The H1-B foreign worker visa program, marketed as a way for U.S. companies to bring in high-skilled workers from abroad for “specialty occupations,” is being abused for mid-range jobs for which Americans are likely readily available, a Daily Wire review of Department of Labor data found.
The Society of Cannabis Clinicians, for example, apparently could not find anyone where it&#8217;s headquartered in Baltimore willing to publicly espouse the virtues of marijuana, instead using an H1-B visa holder for “PR &amp; Communications” at $48 to $50 an hour. Danboise Mechanical in Michigan sought to bring in a foreign worker to serve as a &#8220;Plumbing Estimator&#8221; for $85,000 a year. And public schools in our nation&#8217;s capital looked to other countries for well-paying, non-specialized jobs, such as a $70,000 instructional coordinator and a $65,000 school-based public relations specialist.
The H1-B program says it&#8217;s only for jobs that require &#8220;theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.&#8221; But in fiscal year 2024, nearly 12,000 accountants and auditors were deemed eligible to enter the lottery, along with more than 1,000 construction managers and hundreds each of public relations specialists, interior designers, and landscape architects.
There were some 755,000 H1-B workers in the United States as of 2023, according to government data. Eighty-five thousand H1-Bs are granted each year to companies, chosen randomly from among the approved lottery entrants, plus many more from colleges, government, and research nonprofits, which aren’t subject to that cap. The visas grant admission for up to three years, which can be extended. The beneficiaries&#8217; families can also come with them.
The visa program has been under the microscope in recent weeks. Tech mogul Elon Musk, President-elect Donald Trump&#8217;s efficiency czar, said last month that, when working as intended, H1-Bs can allow American industry to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-backs-musk-on-immigration-visas-its-a-great-program" target="_blank" rel="noopener">skim the brightest</a> fraction of a percent from other countries.  He also said that abuses should be rooted out.
Trump has said similar, saying &#8220;we need smart people coming into our country,&#8221; while proposing reforms. In the final months of Trump’s first term, his administration implemented or proposed several new regulations. His administration <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/08/2020-22347/strengthening-the-h-1b-nonimmigrant-visa-classification-program">revised</a> the “regulatory definition of and standards for a ‘specialty occupation,’” and proposed moving from a random lottery to prioritizing the <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/11/02/2020-24259/modification-of-registration-requirement-for-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b-petitions" target="_blank" rel="noopener">highest-paying jobs first</a>, letting the market prove that the skills are actually high-end. But the Biden administration scrapped the changes.
An analysis of the program in the final year under Biden shows that it has strayed far from its intended purpose, with positions granted for many positions that are neither specialized nor hard to fill with an American worker.
Foreign friends?
The <a href="https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/performance#dis">data</a> suggests that some foreigners may use small businesses to secure entry into the United States for acquaintances, with the false claim that no one in the country could do those jobs.
Arshad Virani of Houston, for example, fashions himself a DJ, saying on <a href="https://soundcloud.com/djaventertainment">SoundCloud</a>, where he has 178 followers, that “DJ AV also known as Arshad Virani is a 29 year old who’s vigorous passion for music has lead him to&#8230; ware out the dance floors at any bash!” According to the government data, DJ AV Entertainment, Inc. needs to bring someone into America through 2027 to serve as Virani’s “public relations manager” at $36 an hour.
Smokers Paradize, a marijuana accessories store in San Antonio owned by Karimali Maknojia, says it can’t find any Texans qualified and willing to be its “brand promotions director” for $53,000.
Abdul Quddus, president of a collection of Fast N Friendly convenience stores, successfully brought in foreigners to work as store managers for separate stores in the Missouri towns of Kansas City, Overland Park, Nelson, and Grandview, based on the notion that he could not find Americans willing to do the job—despite paying up to $58,000, above the average income in the state.
These sorts of foreign-sounding names were very commonly listed as the U.S. point of contact for employers seeking to take advantage of the program. Yanhyujiao Hu, president of the Hu Insurance Agency in Irvine, California, asked to bring in a Financial Planner from abroad for $30 an hour. Santwant Singh was another insurance proprietor who couldn’t find a Californian qualified to serve as New Business Operations Manager for $65,000 a year. In Virginia, Aziza Kasawat, the owner of a 7-Eleven, sought to bring someone to America to work the cash register for $13 an hour.
In Alpine, Texas, 20% of the population is impoverished, but Hursh Patel, principal of America’s Best Value Inn, said he needed to bring in a foreigner to work as manager of the hotel for $68,000 a year — twice the per capita income of the town. In Tioga, North Dakota, a similar situation played out with Sashin Patel, owner of the Mainstay Suites Tioga.
In fact, 1,941 requests for foreign workers listed a U.S. business contact with the last name of Patel, one of the most common names in India.
You can scroll through some H1-B applications from last year — all &#8220;certified&#8221; as eligible by the government, though not all actually won the lottery — that caught our eye here.
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Displacing Americans in sought-after industries
Some industries in which many Americans aspire to work, but in which well-paying jobs have increasingly been hard to come by, have turned to foreign workers.
Major video game studios — an industry sought out by many young computer scientists — have brought foreign labor into the United States. Activision Publishing, the company behind Call of Duty, wants a foreigner to work as an associate designer for $39 an hour. Blizzard Entertainment, producer of World of Warcraft, wants a game designer for $57, while Epic Games wants one for $120,000 a year. And Amazon is seeking 10 foreigners to work as game designers for $53,331.
