The Visas Dividing MAGA World Help Power the U.S. Tech Industry

Behind the uproar over the H-1B visa is a simple fact: America's tech industry is hooked on imported labor.

- Paul Kiernan & Angel Au-Yeung

The program was at the center of a fight that broke out between President-elect Donald Trump's supporters over the holidays. Elon Musk and other tech executives defended H-1B visas as crucial to the success of U.S. businesses. Other stalwarts in the MAGA movement said tech companies should be forced to hire American workers.

Amazon.com, Google, and Tesla are among the biggest users of the visas, which let companies bring foreign workers to the U.S. on a temporary basis. The workers overwhelmingly come from India and fill jobs in such fields as software development, computer science, and engineering.

Created by Congress in 1990, the H-1B program is the main pathway to the U.S. for highly skilled foreign workers. Visa holders can eventually become eligible to apply for green cards, which would let them stay in the country indefinitely.

The program is vastly oversubscribed, with new visas capped at 85,000 a year. Companies file hundreds of thousands of petitions for the visas a year. A lottery system helps decide who gets in. Employees of universities and other nonprofits are generally exempt from the cap.