Demand to end 'scam' visa program replacing American workers surges, West Virginia congressman reveals

Riley Moore isn't the first Republican to take a swing at H-1B, but the fact that he's finding company for it says something. This program was sold to the country as a way to plug gaps in specialized fields America supposedly couldn't fill on its own. Three decades later it's become the preferred tool for outfits that would rather pay a visa holder $70,000 than pay an American $110,000 for the same seat, and everybody in the industry knows it. Disney training its own IT staff's replacements before walking them out the door wasn't a hypothetical. It happened, in Florida, under oath, in front of Congress.

The defenders of the program always retreat to the same talking point: there just aren't enough qualified American engineers and coders. Funny how that shortage never seems to show up in the layoff numbers coming out of the same tech firms lobbying hardest to keep the visa cap high. You don't get to cut ten thousand domestic jobs and then tell Congress you're desperate for foreign talent because nobody here can do the work. Either the shortage is real or the savings are real. It can't be both, and increasingly it looks like it was never about the shortage at all.

What's notable here isn't just Moore's language, it's that "scam" is no longer a fringe word for this program inside the GOP. For years the party split between a business wing that wanted the visa spigot open and a populist wing that watched American graduates get passed over for cheaper labor. That argument is settling, and not in the business wing's favor. Workers who spent years and real money on a degree only to get outbid by an employer's preference for a discounted worker deserve better than a shrug and a lecture about global competitiveness.

None of this is an argument against legal immigration or against genuinely rare expertise coming to America. It's an argument against a visa category that stopped functioning as a narrow fix and turned into a wage-suppression pipeline with a bureaucratic name. If ending it outright is too blunt an instrument, fine, reform it until the loopholes close. But the current setup, where companies can replace American employees and call it innovation, isn't a immigration policy. It's a business model, and it's the American worker footing the bill.