The choice of a policy adviser for artificial intelligence (AI) in the next Trump administration has sparked widespread debate online over the H-1B visa program, which conservatives are calling out as “abusive” and designed precisely to undercut wages of white-collar Americans.
“Sriram Krishnan will serve as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social this week:
Working closely with David Sacks, Sriram will focus on ensuring continued American leadership in A.I., and help shape and coordinate A.I. policy across Government, including working with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sriram started his career at Microsoft as a founding member of Windows Azure. [Emphasis added]
Krishnan’s appointment has sparked a widespread online debate over the H-1B visa program and employment-based green cards.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
One such major effort that Krishnan has backed is a green card giveaway, primarily to Indian nationals, where country caps for employment-based green cards would be eliminated.
As a result, tech corporations would be massively rewarded for having imported mostly Indian nationals on H-1B visas to take white-collar American jobs. The push to end country caps has failed over and over again in Congress.
Last month, in response to billionaire Elon Musk’s X post regarding the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Krishnan replied that “anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge.”
In a clip from Krishnan’s podcast, he is seen laughing as a guest suggests that Indian nationals ought to “just get married to a U.S. citizen, just make that happen” to secure green cards.
Vivek Ramaswamy chimed in on the debate, suggesting that American companies like hiring foreign visa workers over college-educated Americans because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long…”
In March Ramaswamy appeared on Krishnan’s podcast where he said legal immigration ought to center on filling “labor gaps” and “skills gaps.”
“The sole objective of U.S. immigration policy should be to advance the interests of the U.S. citizens who are already here … against that backdrop, what immigration policy makes sense?” Ramaswamy said:
Great. Now, it becomes easy to implement — Where do we have labor gaps? Where do we have skills gaps? Where do we have people who can add to the productivity of the United States? People who bring a civic love of this country combined with skills and a work ethic and perhaps money and investment to be able to make that happen? That, I think, sets us up for a more rational path here. [Emphasis added]
Conservatives and other dissenters online have fought back on the issue for days now.
“The H-1B visa program is loved by tech companies because it helps hold down salaries of ultra high paid engineering jobs and foreign workers on these visas are way less likely to unionize or agitate for better work conditions,” journalist Lee Fang posted. “Both parties enable the abuse of the program.”
Mike Cernovich and others have used online databases to debunk claims that the H-1B visa program brings only the “best and brightest” of geniuses to the United States to take jobs:
As part of the online debate, many X users are reposting a Breitbart News interview with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance from 2022 when he was running for the open U.S. Senate seat for Ohio.
In the interview, Vance made clear that Congress ought to prioritize overhauling the H-1B visa program to prevent corporations from enacting an outsourcing-offshoring scheme where Americans are laid off, forced to train their foreign replacements, and then those jobs eventually sent to countries like India altogether.
“Generally speaking, a lot of the H-1B abuse we see is in the interests of the people hiring the [foreign visa] worker, who can undercut the wages of Americans, but is it in the interest of the 700 Ohioans who lost their jobs? Absolutely not,” Vance told Breitbart News at the time.
“This is one of these issues where you actually need public policy to solve this problem because they’re taking advantage of a visa system that’s meant to ensure that American companies have the workers that they need — it’s not meant to undercut the wages of American workers in this country,” Vance said. “Unfortunately, that’s what the H-1B visa is just being used to do right now.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
