In late June, President Trump signed an executive order eliminating any new H-1B visas through the end of the year. The administration’s rationale for temporarily ending the visa program for high-skilled immigrants was that doing so supposedly puts “America first.”
According to the order, the restrictions are meant to “protect unemployed Americans from the threat of competition for scarce jobs” during the recovery from the COVID-19 economic crisis, but Trump’s suspension of the H-1B program was always on a weak footing. The weight of economic evidence shows that immigration is a boon to the economy, not a blight on it.
Now, new research reiterates that limiting high-skilled immigration actually promotes offshoring jobs to competitors like China and India, one of the very trends Trump promised to combat as president. A working paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research examines past H-1B restrictions and has found that they promoted offshoring. It compares businesses that are highly dependent on H-1B visas to those that are less dependent on them and modeled how they responded to the slash in visas.
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