The Rise and Fall of the H-1B Visa - American Affairs Journal

On September 19, 2025, President Donald Trump shocked American businesses and the world when he announced a $100,000 fee for the H-1B visa, accompanied by a scathing critique of the program. The announcement upended U.S. skilled immigration policy in a way that no other recent administration (including his first one) has done. The White House clarified the next day that the fees would only apply for new applications for the lottery next year and for those applying from outside of the United States. Still, the impact of the change has been immense, with companies, particularly in the tech sector, and prospective applicants from India and elsewhere scrambling to adapt to the new landscape.

The H-1B visa program had already become controversial in the years preceding this announcement. This visa was supposedly designed to attract the best and brightest workers in fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). But the H-1B has instead been wielded as a tool by firms to displace American workers and depress wages in the information technology (IT) labor market, while bringing in large numbers of ordinary professionals from abroad to take their place, with only the most limited government oversight. In order to understand how the United States got to this moment of reckoning, it is worth revisiting the origins of the H-1B as a long-term project of business interests.

The negative consequences of the H-1B can be traced back to its conception and design; the story of who crafted the visa, which firms and lobbies pressed hardest for its passage into law, and how it became Big Tech’s preferred option has largely gone untold. And while it is, of course, a natural feature of American life for businesses to lobby the government for policies that would benefit their bottom lines, what stands out about the emergence of the H-1B is the sheer ease and lack of skepticism its advocates encountered as they made their case before lawmakers.

What follows is a story not so much of a struggle between employers and workers but of a steady advance by the business community against the backdrop of politics in the 1990s and 2000s, characterized by peak globalization, in which the maxim that markets, including labor markets, must be borderless was widely embraced. Assertive private sector associations campaigned for the H-1B while trumpeting slogans about “competitiveness” and “efficiency” over the muted resistance of labor groups, constantly claiming labor shortages (with little evidence) as their rationale and assailing American workers as just somehow not up to the task. All the while, an excessively deferential political establishment in Washington proved only too eager to give tech and business lobbies everything they had asked for and more.

Corporate Lobbying and Policy Formation

Newly uncovered documents from the 1990 House and Senate Immigration Subcommittee, found in the National Archives, reveal how major American multinationals, acting through lobbying groups such as the American Council for International Personnel (ACIP) and the Business-Immigration Coalition (BIC), worked to transform the original H-1 visa, a temporary work permit for foreign nationals of distinguished merit and ability, into what became the H-1B. At the turn of the millennium, Silicon Valley continually lobbied to expand the program, preventing or weakening reforms that would have benefited American workers.

The story of the H-1B visa begins with Congressman Bruce Morrison, who played a pivotal role in driving its creation through Congress. As the chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee in 1989, the Connecticut Democrat worked to reform the H-1 visa program. There were pressing labor issues to address. By the 1980s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had diluted the meaning of “exceptional ability,” allowing almost any professional worker to qualify for the H-1 visa. Employers took advantage of this by bringing in entry-level workers, causing the number of H-1 visas to skyrocket. The H-1 category, which stayed at 20,000 visas per year until the 1980s,¹ surged to over 60,000 by the late 1980s and reached 65,000 in fiscal year 1987.² The afl-cio raised concerns that the visa was driving down wages for American workers. Without a cap, the visa’s popularity seemed poised to grow.

Multinational corporations quickly embraced the H-1 visa program for its ability to bring in foreign scientific research and engineering professionals. Employers had three main issues they wanted changed with the H-1 visa: (1) They disliked that it was shared between entertainers and professionals. The organization proposed creating an “H-1A for entertainers and H-1B for professionals.” Congress would ultimately separate nurses into the H-1A visa and entertainers into their own category. (2) They objected to the 1987 rule by the INS that imposed a five-year time limit on the H-1 visa, with the possibility of a sixth year only in extraordinary circumstances. They proposed a seven-year work visa instead. (3) They wanted to eliminate the “temporary intent” requirement, which mandated that foreign guest workers return home after their visa expired, and to replace it with “dual intent,” allowing workers to seek permanent residency while on a temporary visa.

