Kamala Harris is repeating Hillary Clinton's H-1B mistake
Kamala Harris, backed by Silicon Valley VCs, might overlook H-1B concerns like Hillary Clinton did in 2016, which could affect her presidential bid, especially in key swing states.
Vice President Kamala Harris risks repeating Hillary Clinton's 2016 mistake by ignoring the H-1B visa issue, potentially alienating IT workers concerned about job security.
Harris recently secured the backing of more than 200 Silicon Valley venture capitalists in her race for president, echoing a path eerily similar to Clinton's 2016 presidential run. Clinton's campaign overlooked a critical issue: the threat to IT workers posed by the H-1B visa program and offshore outsourcing. Despite the growing use of the H-1B visa for offshoring IT jobs, Clinton remained silent on the issue. Now, Harris appears to be making the same mistake by not addressing the visa issue.
In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump capitalized on Clinton's position. Trump, who had little Silicon Valley support and garnered just under 21% of the vote in Santa Clara County, invited IT workers who trained their H-1B visa-holding replacements, especially from Disney in the swing state of Florida, to speak at his rallies. These workers voiced their grievances, and Trump promised reforms.
Clinton lost Florida by a slim margin of 1.2%. This state has a substantial tech employment base, with more than 530,000 jobs, according to CompTIA. Its labor force also includes people in other occupations susceptible to offshore outsourcing, including customer service representatives, business and financial operations, HR and legal services. Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.72%, or just 44,292 votes -- another state with a large population likely worried about losing jobs to overseas workers.
Clinton lost other critical swing states with significant populations at risk to offshore outsourcing, notably Wisconsin and Michigan. It's unclear how much Clinton's silence on H-1B visa use in offshore outsourcing contributed to her loss. But ignoring an issue that voters in critical states care about is perilous.
IT job market in flux
Going into November, the IT labor market is changing in ways that might put more scrutiny on the need for overseas workers to fill IT jobs.
"Companies are continuing to cut costs, and IT is one of the areas where they are focusing," said Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates Inc., a labor market research firm. IT unemployment ranges between 5% and 6%, above the national unemployment rate, according to Janco's data.
In an interview last week with TechTarget Editorial, Mark Dinan, a tech recruiter in Palo Alto, Calif., said he believes tech hiring is stabilizing after the layoffs following COVID-19 hiring excesses.
"We've been through the worst of it," he said. However, he noted that companies are cutting back on hiring because AI "has probably made an experienced software engineer 20% or 30% more effective in terms of what they can get done."
This unsteady tech job market is also happening while college enrollments in computer science have been surging. U.S. students are responding to the need for computer science skills. Undergrad enrollments, which U.S. students dominate, grew 9.9% in 2023, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. International students account for a substantial portion of graduate and doctoral students seeking CS and STEM degrees. Still, Trump recently promised to extend green cards or permanent residency even to junior college graduates, which might undermine domestic computer science enrollments.
Computer science enrollments are susceptible to market demand. Following the dot-com bust in 2001, enrollments plummeted as U.S. students moved into safer fields.
Biden shifts focus to green cards
The H-1B visa is used in two broad ways. It provides a means for tech companies to hire graduates of U.S. schools. Companies might hire students under the Optional Practical Training program, which allows students to work on a temporary visa while they submit an H-1B petition. The tech industry has long argued that the constraints on the visa -- notably the annual cap of 85,000 -- cost them the ability to hire talented international graduates, prompting some companies to expand hiring efforts overseas.
But it's also heavily used by IT services to hire workers who can facilitate the transfer of work overseas. Another issue cited as a problem with the visa is the power employers have over these workers, who are dependent on continued employment to remain in the U.S.
The Biden administration has supported more green cards over the H-1B visa. It backed legislation in 2021, the U.S. Citizenship Act, raising the permanent employment-based work visas from 140,000 to 170,000 annually. That legislation also sought to exempt STEM doctoral students from numerical limits. It failed to progress.
Genesis of Trump's H-1B position
Stephen Miller, who joined the Trump campaign and later became a White House senior advisor for the Trump administration, was likely responsible for engineering Trump's position on the H-1 B visa in the 2016 campaign. In early 2015, Miller was a congressional aide working with former Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who headed the Senate immigration subcommittee and investigated offshore outsourcing.
Companies are continuing to cut costs, and IT is one of the areas where they are focusing.
Victor JanulaitisCEO, Janco Associates Inc.
Offshoring was accelerating and normalizing then, and IT offshore firms were among the visa's significant users. They still are. Employers felt comfortable moving IT work offshore wholesale and requiring IT workers to train their visa-holding replacements before getting laid off. Some firms with exclusively U.S.-based customers, such as Southern California Edison and Northeast Utilities -- now Eversource -- in Connecticut and the University of California, were using visa workers to move jobs overseas. Disney was also moving jobs overseas.
Miller connected with Edison and Disney workers, and what he learned became the basis of two committee hearings and Trump's campaign. As president, Trump and his administration increased visa denials, especially to outsourcing firms. However, Trump has yet to deliver the wholesale reform he promised.
Biden-Harris faulted Trump on H-1B in 2020
In the 2020 race, President Joe Biden and Harris accused the Trump administration of acting recklessly on immigration, including the H-1B visa. The Biden administration reduced the rate of visa denials dramatically.
Ron Hira, an associate professor of political science at Howard University who has testified before Congress on problems with the visa program, said Biden didn't make regulatory changes that significantly affected how the H-1B visa is used. The "Biden administration has been very generous to visa employers through its final and proposed rulemaking as well as absence of any enforcement actions," he said. Concerning Harris, "one could argue that she's been pro-H-1B."
Clinton acknowledges a problem
In February 2016, Leo Perrero, a former Disney IT worker who was laid off after training his replacement, testified before the Senate immigration subcommittee about his experience. "I followed my dream of having a career in technology to have my very same desk, chair, and computer all taken over by a foreign worker who was just flown in to America weeks before."
During the 2016 campaign, Clinton initially avoided directly addressing the H-1B visa issue, likely to maintain support from Silicon Valley donors who generally favor the program. However, as the campaign progressed, Clinton, in an interview four months after Perrero's testimony, showed a more nuanced understanding of the program's complexities. "The many stories of people training their replacements from some foreign country are heartbreaking, and it is obviously a cost-cutting measure to be able to pay people less than you would pay an American worker," she told Vox.
But Clinton's comments came late in her campaign. Trump owned the H-1B issue, and Clinton's financial support from Silicon Valley potentially came with a cost to her election prospects. Harris might learn the same lesson if she remains silent on the H-1B visa issue. On election night, the Clinton campaign was surprised it had lost Florida, but the laid-off Disney workers who trained their replacements likely were not.
Patrick Thibodeau is an editor at large for TechTarget Editorial who covers HCM and ERP technologies. He's worked for more than two decades as an enterprise IT reporter.
