winner of the presidential election. tune in for all day coverage as trump becomes the 47th president, stay with c-span for coverage of the inauguration. ♪ >> attention middle and high school students, it is time to make your voice heard, studentcam documentary contest 2025 is here to raise awareness and make an impact it should answer what issue is most important to you? whether politics, the

environment or community, share your message with the world. prizes include a grand prize of $5,000 and you can make an impact and awarded. enter your submissions today or visit studentcam.org. the deadline is january 20. >> now by the immigration studies director at the cato institute. welcome to washington journal. thank you so much for joining us. before we get into our conversation, a caller was asking about the social security fairness act and i wanted to follow-up we had said that would be assigned tomorrow. it actually looks like the act will be signed later today at

about 4:00 eastern. we will be covering that live on c-span. so just following up from previous points in the previous hour. the are here with you to talk about immigration and in particular h-1b visas. would you been in the news quite a bit because some dispute in the republican party. what is an h-1b visa. guest: it is a guestworker visa, a temporary allowing skilled will former -- skilled workers in the united states temporarily. it's initially valid for three years, to be renewed once but if you're sponsored for a green card or permanent residence status in the united states you can extend it indefinitely until you are able to obtain a green card through the green card process. that is really the main gateway

for skilled foreign workers to get a foot in the door into the u.s. labor market and start their careers in the united states. host: how do somebody qualify for one of these visas and how long does that process take get it? guest: you have to have a bachelors degree in a specialty field. you have to be paid the prevailing wage for your area. your occupation and your skill level. host: in the united states. guest: and the employer has to pay $15,000 in legal fees either to the government or to attorneys to file the application on your behalf. and then, if you look at there is a cap. there's 85,000 visas made available -- mainly to for-profit companies and they have to enter a lottery each year at least for the last decade there's been a lot of

reasons the demand exceeded the 85,000 number. even before the start of the fiscal year the demand exceeded. and so much so only about 20% of the applicants actually receive an h-1b visa through the lottery. host: these are people who are qualified and entered the process. what kinds of immigrants and nationalities and industries in the united states rely on this program? guest: if you look at the nationalities of the people who are applying, it's about 56% are indians, people from india. then you have chinese at 14%, that's about -- then all the other nationalities are much smaller percentages. about 30% of the total or other countries. if you look at the industries and occupations they are doing it's about 80% in computer, math and engineering.

that's what these workers are overwhelmingly doing in the united states. that's where you will see the biggest focus of employment and discussion about what their effects are in the labor market. host: for a bit more information about these visas, you mentioned 85,000 of those visas. 65,000 of those are just sort of the regular ones with another 20,000 limited to applicants with graduate degrees. you are talking of a pretty highly skilled workers here. >> you look at the qualifications overall about 70% end up with a masters degree so 20,000 are guaranteed to have a masters degree and the rest are 50-50 have a masters versus not. if you have a masters degree you are really increasing your odds of winning the lottery and getting through the process by going on and getting a higher education and many of the people who come in, start out as

international students at u.s. universities, majority of the people who get the visa are actually already in the united states and have graduated from a u.s. university and are looking to stay on for the company that hired them out of grad school. and so that sort of the profit we see, many foreign students go through. and if they can win the lottery than many of them go back to school and get a masters, and then get a few more chances to win the lottery and hopefully stay in the united states long term. >> is there a path to citizenship involved with the visa? >> there is an envisioned process by which the visa can adjust the status or green card companies have to sponsor the workers so they are sponsored to be on the visa and then there sponsored again to get a green

card and that's a very costly and expensive process for employers to go through as well. so if you look at it only about half of the h-1b visas end up getting sponsored for a green card and like i said they can continue on in their h-1b status indefinitely until they are able to obtain a green card under the green card process. if you look at the green card process it is highly restrictive, so you have about 140,000 visas made available to employer sponsors and immigrants of all types. so it's not just people outside the u.s.. it's people and other statuses, it's international students adjusting. all go through this number. but half of those 140,000 go to spouses and minor children of the workers themselves.

actually really an effective cap of about 70,000 which is less than the h-1b issues annually. so you end up with a big backlog in this process of about 1.5 million immigrants are waiting for employees sponsored green cards. purely because the cap is too low compared to the demand. you end up with this big backlog. it's not all nationalities being treated equally within the green card so i mentioned indians are by far the most common recipients of the h-1b visa over half of the applicants are indian applicants. but if you look at how a green card process works, only 7% can go to any single nationality. so it ends up happening is indians a 50% of the applicants they only get 7% of the green cards and they end up being 90%

of the people waiting in the backlog. so that's why you see so many indian residents, indian h-1b holders in the united states renewing and being a focus of the conversation not just because they are such a high percentage of the total applicants because they are stuck in the h-1b status really indefinitely. right now we are processing people who apply for their green card in 2012 if they are from india. other countries it is 2023. that is a huge disparity between what the process looks like if you are from india versus all other countries because of this cap situation. so looking forward we are processing people who applied in 2012 but there is this huge 1.4 million backlog that is developed since then mainly from india. if you look forward we will have about a century wait for new

indian applicants so basically if you're from india and you're applying for a green card today you are likely never to get a green card through unless there is some reform to the process. host: one of the reasons this is in the news recently is because of discussions happening amongst members of the republican party as well as new advisers to president-elect trump pointing to a post here from elon musk, who says the reason i am in america along with some any critical people who built spacex, tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made america strong is because of h-1b. can you talk about why elon musk finds himself kind of opposed to some other republicans on this issue. guest: when you look at his story. he came as international student and then got -- started a company and went on to h-1b. there is a little bit of a gap in his status there that the

