Bernie Sanders Is Still Wrong About Immigration

The Vermont senator criticized the H-1B guest worker program, drawing praise from the most toxic elements of the MAGA movement.

As President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration approaches, many of his supporters have spent the last few weeks sparring with each other online over a federal visa program. This week, the U.S. Senate's most prominent socialist sided with the most far-right wing of the MAGA coalition.

The H-1B program allows companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers in "specialty occupations"—most prominently, as engineers at tech companies. Qualifying positions must utilize "a body of highly specialized knowledge" and "attainment of a bachelor's [degree] or higher" or its equivalent. Federal law currently limits the number of newly issued H-1B visas to 65,000 per year.

Trump recently expressed support for the program, telling the New York Post, "I have always been in favor of the visas. That's why we have them." (That's not quite true: In fact, Trump made the process much more difficult during his first term. Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, he restricted H-1B visas as "a significant threat to employment opportunities for Americans.")

Tech billionaires Vivek Ramaswamy and foreign-born Elon Musk, who have been tasked by Trump with finding cuttable waste in the federal budget, have endorsed H-1B as well. But many of Trump's more nativist supporters see his support for the program as a betrayal of his "America First" pledge. This week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) came out against H-1B, as well.

"Elon Musk and a number of other billionaire tech company owners have argued that this federal program is vital to our economy because of the scarcity of highly skilled American engineers and other tech workers," Sanders said in a statement. "I disagree."

As Sanders sees it, the "main function" of guest worker programs like H-1B is "to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad."

"The cheaper the labor they hire," charges Sanders, "the more money the billionaires make."

"Bernie Sanders is right. Elon and Trump are wrong," claims an X post by Nick Fuentes, a MAGA figure with a long history of racist and antisemitic commentary.

But Sanders is wrong. What's more, he's wrong in the same way he's been wrong for decades.

"Indentured servitude is a contract to work for a single employer for a predetermined period without pay," David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote in April 2024. "H‑1B workers are not only paid—they receive wages in the top 10 percent of wage earners in the United States. As importantly, although they face more obstacles to changing jobs, H‑1B workers are not tied to a single employer and they change jobs regularly." Indeed, employers have to pay considerable fees just to hire an H-1B visa holder.

Not only that, but job shifters were even more common than new hires, among H-1B recipients. "In 2023, about 61 percent of all H‑1B workers starting with a new employer were existing H‑1B workers hired away from other employers in the United States," Bier added. "This means that US employers are more likely to hire an H‑1B worker already in the United States in H‑1B status [than] they are to hire a new H‑1B worker not already with H‑1B status."

Employers are also required by law to pay H-1B visa holders a prevailing wage, which the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) defines as "the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment." As Bier wrote in 2020, 100 percent of H-1B employers audited by the DOL were doing so, while 78 percent actually paid their visa holders even more—on average, 20 percent above the prevailing wage.

Sanders' support for immigration has long been more tepid than one may assume, given he caucuses with the Democratic Party. In a 2015 interview with Ezra Klein, Sanders perplexingly referred to "open borders" as "a Koch brothers proposal."

"It would make everybody in America poorer," Sanders added. "You're doing away with the concept of a nation state." Trump has made nearly identical remarks, telling a crowd in 2018, "If you don't have borders, then you don't have a country."

Sanders has long believed that increased immigration depresses wages for American workers. In 2007, he helped kill a bipartisan immigration reform bill that would have created a path to citizenship for those here illegally. While Sanders supports both a path to citizenship and welcoming more refugees and asylum seekers, he opposed the 2007 law over its guest worker program that would allow foreign workers to receive two-year work visas.

"I don't know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are right now," Sanders told Lou Dobbs at the time.

"The most recent economic evidence suggests that, on average, immigrant workers increase the opportunities and incomes of Americans," according to a 2012 report from the Brookings Institution. "Based on a survey of the academic literature, economists do not tend to find that immigrants cause any sizeable decrease in wages and employment of U.S.-born citizens, and instead may raise wages and lower prices in the aggregate."

Similarly, an April 2024 working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that between 2000 and 2019, immigration "had a positive and significant effect" of between 1.7 percent and 2.6 percent "on wages of less educated native workers…and no significant wage effect on college educated natives." The paper also found "a positive employment rate effect for most native workers."

In his statement this week, Sanders also implied that programs like H-1B are merely a ploy to bring foreign workers into the country on promises of high-skilled work, only to then employ them in low-skilled positions. "If this program is supposed to be about importing workers with highly advanced degrees in science and technology, why are H-1B guest workers being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers?"

Sanders' use of "importing" to describe the voluntary movement of individual people is dehumanizing—and Trumpian. But his larger point is also incorrect: "Bernie's statement implies that you can get an H-1B to be a masseuse and cook. That is wrong," Bier tells Reason. "Those jobs do not require a college degree and are ineligible."

True, Sanders' motives for opposing H-1B are at least somewhat purer than those of someone like Fuentes—who noted in a recent X post, "I don't really care about the economy that much I just don't want to live in a country that looks like India."

Regardless, the fact that Sanders finds himself on the same side of an issue as someone so odious should provide a wake-up call for self-reflection. Rather than being a shortcut to hiring low-wage workers, programs like H-1B provide opportunities for people to come to the U.S. and ply their trade—enriching themselves, and the rest of us, in the process.