Filling in for Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer, Jeanne Ives and Jim Iuorio discussed an American Greatness article by Stephen Edington examining the H-1B visa program’s effect on the domestic tech workforce. The piece profiled a longtime Silicon Valley marketer who described being laid off after being asked to train the foreign-born worker hired to replace her, and noted that the CEOs of major tech companies including Microsoft, Alphabet, Adobe, IBM, YouTube and T-Mobile US were all born in India. The article also reported that roughly two-thirds of the nearly 400,000 tech jobs in Silicon Valley are held by foreign-born workers, with employees from India and China together accounting for a larger share than U.S.-born workers.
To discuss the issue, the hosts brought on Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and author of “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.” Roberts said that while he wouldn’t have described the H-1B program as a crisis five years ago, he now believes it has reached that point, arguing that companies across the country, not just on the West Coast, have used the 30-year-old program, originally created to address temporary labor shortages, to hire foreign workers at lower wages than they would otherwise pay American employees. Roberts said Heritage supports suspending the H-1B program so Congress can review it, with an eye toward eventually phasing it out or reforming it based on that analysis, noting that nearly 300,000 H-1B visa applications have already been renewed this year.
Roberts also addressed the Trump administration’s $100,000 fee on companies seeking to hire H-1B workers, calling the policy ill-advised and largely ineffective at protecting American workers. He connected the visa debate to a broader labor force concern, citing an estimate that as many as 9 million American men are not currently looking for work, and said Heritage would support a temporary suspension of legal immigration broadly to allow policymakers to address the issue comprehensively. Roberts emphasized that his position wasn’t opposition to legal immigration itself, but a call to prioritize American workers first, while also crediting the Trump administration’s border security efforts as a prerequisite for having a broader conversation about legal immigration reform.
Ives raised the fact that many of the executives leading major tech companies are themselves immigrants, questioning how that reality complicates efforts to reform the visa system. Roberts responded that unless reforms are made, the same pathway that allowed those executives to build successful careers in the U.S. could become politically unsustainable, citing what he described as a historical pattern of social and economic strain when the foreign-born share of the population reaches levels similar to today’s. He also discussed international student enrollment at U.S. universities, praising Heritage’s role in pressuring the Department of Education to limit the practice, and Ives noted that roughly 30 universities are currently under investigation over concerns about Chinese nationals accessing sensitive research, citing a case involving her daughter’s engineering program and a Boeing defense manufacturing facility in St. Louis.
Asked whether President Trump is the right messenger to advance these changes, Roberts said Trump has been effective so far but suggested the broader effort will require additional political leaders, at the federal, state and local level, capable of communicating the substance of these reforms in a measured way that appeals beyond the political right.
The conversation turned to the H-2A visa program for agricultural and other seasonal labor, where Roberts noted a bipartisan push, including 47 Republican co-sponsors, to expand the program’s scope. Roberts argued that generous federal benefits have contributed to reduced labor force participation among Americans, citing economist Milton Friedman’s argument that a country cannot sustain both open borders and a generous welfare state, and praised recent moves by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut certain tax benefits for people in the country illegally. On agricultural labor specifically, Roberts pointed to the Bracero program of the 1950s, championed by President Eisenhower, as a historical model for legally admitting seasonal workers with the expectation that they return home afterward, arguing that approach reflects the sequencing Heritage wants applied to today’s immigration debate: securing the border and prioritizing American workers first, then addressing legitimate labor shortages through structured legal channels.