The Left’s Response

An important response from the Left to the debate can be seen in recent interventions from Bernie Sanders. Given how guest-worker visas work — even for highly skilled workers — the Vermont senator was not wrong to critique them, even at the risk of headlines about him “siding with MAGA.” As Sanders’s January 2 press release rightly states, there are good reasons to view H-1B workers as akin to “indentured servants.” And there are reasons to be suspicious of tech companies who bring in H-1B workers even as they lay off parts of their American workforce.

Still, there is an important point missing in the release and in many of Sanders’s comments on immigration policy that make it vulnerable to co-optation by the MAGA right. It is that this internecine Trumpworld fight over immigration policy is largely a sideshow whose main effect is to impede more impactful debates about the problems Americans face.

Engaging in the debate about how many American workers were replaced with H-1B guest workers lays the onus of unemployment on those workers, rather than on employers. But it is the employers who are making those firing decisions, and they make those decisions to minimize their labor costs, to maximize their profits. In the long run, eliminating the H-1B visa would do little to protect American workers. If guest-worker visas were not available to them, employers would rely more heavily on other options, like offshoring or automation, that are readily available for many tech jobs in our world of telecommuting and artificial intelligence.

Even in the short term, labor shortages alone do very little to improve the conditions of workers. In 2022, at the height of the post-pandemic Great Resignation, when workers ostensibly had unprecedented leverage over employers, average wages rose by only 5.3 percent, below the rate of inflation. Labor-market shortages deliver such meager gains because, however acute they may be, each individual worker negotiates their wage in the context of a vast disadvantage in information and resources vis-à-vis the capitalist firm. The only way to overcome this disadvantage is to organize into institutions, like labor unions, that can compete with firms in terms of resources and data collecting capacity.

Organized labor is the only real protection workers have against the threats to their livelihood, whether they be offshoring, automation, or competition from workers abroad. A militant labor movement, engaged in class struggle, can direct industrial policy to create and keep employment, demand policies to compensate and reskill workers who lose their jobs to automation, and force reforms in guest-worker programs.

Against the Politics of Division

To the extent that immigration is central to the well-being of American workers, it is so because it has the potential to impede the development of the kind of labor movement we would need to secure those policies. Immigration can have this effect in two ways.

First, immigrant workers are harder to organize. This is not because they have some fundamental cultural or political aversion to collective action — since the era of industrialization, foreign-born workers have been pivotal participants in the American labor movement — but because the current configuration of immigration law leaves them extremely vulnerable to employer pressure.

Apart from undocumented migrants, guest workers, including H-1B visa holders, are among the most vulnerable, because their right to remain is dependent on their employment. For this reason, Sanders is wrong to say that there are legitimate conditions under which guest-worker programs like H-1B can be utilized. There never are. If there are labor shortages, they should be met with workers who have all the rights and protections that native workers have.

Second, and perhaps more important, capitalists, in collaboration with the far right, use inflammatory rhetoric around immigration to divide the Left and the labor movement, scapegoating migrants to distract and disorganize our politics. Fewer than a hundred thousand H-1B visas are issued in any given year, representing a tiny fraction of the total population of professional and high-skilled workers in the United States. Expelling them from the labor market will not solve the problems of unemployment and wage depression.

Trump and Musk debate the policy because it deflects attention from the more consequential impact of their own class. Similarly, if workers feel unsafe in their neighborhoods, it’s not because of rampant crime by migrants — who are less likely to commit crime than native-born Americans. It’s because their communities have become more precarious and underresourced, families more stressed. A law to deport migrants charged with minor crimes, which is currently moving through Congress, will not solve these problems. But as long as the Left has to spend time and resources defending against it, it leaves that much less to address the extreme inequality that has hollowed out working-class life.

There is no easy solution to this problem. Socialists cannot avoid the problem by not “taking the bait” because there are real people who will be harmed. And it will not go away on its own because it is so effective in disorganizing workers’ response to inequality and exploitation. When we engage, however, we must clearly reject the premise that immigration is what ails the American working class.