President Donald Trump issued a proclamation accusing U.S. companies of sidelining skilled American graduates in favor of cheaper, mixed-skill, imported visa workers.
“The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program…. has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” said Trump’s proclamation, which adds:
The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security.
The proclamation, titled “Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers,” directed agencies to begin fixing the nation’s shredded professional sector by charging a $100,000 fee for the arrival of each foreigner hired via the H-1B program. It also directed federal agencies to reduce fraud and exclude foreign workers from the career-starting jobs needed by talented U.S. graduates.
The proclamation is a landmark event in D.C., where politicians, pundits, and reporters have long ignored the huge scale and damage of the investor-backed visa programs. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters that the proclamation’s message to U.S. employers is: “You’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land, train Americans… Stop bringing in people to take our jobs. That’s the policy here.”
So far, journalists have ignored the vast damage caused to U.S. innovation and families by this foreign workforce, despite much evidence. The proclamation says 2.5 million visa workers now hold one-in-four tech jobs that would otherwise be held by American graduates.
The new pro-American policy — if implemented — will likely be welcomed by millions of American professionals, many of whom have been sidelined as foreign-born hiring managers quietly sell the jobs to kickback-paying Indian graduates, via online markets that are obscured by Indian languages and laws, by corporate support, and by tacit federal agreement. “The stress of rejection is unbearable, along with the looming threat of financial insecurity,” sidelined professional Katie Gallagher told the New York Times. “I have never felt depression like this before in my life.”
Currently, Trump has low ratings with these white-collar voters.
Lawsuits and Loopholes
Those agency tasks will be difficult to implement because lawyers for H-1B companies immediately found loopholes in the President’s proclamation.
“This is only for the new H-1Bs coming from outside the country,” said Rehul Reddy, a Texas-based lawyer who works with many companies that employ visa workers. “If somebody is already in the United States, if they are filing for a [three-year] extension of H-1B status, this proclamation is not applicable,” he said.
The vast majority of H-1Bs extend their status every three years, creating a massive workforce of at least 700,000 H-1Bs in jobs that would otherwise go to American graduates.
“The wording of the H-1B fee proclamation is very vague,” said immigration lawyer Leon Fresco. “But it appears… this $100,000 fee will not apply to foreign students at U.S. universities who are changing their status” from F-1 student visas to H-1B or J-1 visas, said Fresco, who was a staffer for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) during the Democrats’ 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty disaster.
The university angle is important because George W. Bush’s Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs granted tax-exempt work permits to roughly 400,000 foreign graduates in 2024. That total is roughly three times as many new H-1B visas granted in 2024.
Many of those CPT and OPT graduates snag career-starting jobs via their ethnic hiring networks, and often with promises to kick back part of their salaries to hiring managers. The discriminatory black-market in U.S. jobs pushes skilled American graduates out of tech careers and future management jobs.
The president’s instruction also allows officials to exempt industries from the new H-1B curbs. “It will be interesting to see who gets an exemption,” said Fresco, who also works as a lobbyist for some of the roughly 600,000 resident Indian visa workers who are working while waiting to get an employer-approved green card.
“Subsection (c) is the key… pretty much any employer can make an argument their H-1B worker is ‘in the national interest,’” noted lawyer Paul Herzog.
All three lawyers predict extensive lawsuits over many aspects of the eventual new rules.
“Trump’s $100,000 H-1B Fee Invites Immediate Legal Challenges,” said a headline in the pro-migration Bloomberg news site. The policy “could also have devastating effects on businesses,” the site said.
“We need workers, we need great workers, and this pretty much ensures that is what is going to happen,” Trump said as he signed the proclamation while Lutnick stood beside him. Trump has zig-zagged on the visa-worker issue, sometimes urging more migrants, and sometimes calling for more robots and fewer migrants.
Stephen Miller, the White House’s leading migration expert, did not participate in this Oval Office announcement.
Trump’s proclamation does not explicitly reserve U.S. jobs for American graduates. For example, the President also put out a plan for a so-called “Gold Card” to be purchased by potential immigrants at $1 million per card. The document said:
It is a priority of my Administration to realign Federal immigration policy with the Nation’s interests by ending illegal immigration and prioritizing the admission of aliens who will affirmatively benefit the Nation [emphasis added], including successful entrepreneurs, investors, and businessmen and women.
Pro-American Lobbies
“The proclamation isn’t terrible, but it falls short of truly helping American workers and STEM graduates,” said a post from U.S. Tech Workers, a lobby group for American professionals. The group added:
Companies like Google and Microsoft won’t be affected, because they source their foreign workers through L-1 visas or from those who arrived on student visas. So when @howardlutnick [Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick] said tech companies support it, now we know why.
If the Trump administration truly wants to help American tech workers and STEM graduates, it needs to end the OPT program, which was created entirely through regulation. Otherwise, it isn’t serious about fixing this issue.
Still, the proclamation is a searing condemnation of the federal agencies and the Fortune 500 companies that have used this program since 1990. It is also a massive rebuke to establishment media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post which have ignored the huge damage done to American college graduates for the last thirty years.
Numbers
Breitbart News has posted roughly 1,000 articles on the H-1B visa program since 2015. Breitbart has also published hundreds of other articles on the many additional white-collar visa and work-permit programs that redirect jobs and careers away from Americans — and largely towards Indian hiring networks.
The White House proclamation included new data about the foreign workforce that far exceeded Breitbart News’ estimate of the white-collar outsourcing programs.
The program has helped foreign workers take one of every four jobs in the U.S. science, technology, and engineering sector, the proclamation says:
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019 [emphasis added]. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
The program helped foreigners grab two out of every three information-technology jobs, partly because of rapid growth during the Biden years, the document says:
The share of IT workers in the H-1B program grew from 32 percent in Fiscal Year (FY) 2003 to an average of over 65 percent in the last 5 fiscal years… To take advantage of artificially low labor costs incentivized by the program, companies close their IT divisions, fire their American staff, and outsource IT jobs to lower-paid foreign workers.
The document noted that U.S. multinationals are firing skilled American professionals and filling the empty jobs with imported, cheap, and compliant white-collar workers:
Another IT firm was approved for nearly 1,700 H-1B workers in FY 2025; it announced it was laying off 2,400 American workers in Oregon in July. A third company has reduced its workforce by approximately 27,000 American workers since 2022, while being approved for over 25,000 H-1B workers since FY 2022. A fourth company reportedly eliminated 1,000 jobs in February; it was approved for over 1,100 H-1B workers for FY 2025.
Many Indian visa workers fear the proclamation will force them to return. “The gravy train is up, you’re all going home,” one American said during an online meeting of many Indian visa workers.
Other Indians, however, boast that America’s economy will collapse if the Indians are forced home.
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