Additionally, employers expressed concerns about requirements that forced them to search for American citizens first. They described the process as “time-consuming, expensive, and fruitless searches of the U.S. labor market,”³ especially when they believed there were shortages of scientists and engineers. The narrative of a scientist and engineer shortage, however, which was propagated from an unpublished National Science Foundation study, would later be proven false.⁴ The requirement to prioritize American workers before sponsoring a foreign worker for an H-1B visa became a major sticking point for employers in the policy process that followed.

To engage in the legislative process, businesses had an effective immigration lobbyist in Congress whose name appeared on memos, letters, reports, and briefings: Harris Nathan Miller. Miller would become a key figure in H-1B history, playing a central role in expanding the program in the late 1990s as President of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a major industry lobbying group, though his involvement in the creation of the H-1B visa through the 1990 Immigration Act was previously unknown.

Miller obtained a graduate degree in political science from Yale before working for President Jimmy Carter; as a White House aide, he helped create the Senior Executive Service, a government‑wide corps that now includes eight thousand top executives. In the 1980s, he worked on the Judiciary Committee for Kentucky Democratic Representative Romano Mazzoli; as a congressional policy hand, he helped develop “the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which reshaped U.S. immigration law”⁵ and by providing amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Having gained significant experience in government, Miller later started his own lobbying firm, Holt, Miller & Associates.⁶ By the end of the 1980s, he had also become the Washington representative for the ACIP and coordinator for the BIC.

Leveraging this experience, Miller worked with American multinationals on the immigration front, arranging meetings with staffers, writing memos and letters, and actively advocating for policy goals. Staying well-informed about the latest developments, Miller made it clear to Congressman Bruce Morrison and the staffs of both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees what businesses were seeking throughout the legislative process.

When Chairman Morrison released the text of his bill in the spring of 1990, business groups supported several aspects of the bill, including the creation of a separate H-1B visa for business professionals, dual intent, and the removal of the requirement for visa workers to have a foreign residence. Businesses were nevertheless concerned about other changes, particularly the new visa cap and the labor attestation process. In a meeting with House Judiciary Committee staff, BIC coordinator Harris Miller specifically requested “modifying the labor attestation process to avoid unnecessary complications” and “modifying the H-1B visa cap, which stood at 25,000.”⁷

Labor attestation was a major sticking point. The attestation process required businesses to search for an American worker and confirm the results with the government before sponsoring an H-1B visa. Over the following months, Harris Miller and the business community continued to communicate with the committee about labor attestation. He wrote, “The business community believes the labor attestation process in H.R. 4300, intended to substitute for labor certification, however well-intentioned, will, in practice, be worse than the current labor certification process and should be removed from the bill or deferred for further study.”⁸

On October 18, 1990, Harris Miller wrote to Carl Hampe, Republican minority counsel on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs. Speaking unofficially on behalf of the BIC, he continued to push for the removal of “labor certification for H-1Bs pre-entry.” He said, “Chairman Morrison, the creator of the attestation concept, has assured the business community repeatedly that there will be no pre-entry certification . . . for H-1Bs. . . . He also assured me there will be no recruitment requirement for H-1Bs.”⁹

Another issue was the introduction of a cap, set at twenty-five thousand, which did not exist for the H-1 visa. Business groups argued for modifying this cap, as it was seen as a constraint. This provision was strongly supported by the afl-cio, the primary institution raising labor concerns about the H-1 visa, because it would prevent the usage of H-1B visas from skyrocketing.

The result of the conference was a series of victories for business groups. The final bill included the modifications they sought. Instead of twenty-five thousand H-1B visas, the cap was raised to sixty-five thousand, presumably based on the estimated number of H-1 visas issued in 1987. The second change was a scaled-down labor attestation process. Originally, firms were required to attest to the “positive recruitment” of American workers, and to “recite the specific actions the employer had taken with respect to such recruitment,” stating that they had “been unable to find such workers who are available at the time and place of need.”¹⁰ These requirements were removed. The final bill replaced this language with a Labor Conditions Application (LCA) that only required employers to attest that they were paying the prevailing wage to H-1B guest workers and that their employment would not worsen working conditions for other American workers.¹¹ President George H. W. Bush signed the bill, the Immigration Act of 1990, on November 29, 1990.

