Why Are H-1B Visas Suddenly a Big Deal? One Reason: Tech Jobs Disappeared

Before last fall’s presidential election, Kevin Lynn had spent seven mostly fruitless years trying to stop American companies from relying heavily on foreign workers to do white-collar jobs.

The advocacy group Mr. Lynn leads, now called the Institute for Sound Public Policy, occasionally made a splash. An ad campaign in San Francisco public transit stations and trains ginned up some media attention, much of it disapproving, and he goaded President Trump into stopping the Tennessee Valley Authority from outsourcing about 200 technology jobs. But mostly it was crickets. Even a first-term push by Mr. Trump didn’t have much impact.

Then, suddenly, the issue burst into public view, culminating in Mr. Trump’s decision last month to charge employers a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa used to hire a skilled worker from abroad.

“Our voices are being heard,” Mr. Lynn said in an interview. “Some are really resonating now.”

So what explains the sudden resonance? Part of it is the fierce advocacy of some of Mr. Trump’s loyal supporters, like the right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who helped elevate the issue after the election. Ms. Loomer shouted out Mr. Lynn’s group, whose rhetoric also skews “America first.”

Perhaps more important is the job market. Though college-educated foreign nationals are a small portion of the overall labor force, they make up a substantial proportion of computer-related fields, about one in five of the roughly 2.3 million software developers in the country, according to census data.

For a long time, these foreign workers did not appear to be a major drag on the employment prospects of American workers. But as tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of people since 2022 and the unemployment rate in computer fields has shot up, especially for recent graduates, the issue has moved to the foreground.