washington post has reported on. host: the post reported he overstayed his visa. guest: right, well he didn't actually go to school, he just started a company which is and what he was supposed to be doing. then he was get -- able to get on h-1b when he started the company and the company sponsored him for the visa. that's his process he went through. many other founders of companies, you look at 55% of the billion dollars startups in the united states were founded by immigrants. and if you look at artificial intelligence companies, 65% of those companies were started -- and when he's talking about critical positions. ceos and other -- cto's, chief technology officers. these positions overwhelmingly filled by immigrants, skilled

immigrant workers. 80% of these billion dollars startups had at least one immigrant in one of these positions within their company. so, extremely important to these -- the growth of these types of companies. >> why are some republicans opposed to this program? >> really is because of the messaging they see from the america first maga movement in the united states about we have to put u.s. workers first and the only policy should be that americans do all of the jobs in the economy and that any job that goes to a foreign worker then takes away from a job for an american worker and that's not really how it works. it's not just their founding companies which are obviously employing huge numbers of americans through that process, if a worker comes in, they

create value for the country. they produce something of value and then they spend their earnings in the united states and that creates jobs for americans in other positions in other areas and even if you look within the text fields that have been so inundated with h-1b, if you look at the jobs u.s. workers are doing, they tend to move up in the management positions while they are managing the h-1b labor force that's coming in and more of the entry-level jobs in that industry. host: we will be taking your questions about the h-1b visa program and high skilled immigration. number for democrats, 202-748-8000. republicans, 202-748-8001. independents at 202-748-8002. in addition to some republican pushback against the h-1b visa program there is also some -- i shouldn't say across the aisle,

but from independent senator bernie sanders who said elon musk is wrong. the main function of the h-1b visa program is not to hire "the best and the brightest, but rather to replace good paying american jobs with low wage servants from abroad. the cheaper labor they higher, the more money the billionaires make. your thoughts on that as well. guest: they are not indentured. they're obvious the highly paid workers. you look at their median income or median wage for an h-1b worker is about $120,000 a year. this is the 90th percentile. they are higher paid than about 90% of workers in the united states. and so it's inaccurate to call them low-wage. if the purpose of the visa was to cut labor costs and replace

american workers, you would see the h-1b request increase when unemployment goes up. we see the opposite braid h-1b requests go down when unemployment increases. in 2009 and 2010 there wasn't even a lottery to allocate the visas because demand went way down during the great recession. it increased again after that as unemployment went away and demand for workers increased. the other thing you would see is it's all about low-wage workers and the h-1b would be plate -- paid less compared to u.s. workers. we don't see that either. in fact we see generally paid more than comparable u.s. workers at the same level of education and experience. in their field preyed on the last thing you would see is they would be paid the exact mandatory minimum so there's a mandatory minimum wage, a prevailing wage based on u.s.

worker wages and if you look at what they are actually paying, they are paying higher wages than the mandatory minimum which means they are actually paying something based on what they negotiated. the workers themselves agreed to , not just whatever the government mandated. so i don't see it as a replacement for, it's a complement to american workers and it increases the opportunities for americans both within tech and outside of tech. so if you're talking about the top 10% of earners coming into these jobs and increasing employment at the high-end, what are they doing. they are spending their income in the united states and that is increasing employment and demand for workers and the rest of the economy. 90% benefit by having more workers in that top 10% category. i see it as a benefit to u.s. workers, not something that will harm them or take jobs away from them. host: the federation for

american immigration reform, a group pretty close to the incoming white house deputy chief of staff stephen miller, who also had a pretty strong role in the first trump administration. this group has proposed a series of reforms to the h-1b visa program in particular. number one, prevent employers from paying h-1b visa workers less than americans in the same role, reward applicants who earned a masters degree or higher from an american university. require employers to demonstrate that they sought american workers positions to qualified ones before turning h-1b workers, something similar to th other -- implement more effective enforcement mechanisms and increase investigations including random audits and then the h-1b guest worker program

would be for temporary workers and should not be a pathway to citizenship. what do you think of some of those supposed rules? guest: overall it's objectionable because it's all about increasing the restrictions on the visas. i mentioned they're already required to be paid the prevailing wage which is based on what u.s. workers are paid for the same positions, controlling for skills and locations and all the rest. so most of it is unnecessary. you already reward masters degree, we talked about that with the lottery. the last one is the most dangerous proposal, making the h-1b -- essentially forcing out skilled workers after they've come in and been working in the united states and contributing to companies. and then they want to branch out. they want to go on with their lives and get promotions and move on to more productive

positions. that would be extremely dangerous. we talk about all the companies that have been formed and founded, plenty of critical -- playing a critical role as the cto or ceo, that

live coverage here on c-span.

[indiscernible] >> a live look from the carter center where carter is lying in repose. the public will be allowed to pay respects until tuesday morning and then he will be transferred to washington dc where he will lie in state until thursday morning. live coverage here on c-span.

>> president jimmy carter, the nation's oldest leader, past away at the age of 100. the public will have opportunity to pay respects. his journey continues to washington see where he will lie in state attended by members of congress and the public will have a chance to honor him on wednesday. on thursday the national funeral service will take race followed

by his final resting ceremony. watch live coverage of funeral services on c-span, c-span now or c-span.org. witness democracy unfiltered, history as it unfolds as republicans take control of congress and a swearing in of the 47 president, witness vice president harris preside over the historic session confirming donald trump as winner of the residential election. then live coverage of the inauguration as he takes the oath of office.

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