H-1B visa 'crisis': Are Indians taking over US? What numbers say

A US entrepreneur named James Blunt has sparked an online debate after sharing a X (formerly Twitter) post on how the debate about H-1B visa holders taking over US jobs “is being driven more by emotion than by the actual numbers”. Blunt’s post uses a dot chart to show nearly 700,000 H-1B workers in the US workforce represented as a tiny orange cluster amid 160 million total workers (<0.5%). The post also has a pie chart depicting H-1B visa workers’ share of STEM workforce. For the unaware, STEM is an umbrella term used to group together the related technical disciplines of – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.In the post, Blunt claims that H-1B visa workers constitute around 5% in STEM. “Even in the sectors they’re most concentrated in (STEM), H-1B workers are only ~5% of the workforce,” he wrote.Blunt’s post does not provide the data source. It is captioned: “For perspective: each dot is American workers. The tiny yellow cluster are the H-1B workers <0.5% of the workforce. That’s what’s being framed as a ‘crisis.’ There’s no Indian takeover. There are no talented unemployed Americans being replaced. This debate is being driven more by emotion than by the actual number”. James Blunt’s post has sparked debate online. “You’re comparing H-1B workers to the entire U.S. workforce (160+ million people) and pretending it’s proof there’s “no crisis.” That’s like saying “there’s no fire in the kitchen” while standing in the living room,” a user commented on his post. “You are not counting the stacking correctly. Nor do you account for the H-4 visas for spouses and SOs. Nor do you account for the body shop games of keeping people in country and on bench and rotating assignments, growing the in country presence of H-1B labor force into the millions. Nor do you account for the FACT that universities, nonprofits, and research institutions can hire outside the 85k cap, and do so IN VOLUME,” wrote another.“The problem is that there are positions being lost to H-1B workers when US citizen workers are available who can do the work. This has been going on for decades and has resulted in serious harm to the middle class,” commented a third.