In journalism, National Public Radio is looking to retain a foreigner to serve as digital editor of its National Desk at $123,000 to $148,000. The Concord Monitor in New Hampshire wants an investigative reporter to work for $19 an hour by drawing someone from thousands of miles away from the community it covers. The San Francisco Chronicle sought an “Asian American and Pacific Islander Reporter,” turning not to the city’s sizable Asian-American population but to actual Asians, for $87,500. Bloomberg is seeking foreigners for a slew of positions.
In fashion, Abercrombie &amp; Fitch sought to renew an H1-B for a designer making $38,000, while Armor Jeans sought one for $55,000 and J. Crew for $62,100.
Mundane tech labor
The largest categories of H1-B workers, by far, are in the tech industry. Tech companies have justified the program as giving access to brilliant, specialized engineers. While some fit that category, others don’t—and the H1-B system in its current form selects randomly among all “certified” applicants, without regard to who is more high-skilled.
When selecting a job classification from a list of choices on the Department of Labor&#8217;s form, companies said they were seeking a quarter-million “software developers,” including extending 80,000 who are currently in the country. That description is too broad to determine whether they are elite engineers pioneering novel technologies, or whether they are simply doing the everyday work of software development. Other job classifications more clearly fall into the latter. For example, more than 9,300 “database administrators” were sought.
Employers also report the job title of the person they intend to hire, and when the title is specific, it often suggests duties that typical American programmers could readily do.
Thousands involved tinkering with a company’s Salesforce implementation. Some were for “web administrators” or Python developers — a basic computer programming language that any comp-sci graduate would be qualified for. More than 1,000 were for “scrum masters” or “agile” leads — project management positions consisting of asking computer programmers how far along in their projects they are. Others were for marketing jobs that involve using technology more than creating it; for example, Autozone sought out a foreigner to handle Search Engine Optimization in Memphis for $113,500 a year.
Thousands of graphic designers and user experience designers — creative jobs for which many in the United States are qualified — are also on the list.
Colleges and activists
Unite Here, a union that says it is dedicated to “making sure our <a href="https://unitehere.org/">jobs are safe</a>,” sought to skip over American applicants when hiring for two meeting planners in New York City, paying $62,400 and $48,006.
The fact that nonprofit &#8220;research&#8221; groups, governments, and colleges are exempted from the H1-B cap has led them to make heavy use of the program, including left-wing activist groups. There were 94 H1-B applications for “climate change policy analysts” in 2024, including from the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy, which “fundamentally addresses <a href="https://ceed.org/about-us/">racial and class justice</a>” and used the program to install a foreigner with a masters degree as its “federal policy director.”
Colleges sometimes give recent graduates low-paid jobs seemingly to enable them to remain in the United States, and other times turn to foreigners to fill faculty positions despite ferocious competition in those fields from Americans who paid tuition to earn advanced degrees from the university’s own programs. It is difficult to say whether, in the hard sciences, some are hired because the brightest minds in difficult fields happened to be from abroad. But in the humanities and soft sciences, it is difficult to believe that is the case.
Adelphi University in New York, for example, turned to H1-B to try to fill jobs for Assistant Professor of Sport Management ($78,000) and Assistant Professor of Physical Education ($75,000). The school charges undergrads $68,000 a year in tuition, and its sports management program promises a <a href="https://www.adelphi.edu/program/undergraduate/sport-management/">“thriving career.”</a> Grambling University, a historically black university in Louisiana, sought to renew the visa of an <a href="https://accreditationcouncil.org/Portals/0/DirectoryAnnualReports/2021_Annual_Reports/GramblingStateUniversity_LS_Annual_Report_2021.pdf">assistant professor of leisure studies</a> who teaches REC 201 – Outdoor Recreation, for $65,000.
The University of Louisville’s Department of Health and Sport Sciences “serves <a href="https://louisville.edu/education/departments/hss">nearly 1,000</a> graduate and undergraduate students pursuing careers in the health, fitness, and sports industries.” Yet when it came time to hire a lecturer, it looked abroad, paying $56,000—about the cost of a single student’s <a href="https://louisville.edu/education/departments/hss">annual expenses</a>. In all, twenty-six “recreation” professors are in the U.S. on H1-B visas and seeking renewal, on top of 85 requests for more visas for recreation experts. The figures are higher for fields like art, drama, music, political science, history, and sociology—all fields where the number of American PhDs seeking jobs far exceeds the available jobs.
When it comes to non-academic staff positions at universities, schools that market themselves as training centers for certain jobs often say they can’t find an American capable of doing that very job, and hire foreign workers—likely a student who came from abroad to study at the university and wants to stay after graduation. Alabama A&amp;M, for example, applied for an H1-B financial aid analyst at $35,525, and the University of Illinois is looking for a “grants and contracts associate” for $45,257.
Indiana University-Bloomington is turning to H1-B to employ a web developer for $57,803, despite pumping out nearly 500 comp-sci graduates a year.
In the interactive database below, you can click a job category and browse H1-B applications for that job from fiscal year 2024. All of the jobs were “certified,” meaning the U.S. government found them eligible to enter the H1-B lottery. However, not all of them were selected in the lottery.
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The H1-B Jobs That Prove The Visa Program Badly Needs Reform

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The H1-B Jobs That Prove The Visa Program Badly Needs Reform