Registration for the H-1B visa lottery closed last week. The tech industry has long been the biggest beneficiary of this program for specialized workers. But uncertainty has been spreading due to the Donald Trump administration’s restrictive stance on immigration policy.

Even legal immigrants have felt the crackdown. It’s led some companies to advise their H-1B holders not to leave the country for fear that they could be barred from returning.

Gerrit De Vynck delved into the risks to the visa program for The Washington Post. He told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about anxiety in Silicon Valley over a potential loss of talent and brake on innovation, as well as the impact on tech workers’ lives.

Gerrit De Vynck: There’s a set number of H-1Bs that can be awarded every year. It’s around 65,000, and so people apply through immigration lawyers. Generally, if you work at a company, the company kind of handles that for you, and some of them get these visas. So yeah, Amazon is the biggest right now, but companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, they also, every single year, apply for hundreds or thousands of H-1B visas for their workers.

Meghan McCarty Carino: And then on the list, there are some companies that are not exactly household names, but are sort of contracting companies that also feed into the tech industry, right?

De Vynck: Yeah, I mean, this is another really important part of the H-1B system, and the most controversial part, I would say. There’s these large IT consulting companies, so these are companies that if businesses don’t want to have their own IT staff, they might contract it out to these companies. And they also apply for a lot of H-1B visas for their workers. These companies are not always based in Silicon Valley or sort of in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of them are actually based in Texas and form a big part of the skilled economy in places like Houston and Dallas. And the reason that those companies are a bit more controversial is because people have this sort of stereotype that the H-1B is being used for workers, particularly from India, to come to the United States, get these jobs at salaries that are below what American workers might be willing to work for. And so people see these companies as using the H-1B to undercut American workers. And I think these companies and even the workers who work for them would push back pretty strongly against that and say, these salaries are still really good, especially if you are coming from another country.

A lot of these salaries are definitely in the range of $70,000, $80,000, $90,000 a year. And maybe, if you live in a place like Texas, that is a solid salary that I think a lot of Americans would agree with. And so that’s kind of the other side of the H-1B. And there have been reports over the years, there’s been journalistic organizations that have, have sort of gone out and shown that some of these companies have committed, or at least, sort of fudged some of their applications. And so I think that also leads into this conversation where a lot of people, regardless of how they feel politically about immigration, they do think that this system needs to be reformed in some way, that even if they want to continue having skilled workers coming into the United States being able to stay and work here, they need to change the way that the H-1B system works in some way. But of course, there isn’t agreement on what exactly to do about that.

McCarty Carino: As you noted, H-1Bs are awarded through a lottery system. The registration for it just closed. What do we know about how the Trump administration might handle the awarding of H-1Bs?

De Vynck: I mean, this is a huge question that is really hanging over the entire community of immigrants in the United States, not just those who work in tech. But then you have some other people, such as Elon Musk or other members of the tech industry that are now close to Trump, who say, “No, some of us are immigrants. We work with immigrants, and skilled visas like the H-1B are really important,” because when a tech company needs to grow really quickly, say they’ve got a great idea, they’re building something in AI, they’re raising a bunch of money, and they can’t just slowly hire people over many years, they need to go from zero to 100 very quickly. Being able to access those talent pools from other countries is very important to them, and so we’ve seen this debate flare up amidst Trump’s key supporters several times over the last several months, and there is not yet consensus on what the administration is going to do when it comes to skilled workers in tech.

McCarty Carino: President Trump’s relationship with the tech industry is very different now than it was during his first term. But remind us what the Trump administration’s approach was to H-1Bs during that first term.

De Vynck: During his first administration, Trump did say he wanted to get rid of the program. He caused a lot of concern, a lot of panic. And for people who were renewing their H-1B or applying for new H-1Bs, there was definitely a slowdown in processing times. There was also an increase in rejections. There was an increase in the government saying, hey, you need to send me more information before I can give you this visa. But overall, the program itself was not dismantled. It stayed in place despite some of the rhetoric. There was no major disruptions to the H-1B program during the first Trump administration. And so I think a lot of people going into the second Trump administration thought that even if there was some anti-immigration rhetoric, they probably wouldn’t really, at the end of the day, touch the program. And I think people are rethinking that now that the second Trump administration is moving a lot more decisively and aggressively on a lot of the things that maybe in the first Trump administration they kind of left in the realm of rhetoric.

And I think people are particularly concerned about Trump’s goal to end birthright citizenship in United States because a lot of people on H-1Bs are married to someone on H-1B who maybe they either met in the United States, or maybe they came over to the United States together as a couple. And usually when people like that have children, they’re born in the United States, they automatically become American citizens. And there are even cases of people whose children grow up and then apply for their parents to become citizens, even though their parents have been waiting for a green card for many, many years and have been working and contributing to the United States. And now, if Trump succeeds in changing the definition and ending birthright citizenship in America, those children will no longer be citizens when they’re born. And that’s something that really scares and concerns people on these visas.

McCarty Carino: And as you noted in the story, there has been this broader crackdown on legal immigrants, many of them student visa holders, also green card holders, permanent residents who have been detained by the administration often over kind of ties to the protests over the war in Gaza. But I mean, how is this kind of broader environment affecting perceptions of the U.S. and kind of the, the uncertainty over legal immigration?

De Vynck: I mean, I think people are looking at the United States in a way that they maybe didn’t before. I think immigrating to the United States has always been difficult. I mean, there’s a lot of forms, to qualify for an H-1B you have to be a pretty impressive person. A lot of people want to work at Google, want to work at Apple, and very few people actually get those jobs. And so I think a lot of people who are working in Silicon Valley in H-1Bs are very proud of themselves. They maybe were the top of their class in their country of origin. They found a place at an American university, and then they were able to sort of leverage that into getting one of these jobs. And so they really see themselves as living the American dream. They see themselves as contributing to America. They see themselves as building a life here. Of course, some do return to their countries, but most of the people that I’ve experienced and talked to in the tech industry on these visas, they intend to stay in America. And, of course, they still have family back home. They would travel for weddings, for funerals, for vacations, and now their lawyers are telling them, don’t leave the country because we can’t guarantee that you will be allowed back in even though you have an approved visa. And so that is really changing the way people feel and think. And I think it will dissuade some people from choosing this path to come to America. They may choose to go to other countries such as Australia or the UK or Canada instead.

That said, though, I still think that the U.S. is seen as this beacon of a place where you can build a life, you can make a lot of money, you can participate in some of the most exciting things going on in the world, especially if you are a technical person. And so I don’t think that we’re going to necessarily see a huge dropoff in the amount of people who want to apply for these visas and just throwing up their hands and saying, “Sorry, America is not for me.” They will continue to run the gauntlet and see if they can find a place here up until the program is ended, if that does happen.

McCarty Carino: Should the number of H-1Bs be significantly reduced, what are the implications for innovation and for U.S. competitiveness in technology?

De Vynck: When you talk to people in the tech industry, I mean, whether they’re on visas or not, they definitely are concerned about that. I mean, talent is a huge driving force of innovation. And if you look at American universities, a lot of the people graduating are foreign students, are people who are not citizens and are going to be looking for visas. So I do think there is a real concern in the tech industry that if there is a major change to the status quo when it comes to skilled immigration, that the United States, at least in the short term, will not be able to make up for that and will sort of slow down when it comes to innovation.