GoKawiilResearch Highlights Article
August 13, 2026
Winning the visa lottery
Evidence from a US government lottery shows that restricting foreign low-skill workers shrinks businesses without creating jobs for Americans.
Source: Ragesoss, CC BY-SA 3.0
Researchers broadly agree that high-skill immigrants complement native labor. But for low-skill work, the evidence has been less clear, with estimates swinging widely depending on the assumptions made.
In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, authors Michael A. Clemens and Ethan G. Lewis studied the economic effects of low-skill immigration by exploiting a randomized lottery for visas run by the federal government.
In the United States, the H-2B visa authorizes temporary foreign workers in seasonal jobs, such as landscaping, seafood processing, forestry, and hospitality. Ninety-eight percent of these jobs require no high school education.
The Immigration Act of 1990 capped the number of H-2B visas at 66,000 per year. Clemens traced the origin of that figure through a chain of former congressional staffers to a subcommittee chairman who recalled that the law’s designers had simply tripled the roughly 22,000 visas issued the previous year and assumed the ceiling of 66,000 would never bind. But 36 years later, the cap falls far short of the demand. For the second half of 2022, employers requested 136,555 workers for just 33,000 visa slots.
H-2B visa petitions across the country The chart below shows the counties where cap-subject petitions were certified by the Department of Labor for 2021 and 2022. There were certified petitions from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Source: Clemens and Lewis (2026)
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