Palmer Luckey says H-1B visas fail their legal purpose and backs Vance's reforms

Palmer Luckey, the billionaire founder of defense contractor Anduril, has publicly broken with the tech-industry line on H-1B visas. In a post on X, he said the program is being abused in ways that no one can credibly defend.

He also praised Vice President JD Vance for pushing regulatory changes to the visa.

What Luckey said

Luckey wrote that "everyone knows the [H-1B visa] guy in Cubicle Bay 7 doing mediocre but functional web design for half the salary of his American peers is no savant and doesn't meet the statutory requirements for his H-1B visa."

He said Vance "is blowing the whole thing wide open by putting facts and stats front and center that nobody wants to engage with."

Critics, Luckey wrote, "will talk about anything and everything else but these damning facts and this obvious truth, that H1B visas serve neither their original purpose, legal purpose, invented purpose, or the American people."

That is a blunt charge from someone who hires at scale. Luckey runs a weapons company and sits among the CEOs and investors who have long been the program's strongest backers.

He is not an immigration opponent

Luckey is not arguing for less immigration. He describes himself as a longtime, outspoken advocate of "stealing the best people" from other countries.

His case is about preservation. In his words, "the obvious abuse going on is politically suicidal and something that even the most ardent supporters of the visa should want to crack down on."

He added that "no immigration program can possibly survive the obvious and widely known reality of what is going on."

Put plainly, he thinks cleaning up H-1B is the only way to keep public support for bringing in top talent.

Reaction from immigration-restriction advocates

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Luckey's comments matter precisely because of who is making them. "He likes [the inflow of visa workers], and the fact that he is willing to acknowledge its corruption is really important," Krikorian said.

Kevin Lynn, founder of the pro-professional advocacy group U.S. Tech Workers, said the remarks are "normalizing the conversation on employment visas." He told Breitbart News it is "only a matter of time before legacy media outlets, you know, focus more attention on this."

Both men have long argued for tighter limits on employment visas. Neither claims Luckey has changed his broader stance on immigration.

The numbers behind the fight

Breitbart News puts the number of foreign workers in U.S. white-collar jobs through the paired H-1B and H-4 EAD programs at roughly 900,000. It counts another roughly 700,000 across the L-1, J-1, O-1, OPT, CPT and E-2 programs.

It also says federal rules have admitted more than 2 million foreign graduates since 1990.

Those are Breitbart's tallies, and they lump together programs with very different rules, purposes and durations. Some of those categories cover students and trainees, not H-1B workers. Anyone citing the totals should keep that in mind.

The outlet and the advocates it quotes argue that the inflow has raised unemployment among American graduates and shut young citizens out of careers in technology, healthcare and banking. Those are their claims. They are not findings from a government study.

What the argument turns on

The dispute comes down to whether H-1B is working as the law intends. The statute reserves the visa for specialty occupations, meaning jobs that need specialized skills.

Luckey's "Cubicle Bay 7" example is an anecdote, not a dataset. It does show where the argument is moving. A tech billionaire who wants more skilled immigration is now saying the program as practiced fails the standard written into the law.

He is also saying the people defending the status quo know it. That is an accusation about motive, and Luckey did not name anyone or offer evidence in the post.

What comes next

Luckey did not lay out which of Vance's changes he is backing. The details of the administration's proposals and any timeline for putting them in place are the open items.

Luckey's own warning frames the stakes. If an industry insider is right that an abused visa cannot politically survive, then the fight is no longer over whether to change H-1B, but over who writes the changes.