“If there’s some level of ultimate take-home pay that workers know they will accept to take a job, or to stay in a job … the wages needed to meet that level will have just gone down,” Economic Policy Institute president Heidi Shierholz told PBS [6].
MoneyWise
September 29, 2025
Federal enforcement agencies and policy experts argue that the current H-1B system enables widespread wage theft and creates unfair labor conditions that harm both American and foreign workers. The Economic Policy Institute has documented how companies intentionally underpay H-1B workers compared to similarly situated American employees, calling for immediate investigations and prosecutions under fraud statutes.
LA Times
September 29, 2025
The tech industry in San Francisco and Silicon Valley has long relied on the H-1B program. The top 30 corporate sponsors — which account for about one-third to one-half of all the program’s visas — are predominantly tech companies, according to Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank that has closely scrutinized the program. Many of those companies are either based here or have local offices.
San Francisco Examiner
September 29, 2025
And in 2023, the pro-labor think tank Economic Policy Institute noted “the H-1B’s biggest users are companies that have laid off tens of thousands of workers.
Raleigh News and Observer
September 29, 2025
Her past ventures include co-founding the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, where she examined the relationship between inequality and economic performance. She has worked at think tanks like the Center for American Progress and the Economic Policy Institute, among others.
Boushey is regarded as a leader in her industry, and according to The New York Times, is “at the forefront of a generation of economists rethinking their discipline.”
The Daily Pennsylvanian
September 29, 2025
There has been a steep decline in the immigrant workforce under Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. Vice President JD Vance and other conservatives have said the exodus of foreign-born workers can explain the weaker job growth, but that it creates more employment opportunities for native-born Americans. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, argued Trump’s job market has been worse for U.S.-born workers, pointing to BLS data showing an increased unemployment rate among this group.
NBC News
September 29, 2025
A July 2025 report from the Economic Policy Institute by Ben Zipperer finds that, if the Trump administration follows through on its goals of deporting 4 million people over four years, there will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed U.S.-born workers at the end of that period.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but the research is solid, says Zipperer. For example, aggressive deportations can cause a sharp and abrupt enough fall in labor supply that some employers will respond by shutting down operations entirely. This has been clearly seen already in small businesses such as restaurants that serve farming communities in Southern California and the Rio Grande agricultural regions, for example, where fear of ICE crackdowns has kept their customers and employees at home.
Supply Chain Brain
September 29, 2025
Business Chief
September 29, 2025
A growing chorus on both the left and the right say an over-reliance on the visa by U.S. firms has put U.S.-born workers at a disadvantage. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has called the H-1B visa program a “scam,” while the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has claimed that some of the companies most reliant on H-1B visas, such as Amazon and Facebook’s parent, Meta, have also had sizable layoffs, though it did not cite evidence that the use of the visa and the layoffs are related.
NBC News
September 29, 2025
H-1B workers generally make on average in Chicago $172,720, according to ZipRecruiter. But the pro-labor union Economic Policy Institute found that outsourced employees in particular are underpaid, undercutting the labor market for American workers.
“Thanks to (the Department of Labor’s) failure to enforce the wage laws or close the outsourcing loophole,” the institute reported, “DOL is in effect subsidizing the offshoring of high-paying U.S. jobs in information technology that once served as a pathway to the middle class, including for workers of color.”
Chicago Tribune
September 29, 2025