The Body Shop — A Data Dossier on the H-1B Visa

A data dossier · The H-1B visa<br>Body Shop

The H-1B visa was a footnote in the Immigration Act of 1990, meant to address a vaguely defined skilled-worker shortage at the dawn of the information age. It has grown into a lifeline, a racket, and a cornerstone of the Indian economy.<br>Founded by others. Now run by one.

Zoom into one. Every window is an H-1B approval.<br>How did a generic skills-based visa become dominated by Indian IT workers?<br>85 of 120 windows · ~71% from a single country

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The question<br>How did America’s largest skills-based immigration pathway come to be dominated by Indian IT workers?

1Part 1<br>Laws, Loopholes and Labor Markets

01The Number That Does Not Exist

The Scale<br>The system is a Russian nesting doll: the H-1B in its exempt and non-exempt forms, the H-4, OPT, the O-1, the EB-2, one visa inside another, all serving the same applicants and the same companies. Start with the one Congress argues about.

85k<br>The statutory cap<br>65k + 20k master's

01 / 7<br>85k<br>The statutory cap<br>The number Congress argues about: 65,000 seats plus 20,000 for holders of a US master's degree. It excludes universities, nonprofits, and government labs entirely, and it excludes every renewal.

02 / 7<br>399k<br>Approved in FY2024<br>USCIS actually approved 399,395 H-1B petitions in fiscal 2024, about 4.7 times the cap. Most were continuing employment, which the cap does not touch.

03 / 7<br>600k<br>Living in the US on H-1B<br>At any given moment an estimated 600,000 people are in the country on an H-1B. The government never integrated the systems that would let it count them exactly.

04 / 7<br>505k<br>Working on OPT, FY2024<br>The uncapped student pathway. In FY2024 more than half a million foreign graduates were working on OPT, which is not an H-1B at all, and it outnumbered new H-1B hires several times over.

05 / 7<br>175k<br>H-4 spouses in the US<br>Since a 2015 rule, the spouses of many H-1B workers can work too. More than 175,000 H-4 spouses live here, most of them work-eligible: a second workforce attached to the first.

06 / 7<br>1.3M<br>Total here on a pathway<br>Add the three standing populations together, H-1B, OPT, and H-4, and about 1.28 million people are working here on one of these pathways. Not a flow, not a rule, people, right now.

07 / 7<br>1.9M<br>The US software workforce<br>For scale: the entire US software workforce, developers, QA analysts, and testers, is about 1.9 million. The 1.28 million on a pathway is roughly two-thirds of it, and the cap Congress fights over is under 5%.

The debate is about a number that does not exist. Every argument over “raising the cap” is conducted over a figure that describes a fraction of what the program does. It isn’t hidden. It’s disclosed, in a report nobody reads.<br>Source · USCIS H-1B Characteristics, FY2024 (399,395 approved vs an 85,000 cap); DHS/USCIS OPT (505,000+); H-4 spouses per fwd.us and USCIS; software workforce per BLS OES 2024

Two histories, one pipeline<br>The largest labor arbitrage in history

02The Visa

Senator Kennedy’s Good Intentions

Senator Edward M. Kennedy<br>Sponsor, S.358 · passed 81–17<br>US Senate portrait, public domain.<br>In 1990 Congress passed the largest expansion of legal immigration in a generation, a bill that raised annual admissions to 700,000 and created the diversity lottery. Tucked inside it was a small employment provision: the H-1B “specialty occupation” visa, capped at 65,000, with a Labor Condition Application meant to keep it from undercutting American wages.<br>Over the next thirty-four years Congress raised the cap to 195,000, let it fall back to 65,000, added 20,000 slots for holders of a US master’s degree, bolted on fees, and then mostly stopped touching it, while the program’s actual use, and its concentration in a single country, ran far past anything the statute describes.

03The Industry

India’s Road to Capitalism

Jawaharlal Nehru<br>Indira Gandhi<br>P. V. Narasimha Rao<br>Manmohan Singh<br>Portraits via Wikimedia Commons: Nehru (CC0); Gandhi & Singh (GODL-India); Rao (CC BY 4.0).<br>While India became a democracy upon its separation from the British Empire, it did not immediately adopt free-market capitalism. Generations of leadership chose instead a mixed economy with a strong socialist flavour (though not outright communism): five-year plans, the nationalization of key industries, tariffs and foreign-exchange controls, and a mythically suffocating business environment known as the “License Raj.”<br>It worked until 1991, when the country ran out of money. What grew in the opening that followed was not the broad factory base the Asian tigers had built a generation earlier, it was a services-export engine, software written for foreign clients, which by 2000 had gone from about 2% of exports to 26%. That engine needed a way to stand its people on American soil.

02The Visa · the law in moments

Congress set the number in 1990 and has barely moved it since. Almost everything else happened in the rulemaking and the courts.<br>1990+...