This victory on labor attestation wasn’t enough for American multinationals, however. The following year, they successfully pushed Congress to further strip labor attestation of government accountability and oversight by requiring the Secretary of Labor to approve LCAs within seven days, reviewing them only for “completeness and obvious inaccuracies.” Congress passed, and President Bush signed, the Miscellaneous and Technical Immigration and Naturalization Amendments of 1991.¹²

Once again, Harris Miller played a key role in shaping H-1B history. In 1995, he became president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a trade association for the technology and electronics industries.¹³ Having successfully secured changes when the H-1B visa was first created, Miller now worked to counter reform efforts and expand the program. To support this push, he orchestrated poorly conducted studies that claimed a shortage of workers in the IT industry. The first report, released in 1997 and titled “Help Wanted,” asserted that there were 190,000 open positions.¹⁴ His following reports would inflate the number of positions upward, to 346,000 in 1998, then 843,000 in 2000.

This time, the push to expand the H-1B would be primarily driven by the IT industry, rather than the broader business community that supported the original push for the visa. Along with Harris Miller, software giant Microsoft and semiconductor firm Intel emerged as major players in policy advocacy. Jennifer Eisen, who led American Business for Legal Immigration (ABLI), served as Intel’s public policy advocacy director from 1996 to 2010.

Michael Teitelbaum, Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (also known as the Jordan Commission, from its chair, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan), described Intel’s lobbyist as “the most stridently opposed to our reform ideas when we met with high-tech lobbyists.”¹⁵ These tech firms not only advocated for H-1B visas but also funded several satellite advocacy organizations to fight on their behalf. ABLI, for example, “came mainly from Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and other IT companies.”¹⁶ Additionally, there was support from within the government, particularly from Senate Immigration Subcommittee Chair, Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham, who focused exclusively on the H-1B visa issue. These industry advocates would exert pressure on Congress, both externally and internally.

Their efforts paid off in the late 1990s. The number of H-1B visas grew to 115,000 in 1998, 195,000 in 2000, then reverted to 65,000 in 2004. Even so, the 2004 H-1B Visa Reform Act added 20,000 additional visas solely for U.S. master’s degree graduates. Since then, there have been no additional legislative changes to the H-1B visa. Tech advocates successfully won the legislative policy fights up until the early 2000s, reinforcing the pro-employer bias of the status quo.¹⁷

Displacement and Suppression: The Consequences of H-1B

The institutionalization and expansion of H-1B from 1990 onward resulted in three major structural changes across the American labor market in the years that followed. By the early 2020s, the visa has become virtually synonymous with a warped system that exploits foreign workers while disadvantaging Americans. The first of these changes has to do with the sheer open-endedness and flexibility that characterized policymakers’ attitudes toward revising the visa’s caps, which all but undermined the very logic of having caps in the first place.

While the 1990 Immigration Act capped new H-1B visas at sixty-five thousand per year. Since then, two significant adjustments have expanded this number. An additional twenty thousand visas were reserved for individuals with a master’s or PhD degree from a U.S. educational institution. Furthermore, the cap no longer applied to high­er‑education employers and nonprofit research organizations, meaning the number of new H-1B visas varied each year. For example, in fiscal year 2023, the government approved 119,000 initial H-1B visas.¹⁸

The second change emerged from the “dual intent” feature included in the 1990 law, which allowed temporary H-1B visa holders to seek permanent residency without jeopardizing their current temporary visa status. This provision effectively transformed the H-1B visa into a permanent immigration pathway.

