Among the government programs that produce more confusion than benefits, H-1B visas are right up there.

If you’ve been hearing about H-1B visas, it’s probably because President Trump abruptly changed its rules with a proclamation on Sept. 19.

As is typical of Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip policy-making, the proclamation produced an outbreak of fear and chaos, in this case among holders of the visas. That’s because it seemed at first that the administration was imposing a $100,000 fee not only on applicants for the visas, but on current holders reentering the U.S. from abroad, say from home leave or a business trip.

Until the White House clarified that the charge would be a one-time fee for new H-1B applications, not charged annually or for renewals or reentry, holders were advised by some employers not to leave the U.S. for the present; those who were caught off-guard overseas scurried to get home by Sunday, when the fee began.

A Sept. 19 Emirates flight from San Francisco to Dubai had to abort its departure to allow several panicky passengers to debark, according to Bloomberg.

The administration’s subsequent assurances have quelled the panic. But the proclamation has created new befuddlements, including over whether it opens the door to illicit dealings between Trump and companies bidding for the visas, and whether it’s even legal.

As my colleagues Queenie Wong and Nilesh Christopher reported, there are concerns that “a selective application of the fee could be a way the White House can reward its friends and punish its detractors.”

Importantly, there’s room to question whether the proclamation will solve long-standing problems with H-1B visas. So let’s take a look at the program’s malodorous history.

H-1B visas were created in 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, to relieve what high-tech companies asserted was a chronic shortage of U.S.-born workers in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).

The idea was to give highly-skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations” the right to three years of U.S. residence renewable for a further three years — an opportunity to obtain permanent residency or even citizenship.

After a few rounds of tweaking, the annual cap on new applications was set at 85,000, including 20,000 holders of advanced degrees from U.S. universities. Higher education and nonprofit research institutions are exempt from the cap.

Things didn’t work out as anticipated. U.S. employers came to see the H-1B visas as tools to replace native-born technicians with cheaper foreign workers. Scandalously, some of the American workers were required as conditions of their severance to train the newcomers to do their jobs.

I documented that practice at Southern California Edison in 2015. The giant utility acknowledged that the outsourcing of workers would cost the jobs of 500 technicians who did the work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison’s computer hardware and software for payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management.

Essentially, Edison was replacing domestic IT specialists earning $80,000 to $160,000 with workers provided by two India-based outsourcing firms, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, which were paying their recruits $65,000 to $71,000. By the time the outsourcing process was complete, Edison said, its IT expenses would fall by about 20%.

“They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money,” one laid-off Edison worker told me at the time, recounting a group meeting with supervisors. “They said, ‘We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.’ You could hear a pin drop in the room.”

Then there’s the University of California, which announced in 2016 that it would lay off 49 career IT staffers and eliminate 48 other IT jobs that were vacant or filled by contract employees. The American workers were ordered to train their own replacements, who were employees of the Indian outsourcing firm HCL Technologies.

Although the visa law specified that hiring foreign workers would not harm American workers, “the H-1B program is most definitely harming American workers, harming them badly, and on a large scale,” Ronil Hira of Howard University, an expert in the visa program, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015. “Most of the H-1B program is now being used to import cheaper foreign guestworkers, replacing American workers, and undercutting their wages.”

The high-tech industry’s dirty little secret, I reported, was that the STEM shortage was a myth. The same companies wringing their hands over the supposed dearth of STEM-qualified workers were simultaneously laying them off by the tens of thousands. Indeed, experts in technology employment consistently found that “the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry,” one told me. Anyway, a significant portion of H-1B recruits weren’t in jobs demanding unique skills, but workaday technicians.

Since 2020, the top employer of H-1B visa holders has been Amazon, with a total of 43,375 workers over that period — followed closely by the Indian outsource companies Infosys and Tata. In the current fiscal year, Amazon reigns, with more than 14,000 H-1B holders, followed by Tata, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Apple and Google. I asked Amazon why it needs so many foreign workers and what work they do, but didn’t receive a reply.

The Indian outsourcing firms have dominated the H-1B system since at least 2009. For years their role has stoked controversy, in part because their employment practices have come under question.

In court, government prosecutors and civil plaintiffs have alleged that Infosys and Tata were exploiting the guest workers they brought to the U.S. Infosys settled federal fraud charges with a $34-million payment in 2013, the largest penalty in an immigration case at that time. The company denied the allegations.

That same year, Tata settled a class action lawsuit with a $29.8-million payment. The plaintiffs alleged that workers imported by Tata were forced to sign over their federal and state tax refunds to Tata, among other claims. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing.

Over the years, the H-1B program has made for political controversy, though Congress hasn’t taken a firm hand in correcting its issues. Conservatives and progressives alike have found reason to complain that it undermines domestic employment. Near the end of his first term, Trump shut down H-1B issuance entirely, along with some other specialty visa programs, but his initiative was blocked in federal court.

But the program remains enormously popular in the high-tech world, which has long agitated for an expansion. Its fans include Elon Musk, who tweeted in December that “the reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H-1B.” He underscored his position with a burst of profanity, but he did promise to “go to war on this issue,” although he acknowledged that some fixing is in order.

That brings us to the issues with Trump’s proclamation. Its shortcomings resemble those that prompted federal Judge Jeffrey S. White of Oakland to overturn Trump’s ban in 2020 in a case brought by the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others.

White ruled that the authority to change the terms of the visas belonged to Congress, not the president, and that the administration hadn’t evaluated the effect of the ban on the domestic economy, as federal law required. The case was rendered moot when Trump’s ban was reversed by President Biden. I asked the White House if it was concerned that this proclamation could also be blocked in court, but got no reply.

A bigger question concerns the ramifications of the $100,000 fee. “H-1B visa fees of this magnitude will strongly discourage the hiring of the most talented members of the global labor force,” says University of Chicago economist Steven Durlauf. Instead, the policy will create incentives to move high-tech and scientific activity to other countries, effectively offshoring economic activity that should occur in the U.S., he says.

The fee is so high that only the biggest and richest employers will be able to pay it, locking out small start-ups that have tried to use H-1B visas to build their professional teams. The proclamation doesn’t make clear whether universities and research institutions will be exempt from the fee. Even financially well-endowed universities would find it hard to justify paying $100,000 to import a faculty member from abroad.

“This is a de facto ban, as few organizations will be able to afford it,” says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a high-tech think tank.

The White House says it intends to replace the current system, a random lottery apportioning available H-1B slots among all applicants, with one favoring applications to fill the highest-paid slots.

The proclamation states that H-1B abuses “present a national security threat by discouraging Americans from pursuing careers in science and technology, risking American leadership in these fields.” Never mind that students considering careers in scientific and technical fields are being profoundly discouraged by Trump’s freezes on research funding across the scientific landscape.

So the bottom line is that, as is usual, Trump’s H-1B policy works at cross-purposes with his other initiatives. For decades, the H-1B program has been ripe for fixing. If only the Trump White House took the time to craft a sensible repair.