Idexx, which is headquartered in Westbrook, is one of the Maine companies with the most H-1B visa approvals. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

An ongoing clash between Republicans over visas for highly skilled immigrants is bringing new attention to the program, which Maine business and immigration experts say is vital to filling jobs in some of the state’s fastest-growing industries amid a tight labor market.

The visas, known as H-1B visas, allow 65,000 skilled workers to come to the U.S. each year to fill specialized jobs that require at least a bachelor’s degree, often in technology, health care, higher education, scientific research or other STEM fields.

Nationally, tech giants like Tesla, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple use H-1B visas to source thousands of higher-level employees. Locally, they’re favored by companies like The Jackson Laboratory, Eastern Maine Medical Center, the University of Maine, Idexx and Wex.

The program made headlines last week after Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who’ve been tapped to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, defended the visas and the need to bring “the best and the brightest” into the United States. Musk, who grew up in South Africa and is now the richest man in the world, wrote on X, the social media platform that he owns, that H-1B visas are the reason he and many other immigrants have found success living and working in the U.S. He said he was prepared to “go to war on this issue.”

But anti-immigration Republicans have criticized the program as a way to take well-paying jobs away from Americans and hand them to foreign workers for less money. The H-1B visas have also been criticized by progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who argued that companies abuse the program. He likened the visa recipients to “low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”

President-elect Donald Trump has historically opposed the H-1B visa program, believing companies should prioritize American labor over hiring foreign workers. In 2020, he restricted several forms of legal immigration, including access to H-1B and H-2B visas, which are used for jobs in fields like hospitality and construction.

But last week Trump appeared to change course and defended the program, siding with Musk, saying the country “needs smart people.”

‘HARDER TO MEET STAFFING’

The apparent shift is welcome news to many companies — including dozens in Maine — that rely on the program.

Eastern Maine Medical Center and The Jackson Laboratory are consistently the top two Maine entities to request H-1B workers. In 2024, the laboratory requested 37 visas and the hospital requested 34. In 2023, they requested 51 and 45 visas, respectively.

Eastern Maine Medical Center has roughly 120 H-1B employees at a given time, said Paul Bolin, executive vice president and chief people and administrative officer for Northern Light Health, the hospital’s parent company.

“Things have gotten worse since the pandemic,” Bolin said.

The state isn’t producing enough nurses to meet the need, so the hospital is still reliant on traveling and international nurses and medical staff.

“If those are further restricted, it would make it that much harder to meet our staffing needs,” he said.

Sarah Joughin, senior associate director of the Office of International Programs at the University of Maine, said the program is vital to both the university and the broader University of Maine System. In 2024, the university system was approved for 30 H-1B visas, 24 of which were for positions at the flagship campus in Orono.

According to Joughin, the program “enables our institutions to attract and retain highly skilled professionals from around the world, ensuring access to a global talent pool essential for advancing research, innovation, and academic excellence. This is particularly critical in specialized fields where domestic expertise may be limited, such as engineering, computer science, and advanced research disciplines,” she said, adding that the national shortage of qualified STEM professionals has made it difficult to recruit U.S. citizens for more specialized roles.

In an emailed statement, the Jackson Lab also reinforced the importance of the program.

“JAX — and the U.S. scientific community at large — depends on the H-1B visa program to foster international collaboration and drive groundbreaking research. The diverse expertise and innovative perspectives the international community contributes are crucial to advancing our mission to improve human health,” it said.

SMALL BUT MIGHTY 

On top of the 65,000 yearly cap, an additional 20,000 visas are available to workers who have received an advanced degree in the U.S.

Universities, nonprofits affiliated with universities and nonprofit or government research organizations are exempt from the cap. The visas are good for three years and can be extended to six.

The specialized work visas are different from H-2B visas — the temporary work authorizations that many of Maine’s seasonal and tourism-based businesses rely on each year.

H-2B visas are issued when there are not enough U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to do temporary work, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Business owners have to prove that they tried to hire in the U.S. and that hiring foreign workers will not adversely impact the wages or working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.

H-1B visas, however, do not require proof that the business owner tried to recruit within the U.S.

Like the H-1B visas, there is a 66,000 cap, but the Department of Homeland Security frequently releases more. In November, the federal government announced an additional 65,000 H-2B visas.

It was welcome news to Maine’s seasonal businesses, which last year were approved for just shy of 2,000 H-2B workers.

Comparatively, Maine employers last year were approved for 320 H-1B workers — 148 new positions and 172 extensions.

Patrick Woodcock, president and CEO of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, warned against discounting the program as less important for its size.

Patrick Woodcock

“It is some of the fastest growing companies in the state that are utilizing it,” he said. “The program has been modest in numbers, but I think in terms of economic output for the state, they really have been pretty consequential.”

H-2B visas are critically important, especially in the increasingly tight labor market of the last few years, but the need for H-1B visas will likely only increase as the state tries to combat an aging population and declining workforce participation.

The number of H-1B new or extended workers in Maine has been increasing over the last decade, with a low of 217 in 2015 and a high of 342 in 2022. It was not immediately clear how many total workers are in the state at a given time because people in the second or third year of a visa are not counted in yearly totals.

“This is an incredibly important program to supplement our existing workforce … and it is critical to maintain some of the progress we’ve seen economically in recent years,” Woodcock said.

AN EMPLOYMENT ‘WORKHORSE’

Many people now on or seeking an H-1B visa came to the U.S. through a different visa program for school, and one to three years after graduation need an employer to sponsor a special skills visa to stay, said Stefanie Trice Gill, founder and chief recruiter of IntWork, a Maine recruiting firm that specializes in pairing immigrants with employers.

“Often they’re with people who’ve been working with them for some time, and the employers just can’t afford to let them go,” Trice Gill said. “It’s much better for employers to be able to bring someone to their tech company in Maine than to have to leave Maine to find workers.”

Trice Gill said she does not work with many H-1B visa holders, though the agency is interested in doing so — the immigrants who go through IntWork are often already living in Maine and already have work permits. They don’t need sponsorship.

“But even with that supply, employers still struggle to fill key positions,” she said.

According to Trice Gill, immigrants are more likely to have a master’s degree in a STEM field than a U.S.-born candidate, she said.

“For those professions that require an advanced degree, we can’t meet the need without considering immigrant candidates,” she said. “As the U.S. industry grows, the workforce has been declining. Even with all the effort to get U.S. citizens to study STEM professions, there’s still a big shortage of skilled STEM professionals.”

Marcus Jaynes, an immigration attorney with Landis, Arn and Jaynes in Westbrook, called H-1B visas the “workhorse of temporary employment” for professional positions.

The 65,000 to 85,000 cap is barely touching the demand.

“Last year there were half a million registrations in the annual lottery,” said Jaynes, who specializes in business and employment-related immigration law. “That’s a really high contrast. It shows very clearly that employers are looking to bring on a lot more H-1B workers than they can.”

The cap is already too low, so further limiting the number would be challenging, Jaynes said.

“If the program sees restrictions, it’s going to hurt the individual companies that can’t access the program, but it’s also going to hurt the economy,” he said.

Jaynes is encouraged by Trump’s recent statements favoring the program but said there’s still “a lot of room for damage to be done” by restricting the program through other means than the cap, like raising the minimum prevailing wages to make them less accessible to smaller companies.

“There’s lots of speculation about what may happen,” he said.

Copy the Story Link