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By Hugh Cameron
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President Donald Trump, in a rare defense of the benefits of immigration, has ignited debate by insisting that America lacks the “talent” needed to remain competitive on the world stage.
In last week’s interview with Fox News, Trump was arguing in favor H-1B temporary visa program when host Laura Ingraham interjected to state that there was “plenty of talent” in the U.S. that could take up the roles potentially filled by foreign-born, skilled workers.
“No, you don’t. No, you don’t,” the president responded.
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"You don't have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can't take people off an unemployment line and say, 'I'm going to put you into a factory, we're going to make missiles.'"
Trump’s statements sparked backlash from elements within his base, who accused him of abandoning his past stance on immigration and prioritizing foreign-born workers over fostering domestic skills. And experts say the notion of a “talent shortage” in the U.S., while true in some regards, is more nuanced than a simple binary of too many jobs, not enough talent, and may not be the defense of the H-1B program Trump seems to be suggesting.
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A Shortage by the Numbers
A survey of thousands of businesses by the Employment agency ManpowerGroup found that 71 percent of employers in the U.S. report struggling to find the skilled talent they require for their operations.
The Semiconductor Industry Association—a trade group representing companies involved in chip manufacturing—has predicted that by 2030, 67,000 vacancies in key roles like technicians, engineers and scientists will be unfilled. This shortfall, it warned, “presents an economic and national security vulnerability in America’s drive to secure access to this critical technology,” and industry figures have framed this as an argument against tightening visa eligibility as the U.S. attempts to boost chip production.
“At any moment in time, we never have exactly the people we want,” Gordon Hanson, professor in Urban Policy and Academic Dean for Strategy and Engagement at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Newsweek.
“And right now, with the AI boom, we have a surge in demand for workers with different skills,” he said. “And you can’t just turn on the tap and make them available.”
While fixing a shortfall would begin in education, the STEM pipeline is appearing increasingly thin when it comes to U.S.-born talent.
In its 2024 Survey of Earned Doctorates, the National Science Foundation found that temporary visa holders make up 33 percent of PhD recipients, up from 22 percent in 1999, and this figure grows in fields the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) considers “essential to U.S. competitiveness.” Last year, 58 percent of computer and information sciences doctorates went to temporary visa holders, alongside 42 percent in physics and 51 percent in mechanical engineering.
Robert Atkinson is the founder and president of the ITIF, a technology policy-focused think tank, and told Newsweek that, even if the labor market “responded adequately” with Americans drawn to in-demand fields with higher wages, “it takes a long time for that pipeline to work.”
Hanson described temporary remedies like the H-1B as a way of “short-circuiting” this process, though he acknowledged that this could, in turn, diminish the incentives and abilities of Americans to enter these fields.
Is There Even a Shortage?
However, while some industries are decrying a shortage of workers, Ronil Hira, an associate professor in Howard University’s Department of Political Science, believes that this narrative contradicts economic realities.
“By any standard or measure, there is no STEM workforce shortage. Look at wages, unemployment rates, mass layoffs, the number of US graduates, etc,” he told Newsweek, adding that the government should permit guestworker programs such as the H-1B to be used in “very targeted ways to fill genuine shortages.”
Hal Salzman, an expert in workforce development at Rutgers University, said he found Trump’s statements “puzzling” given his administration’s efforts to make temporary visas for both workers and students more exclusive, but said there was “no evidence of a talent shortage” in the U.S.
“If anything, there is an extreme shortage of jobs,” he told Newsweek. “Layoffs by tech companies are in the tens of thousands, my students (engineering and computer science) believe there is a miserable job market awaiting them.”
A Shortage of ‘Superstars’
While some see overabundance and others see scarcity, a distinction that appears to bridge the gap is the level of talent under discussion.
“The U.S. talent shortage isn’t about quantity, it’s about alignment,” said John Lewis, chief sales officer for the tech-focused staffing and workforce solutions firm Artech. “There’s tremendous domestic talent, but the pace of technological change has outstripped how quickly new skills are developed and deployed.
“Roles in cloud architecture, cybersecurity, AI, and data analytics are persistently hard to fill, not because Americans can’t do them, but because the market can’t train fast enough.”
“When we’re talking about shortages, we’re talking about talent at the very, very top,” Hanson told Newsweek.
“If companies need the truly superstar talent to excel in an area—and that’s going to be a few percent of the H-1Bs who are going to be the starting NBA player-type talents—then we always have a shortage of those people, they’re in short supply globally.”
Indeed, ManpowerGroup’s survey found the number of American employers reporting skills shortages (71 percent) was below the worldwide average of 74 percent.
Atkinson, like Hanson, said the most indisputable shortage was in what could be termed “very high-IQ jobs” such as computer science and AI-related fields, areas “where immigration can play an important role in addressing those.”
U.S. competitiveness in things like AI and chip development, he told Newsweek, would be “very, very much” undercut by restrictions on things like the H-1B.
Hanson deems this a double-edged sword.
“If we admit a foreign student to a university, then that's a slot that's not going to go to somebody else. You would then have a domestic student who's not going to have the same opportunity they would have had otherwise,” he told Newsweek. “However, when you bring in that talent…that person might then launch a startup that ends up employing 15,000 people, and it's going to expand and create employment opportunities that didn't exist otherwise.”
And while higher education is increasingly dominated by overseas talent, the National Science Foundation found that nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of science and engineering doctorate recipients from 2017 to 2019 remained in the United States around five years after graduation.
What all this means, to Hanson, “is that H-1B visas help strengthen the U.S. economy,” but notes that this help is “all about implementation” and ensuring America courts the “superstars” while focusing less on those on the “lower end of the distribution.”
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