold them accountable. ®
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/20/h_1b_job_lottery/