The third change came after labor unions began raising concerns about the displacement of American workers because multinational corporations were bringing in ordinary foreign professionals.¹⁹ A labor attestation system was introduced allowing employers to confirm wage and employment conditions. Significant limitations on this process were baked into the cake, however. For instance, the Labor Condition Application (LCA), the form employers submit to the Department of Labor during the initial phases of the H-1B sponsorship process, only asks whether they are paying the higher of the prevailing wage for the occupation and location or the wage paid to similar employees. The primary issue with this is that it operates on a “trust-me” system, allowing employers to determine the prevailing wage themselves, often using their own wage surveys. This frequently results in prevailing wages being set too low for H-1B workers.

Furthermore, the Department of Labor can only review the LCA for “completeness and obvious inaccuracies” and must approve it within seven days. Once approved, the Department of Labor cannot go back and scrutinize the LCA. This lack of oversight and accountability has allowed employers to underpay H-1B workers without consequence. Despite its intended purpose, the process offers little protection for American workers. There is no legal requirement for employers to actively search for or confirm the unavailability of American workers before sponsoring an H-1B visa for a foreign worker.²⁰

In recent years, nearly three-quarters of all H-1B visas were issued to citizens of India, with China coming in second, receiving about 15 percent of the total.²¹ A significant portion of H-1B sponsorships comes from Indian IT outsourcing companies, including Tata, Infosys, and Wipro, which together account for more than half of the top H-1B sponsors.²² These companies often use the H-1B visa program not only to bring in workers they “lease” to U.S. companies but also to facilitate the offshoring of U.S. IT and tech jobs back to India, profiting from wage arbitrage.²³

The H-1B visa program, by design, does not prioritize bringing in the “best and brightest” workers. Instead, the government issues visas through a random lottery each year, with no consideration given to the worker’s skills or salary. The program is intended to bring in cheaper, more compliant, and more committed workers. Once a foreign worker receives the visa, it is initially valid for three years and can be renewed for another three. The employer acts as the sponsor, tying the worker to a specific position and wage. If a worker complains or seeks to leave, the employer can terminate their employment, forcing the worker into a precarious position where they must find a new sponsor within sixty days or leave the country.

Furthermore, because employers are also responsible for sponsoring employment-based green cards for their H-1B workers, they leverage the promise of green card sponsorship to secure workers who are often desperate to accept any terms in hopes of eventually obtaining permanent residency status. As a result, many H-1B workers remain tethered to their employer, even though they technically could switch jobs.

Another significant way employers can routinely pay H-1B workers less than the prevailing wage stems from the Department of Labor’s regulations, which set four wage levels: Level 1 (entry-level), Level 2 (some skills and experience), Level 3 (experienced), and Level 4 (highly skilled). The wages for Level 1 and Level 2, however, are set at the 17th and 34th percentiles, well below the median 50th percentile. Employers are also allowed to choose the wage level for their job openings and often classify roles as Level I, even when those positions require skills typical of Level 3 or higher. This manipulation of the system enables employers to lower labor costs significantly.

As a result, 80 percent of H-1B workers fall into Levels 1 and 2, earning 40 percent and 20 percent less than American workers in similar roles, respectively.²⁴ This design of the visa program inherently allows foreign workers to be paid less than their American counterparts.

Supporters of the H-1B visa program often argue that it is relatively insignificant in terms of numbers, pointing out that it only brings in 120,000 new workers annually. Two key points should be considered, however. First, the 120,000 refers only to new initial visas; the total number of H-1B visa holders, including renewals, was estimated by the Trump administration to be 583,000.²⁵ Second, the program is heavily concentrated in the tech sector, with 65 percent of visas issued for computer-related occupations.²⁶ According to Rutgers University professor Hal Salzman, guest workers fill half of all information technology (IT) jobs, and two-thirds of new IT hires under thirty are guest workers.²⁷ Therefore, the influx of H-1B workers significantly impacts Americans pursuing STEM degrees, particularly those aiming for careers in the tech sector.

