Anduril founder Palmer Luckey says the political defense of the H-1B visa program is dishonest, even though he supports bringing more skilled immigrants into the United States.
In a message posted on X, Luckey wrote that “everyone knows the [H-1B visa] guy in Cubicle Bay 7 doing mediocre but functional web design for half the salary of his American peers is no savant and doesn’t meet the statutory requirements for his H-1B visa.” He also praised regulatory reforms to visa programs being pushed by Vice President JD Vance, writing that Vance “is blowing the whole thing wide open by putting facts and stats front and center that nobody wants to engage with.”
Luckey added that critics “will talk about anything and everything else but these damning facts and this obvious truth, that H1B visas serve neither their original purpose, legal purpose, invented purpose, or the American people.”
Luckey is not opposed to immigration. He wants visa reforms that would build public support for admitting more productive migrants, which he and other executives and investors could then hire.
A ‘Useful’ Admission
Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Luckey’s remarks matter because of who is making them. “He likes [the inflow of visa workers], and the fact that he is willing to acknowledge its corruption is really important,” Krikorian said, adding that the comments give media outlets “a news hook” to examine white-collar outsourcing.
Kevin Lynn, founder of the advocacy group U.S. Tech Workers, agreed the comments could shift coverage of employment visas. “It is normalizing the conversation on employment visas,” Lynn said. “It’s only a matter of time before legacy media outlets, you know, focus more attention on this.”
The Scale of the Programs
The combined H-1B and H4EAD programs currently keep roughly 900,000 foreign contract workers in U.S. white-collar jobs, according to the report. Other programs — including the L-1, J-1, O-1, OPT, CPT, and E-2 visas — account for about 700,000 more migrants in jobs also sought by Americans. Federal rules have additionally admitted more than 2 million foreign graduates into the workforce since 1990.
Luckey warned that abuses within these programs threaten the broader goal of continued high-skilled immigration that he supports.
The obvious abuse going on is politically suicidal and something that even the most ardent supporters of the visa should want to crack down on, no immigration program can possibly survive the obvious and widely known reality of what is going on. I am a longtime outspoken advocate for stealing the best people from other countries to make our own better; runaway abuse of existing programs robs the government of the worker trust required to do so.
He said business and political leaders stay quiet out of fear of attacks from both directions. “Unfortunately, most people with power or profile are terrified that any public statement or acknowledgement will get them attacked by the right (‘You guys have been screwing over American workers for years with visa abuse, you damn hypocrite!’) or the left (‘You are racist, sexist, misogynist, and sucking up to this fascist administration!’). Or, more likely, both,” Luckey wrote.
He also dismissed the standard business case made for the visa system: “It is all a sham. The world that created those statistics, people, and businesses no longer exists. Brilliant but desperate Vietnamese fathers who fled communism have nothing in common with young men from Honduras, and the crime rates/economic accomplishments/integration of the former should not be used to justify mass migration of the latter.”
Luckey said he knows “too many tech execs in particular who feel trapped, like the only winning move is to stay silent,” rather than publicly defend the program or push back against it.
Luckey’s Broader Vision
On October 21, Luckey separately argued for sharply increasing the U.S. population to compete with China, writing: “We need to do better with what we’ve got. But we also just need a lot more people. We need 1 billion Americans minimum, probably more like 2 or 3 billion, with better demographics and better natural resources.”
Political Stakes
Vance has repeatedly criticized visa programs for harming American workers and has pushed regulatory reforms aimed at curbing abuses. Those reforms, however, cannot reduce the annual inflow of new migrants without action from Congress, and they face lawsuits backed by investors and corporate executives.
Krikorian said reform efforts could gain momentum if Democrats joined in criticizing the current system. “[So far] Democratic officials and commentators won’t criticize it,” he said, but reform would advance “if you had Democratic legislators in Congress say, ‘This really is a corrupt system full of fakery, and we want to work with people on the other side of the aisle, at least in those areas that we agree.'”
Krikorian called Luckey’s statement a step in the right direction, even if incomplete. “I’ll take half a loaf… he acknowledges the system is corrupt, but wants a non-corrupt version of it to function,” Krikorian said. “One step at a time.”
