.; and, vivek wadhwa is a distinguished fellow and adjunct professor at carnegie mellon university's college of engineering. he teaches and writes on technology and entrepreneurship. welcome to you both. daniel costa, i'd like to start with you. you heard the brief introduction that i made about these visas. explain what is the intention of the h-1b visa? >> well, the program is usually sold by the companies that use it as a program to bring in the best and the brightest workers from abroad and also to be used when no qualified u.s. workers can be found. and the reality is, though, that's not what the law requires. employers are not required to search for and offer jobs to u.s. workers, and they can also pay much lower wages, based on the way the wage rules are set up in the program. and so that's sort of the two main things that are wrong with the program, and so the probable prm doesn't have a lot of credibility, and some fixes are definitely required. >> brangham: vivek wadhwa, the president argues there is a ready supply of american tech workers to fill these jobs and the visa pr

joining us from palm beach, florida, vivek wadhwa, the author of multiple works.e has written extensively on h-1b visas and the tech workforce as well as diversity. thank you very much for joining the show. first of all, these changes we see, some last-minute, do you feel this is a tightening up of some of the eligibility or do you expect full-scale dismantling of the h-1b visa? >> i don't think they have thought it out. they are doing the same stupid things they did with the muslim ban, and now they are haphazardly applying it to h-1b visas. it does not make sense. if they are locking out computer programmers, that means my students at carnegie mellon and stanford can no longer get jobs here. why do we want to lose these brilliant kids? they are going to go back to their home countries, and it is going to hurt us and benefit the rest of the world. caroline: the average salary today for high demand h-1b visas was many felt this needs to be $72,000. driven higher to ensure this is not about getting cheaper tech talent in, but the more educated and better tech talen