The H-1B visa program’s exploitative features—from its arbitrary lottery system to its wage-level manipulations—were not design flaws, but deliberate mechanisms serving their proponents’ true purpose: labor arbitrage. The H-1B system became an effective tool for major U.S. companies to drive down domestic wages and labor costs. For example, after Disney brought in H-1B workers from IT outsourcing companies such as Cognizant and HCL, the company was able to pay these workers 33–39 percent less than the American Disney workers who earned $100,000 and benefits.²⁸ The influx of H-1B and other guest workers has caused wage stagnation, particularly in the IT industry and in other STEM professions. Computer programmers’ salaries have been flat since 2000. STEM salaries overall have also been flat since the start of the century.²⁹

The doubling in the number of foreign-born STEM workers since 2010 has continued to tamp down on wages. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from employers show that between 2008 and 2023, real STEM hourly wages grew from $50.58 to $50.63 an hour, a five-cent-an-hour increase. Total compensation, including benefits, only rose from $72.40 to $74.06 an hour, a 2 percent increase.³⁰ Furthermore, in the most comprehensive economic study on the subject, drawing on the best available data, Notre Dame professor Kirk Doran, UC Berkeley professor Alex Gelber, and Treasury Department analyst Adam Isen found that hiring additional H-1B workers at a firm decreased “median payroll costs per employee” and led to “higher firm profits” after reviewing Internal Revenue Service (IRS) firm tax data.³¹ Firms are only able to artificially lower their labor costs because of the government-provided H-1B labor subsidy program.

Advocates for expanding skilled immigration often argue that the United States must liberalize its visa system to maintain global competitiveness. They cite national security and technological leadership concerns, contending that restrictive policies risk driving foreign talent to rival powers such as China. A 2024 American Affairs essay framed the issue as one of “great power competition,” suggesting that attracting more engineers and scientists through faster processing and higher visa caps would help sustain American primacy in innovation.³²

Proponents claim that labor shortages in advanced industries justify an expansive approach, that global competition for talent is intense, and that excessive regulation weakens the nation’s technological edge. They also argue that bureaucratic bottlenecks—green card backlogs and per-country limits—create inefficiency and dissuade skilled migrants from contributing to the U.S. economy.

All of these issues, however, are exacerbated by the mass corruption of the visa system. Immigration benefits have become commodified, with intermediaries monetizing applicants’ desperation. This has generated apparent backlogs and country-specific issues, particularly affecting India, not because of inherent talent shortages but because the system incentivizes the monetization of visas. Rather than streamlining innovation or competitiveness, the liberalization of skilled immigration channels encourages the proliferation of low-tier applicants who seek entry primarily for the sake of residency, creating structural distortions that undermine the objectives these policies claim to promote.

The experience of countries that adopted these policies demonstrates the dangers of this narrative. In recent years, Canada and the United Kingdom implemented liberalized skilled immigration policies, creating systems in which universities and other intermediaries became de facto immigration hubs. Rather than attracting the highest-skilled talent, these systems were inundated with lower-tier applicants seeking residency under the guise of education or employment. Institutions profited from issuing credentials that functioned primarily as tickets to immigration, creating perverse incentives that produced far larger structural problems than any intended benefits. Both countries have since moved toward more restrictive immigration policies in response to public backlash and the strain on domestic labor markets.

Similarly, the assumed benefits of mass skilled immigration on innovation have not materialized as promised. Large inflows of H-1B workers have not demonstrably improved productivity or accelerated breakthroughs at firms like Intel or Boeing, where the focus remains on cost control rather than genuine innovation and invention. The presence of lower-wage foreign labor has displace higher-paid, experienced domestic engineers who were the drivers of research and development, undermining the ability to attain high-end innovation.

These outcomes illustrate that without careful design and selection, policies aimed at increasing skilled immigration can amplify corporate leverage, weaken worker protections, and produce systemic inefficiencies. In the United States, as elsewhere, liberalized skilled immigration schemes create a marketplace in which immigration benefits are com­modified, exploiting applicants while delivering negligible gains in innovation or competitiveness.

Moreover, there are national security implications that are rarely acknowledged in this debate. Expanding skilled immigration without rigorous safeguards risks exposing sensitive industries to intellectual property theft and espionage, particularly from authoritarian competitors such as China. The same liberalization policies intended to preserve U.S. technological leadership could inadvertently erode it by increasing vulnerability within defense, semiconductor, and aerospace sectors.

