The Trump White House is finally recognizing the need for much more drastic changes to the H-1B visa program than have been previously contemplated, and that employers exploit it to hire large numbers of foreigners at cheaper prices while shoving Americans out of the job market. The $100,000 fee was not enough to discourage foreign cartels from trafficking workers here.
Leftists love to claim that Americans are incapable of holding the jobs that H-1B visa holders take. But Fox News reported last year that 80% of H-1B visa holders are taking junior-level or entry-level jobs. As President Donald Trump's September 18 executive order says, “Many employers have laid off large numbers of highly skilled American workers, only to promptly hire large numbers of H-1B workers who are often lower-skilled and lower-paid.”
Furthermore, “Many jobs held by H-1B workers eventually leave the United States entirely… In Fiscal Year 2026, the top six users of the H-1B program operating with this outsourcing business model accounted for over 25,000 H-1B cap registrations.”
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I personally know multiple people who either lost their jobs to foreign visa holders, or who are the last holdout in their department, as visa holders take every other fired American’s position. And it seems as if every time I call a customer service line now, no matter the company, I get an Indian who can barely speak or understand English. Trump’s order explains why:
The abuse of cheaper H-1B labor places downward pressure on domestic pay. H-1B visa holders earn far less than comparable United States-born workers, despite the statutory mandate that H-1B workers be paid equally to their domestic peers, with the estimated wage gap starting at $9,000 and climbing as high as $20,000 in H-1B reliant industries. One company even warned its shareholders that restrictions on cheap H-1B labor could force the company to use “local” workers, which “may only be available at higher wages.”
Trump’s order specifically slammed Big Tech companies, noting that “technology sector employers have collectively requested H-1B visas for hundreds of thousands of workers, yet have also laid off somewhere between 800,000 to 1.3 million American employees from 2022 through 2026. Employers have even forced laid off American workers to train their foreign replacements.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) earlier this year said that 82% of the H-1B workers brought in to replace the laid-off American tech workers received below-median wage salaries. Schmitt described a massive visa cartel in countries such as India that will pay the fee that the Trump administration imposed on the programs, and essentially traffic desperate workers to America. H-1B is one of several visa programs that foreigners exploit to ship their people here and sabotage the American job market.
Part of the problem with this visa abuse is that Americans are even less likely to go into fields where they know that companies and government entities are much more likely to hire foreigners, Trump acknowledged that, calling it a national security threat. Trump is therefore calling on multiple agencies, including the Small Business Administration, the Commerce Department, the Labor Department, and the Department of Education, to coordinate a crackdown on abuses.
Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Labor, through the Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, shall begin reviewing data related to previously submitted labor condition applications to determine whether further action against sponsoring employers is warranted under section 212(n)(2)(G).
Trump is even delegating some of his executive authority to members of his cabinet, in order to ensure that there is swift action to reform the H-1B visa process and punish its misusers. Part of the reform will be to assess which companies have had significant layoffs recently, and whether they are obviously trying to replace Americans with visa holders.