Tech makes an economic case for skilled immigrants. Will Trump bite?

Aaron Levie, the CEO of the cloud software company Box, said he was more hopeful than he had been at any point in the past 15 years that America could soon accept more highly educated immigrants -- the sort of skilled foreigners he hires as software engineers.

Levie recently posted on the social platform X that America's immigration policies for high-skilled workers are "not responsive to the market" and that Elon Musk, with his position in president-elect Donald Trump's orbit, could fix them.

"I agree," Musk replied. The thread quickly filled with other tech workers and executives sharing stories of trying to get visas for themselves and their employees.

Welcoming more high-skilled immigrants is "one of the highest leverage -- maybe the highest leverage -- thing you could do to make sure that America stays at the forefront," Levie said in an interview.

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The technology industry considers that argument about economic competitiveness as one that could persuade Trump to allow increased levels of immigration for highly skilled workers. But the industry's optimism clashes with past experience: The president-elect did not expand skill-based legal immigration during his first term in office. Instead, his immigration officials curbed visa programs for educated workers by overseeing them more stringently.

And while some in Silicon Valley and corporate America are hoping that this time will be different, Washington policy analysts, lawyers and visa holders themselves are less certain.

"I do think there is potential for some sort of expansion or change to the skilled immigration world," said Shev Dalal-Dheini, the American Immigration Lawyers Association's senior director of government relations. "But I think it's still going to be a battle with the restrictionist ideas that are a large part of his administration."

Levie and his fellow optimists pointed to the tech giants who are newly in Trump's circle -- and who have used these programs in their own companies -- as a clear reason that expanding skilled visas could be a bigger priority for Trump 2.0.

Musk has become a powerful voice in the president-elect's policy sphere. His company Tesla obtained 724 H-1B visas, which are granted to foreign workers with specialized skills, in 2024. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta who was once a high-profile advocate of immigration reform, met with Trump at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, and Zuckerberg's company donated $1 million to Trump's upcoming inauguration.

And the president-elect himself has talked about the prospects for legal immigration reform, both during a recent interview and on the campaign trail. During a June podcast co-hosted by venture capitalist David Sacks, whom he has since tapped as his cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence czar, Trump said he wanted to make it easier for educated foreigners to work in the United States.

"What I will do is, you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country," Trump said.

His transition team did not respond to requests for comment on its plans for visas and green cards for high-skilled workers. But those who watch the president-elect closely believe that despite his determination to expel millions of immigrants living in the country without legal permission, he is not ideologically opposed to widening avenues for individuals with specific skills to work legally in the United States.

"He's not a restrictionist," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration. "He's just a regular Republican who believes in 'legal good, illegal bad.'"

But while business leaders argue that loosening restrictions on high-skill immigration would bolster America's competitiveness on the global stage, Trump embraced the opposite approach during his first term.

Although he sometimes spoke of his desire to transition to a "merit-based" immigration system at the time, the bill he endorsed to do that in 2017 would not have expanded green cards, and it went nowhere. A year later, his administration released general reform principles that dropped the concept entirely. Instead, Trump's immigration officials quietly tried to clamp down on many visas for students and educated workers. Denial rates for professional visa applications jumped. In 2020, officials briefly suspended employer-based visas.

Now many of the same people who championed that tougher stance -- including Stephen Miller, the incoming White House deputy chief of staff for policy -- are returning to power.

High-tech firms have long pushed for a relaxation of the H-1B visas cap, which has remained at 85,000 since 2006. For the fiscal year 2025, 470,000 people applied for those spots. It is also extremely difficult to convert those three-year visas into green cards, especially for people from India, about 1 million of whom are waiting for approval.

The research on highly skilled immigrants is very clear: Immigrant inventors punch above their weight in terms of innovation, in part by lifting the performance of their U.S.-born collaborators. Firms that are granted their H-1B petitions hire more U.S.-born workers, whereas restrictions on those visas push companies to instead expand overseas.

"Competition with China demands that we have top tech talent," said Vivek Chilukuri, the senior fellow and program director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security. "Their size is their strategic advantage, and ours is immigration."

Still, support for expanding high-skilled immigration has been undermined by widely publicized examples of abuse by companies that use H-1B workers to replace their American employees. In his first term, Trump requested additional documentation for nearly a third of H-1B applications, slowing everything down, even for companies that did manage to win visas.

There is broad agreement in Washington that the system could work better, but the Congressional Record is littered with bills that have not advanced. Powerful legislators have preferred to package high-skilled visa reforms with changes to family-based immigration and border security in an effort to win broad enough support to pass. Instead, those complex compromises have fallen under their own weight.

Linda Moore, the president and CEO of the tech industry association TechNet, hopes that exhaustion might actually work to her advantage.

With energy for a comprehensive solution fading, she thinks Trump's focus on artificial intelligence and U.S. manufacturing could be directed into a stand-alone high-skilled immigration measure, even as the White House separately pursues large-scale deportations. The pitch is especially urgent for semiconductor companies, whose officials have said they desperately need more specialized engineers from places like Taiwan in order to keep their enormous factory projects on schedule.

"The focus on America's global competitiveness, and making sure that we're leading the world in technology, that America-first kind of approach, we feel that high-skilled immigration is an incredibly important part of that," Moore said.

However, Congress and the incoming administration have a long list of things to get to: Trump's Cabinet nominations, taxes, border security, tariffs, deregulation. In recent years, proposals to do relatively small things -- such as extending the grace period that H-1B holders have to find another job if they lose one, and allowing the U.S. military to hire more foreign-born workers -- haven't advanced.

Adam Kovacevich leads the Chamber of Progress, a left-leaning tech industry policy coalition. He notes Trump's tendency to say what the executives around him want to hear. In this case, they have been more focused on freeing the industry from what they see as burdensome restrictions.

"High-skilled immigration is pretty far down the list," Kovacevich said. "I think the broader tech community would love to see H-1B reform, but I think there's also a wariness because it's been discussed at length, and nothing has ever really happened."

In the meantime, employers are paying to expedite their applications and advising their international employees to be in the United States by the inauguration. Companies are bracing for the delays and denials they faced in Trump's first term. But the president-elect's remarks are also giving them hope that even if the rules remain restrictive, at least they won't tighten further.

"I do think that on the highly skilled immigration side, there's a greater probability that we'll see less draconian changes," said Sam Adair, a lawyer based in Austin, Texas, who leads a law firm focused on immigration. "But it's anybody's guess."