The Trumpian Reckoning: The End of H-1B?

This year could prove to be the beginning of the end of the H-1B visa as we know it. Although the $100,000 H-1B fee was the most visible new policy of an administration that has put H-1B visas back at the forefront, the latest policy changes have been a long time coming. They stem from a decade of work, primarily led by President Trump himself, that has shifted the Overton window on the issue. Trump’s Hire American, Buy American rhetoric connected with populist voters in 2016, and it galvanized not just around illegal immigration but legal immigration. Prior to that, H-1B rhetoric was dominated by big business Republicans such as Utah senator Orrin Hatch and Arizona senator Jeff Flake, who pushed to expand the program. Although there was pushback by conservatives on illegal immigration, there was very little interest in pushing back against nonimmigrant employment visa programs on either side of the aisle.

Additionally, the president actually dedicated part of his first term to fixing the issue. Thirty years after its creation, it was President Trump who was the first to seriously propose and enact real H-1B visa reforms in 2020. Efforts at regulatory changes began in his first term, but because they faced legal challenges, or were in the infancy of the rulemaking process, the Biden administration was able to stall and then rescind the rule reforms. Instead, President Biden succeeded in implementing a rule at the end of 2024 that made it easier for foreign students to transition to H-1B visas, broadened the definition of what a specialty occupation is, and created deference for approved H-1B renewals. The Biden administration focused on improving the process for H-1B visa holders.³³ The Trump-era reforms remained unfinished.

Several other important factors between 2020 and 2025 have led to the shift in the political landscape, including a worsening of the white-collar labor market, its impact on Gen Z, and the influence of new media on the discourse.

The white-collar labor market worsened, as companies laid off Americans while still receiving H-1B petitions. The worsening of the labor market was visible across the country. The issue of the H-1B visa became more visible as well. The negative impact of the H-1B visa, which had been self-contained within the tech industry, broke out. The visa increasingly became adopted by other white-collar fields like finance and accounting. Meanwhile, as tech companies spread out from California following the Covid pandemic, the H-1B visa holders followed, dispersing across the country to Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina, for example. It was no longer just a tech job story, but a white-collar job story. It was no longer just a West Coast story, but a national one.

In addition, the labor market hit Gen Z Americans who went to college particularly hard, as they struggled to even land a job at the bottom rung of their career ladders. For parents and families who were aware of the issue and how it was directly impacting their children, it made policy personal rather than an abstract debate about economics and immigration. Meanwhile, for conservative Gen Z activists and politicos, H-1B became a litmus test for anyone choosing to wear the America First mantle. For young populists, the two letters and one number connotated everything that has gone wrong in the United States over the last thirty-five years.

The last factor that helped facilitate debate was the rise of the new media environment driving the narrative on the issue. Podcasts and livestreams on YouTube and Rumble helped expose online viewers to the harm being caused by the H-1B visa. One of the biggest influencers has been Steve Bannon. On War Room, he hammered away on the H-1B visa and the loss of STEM jobs for years, calling Silicon Valley an “apartheid state” for denying opportunities to all Americans, including African Americans and Hispanics.³⁴ As a result, millions more became aware and animated about the issue, even if it was not directly impacting them in their lives.

Of course, the biggest online platform that triggered the beginning of the downfall of the H-1B visa was ironically owned by one of the visa’s biggest proponents: Elon Musk. After purchasing Twitter, now known as X, in 2022 for $44 billion, he vowed to make the social media site a place for free speech and also more hospitable to conservative opinion. As a result, the number of posts on H-1B visas exploded, becoming a major talking point with influencers, activists, and high-profile accounts. It should then be no surprise about what happened around Christmas at the end of 2024.

The defining moment came in the early morning hours of December 23, 2024, when an innocuous post on X by @USTechWorkers, an affili­ate arm of the Institute for Sound Public Policy, regarding the appointment of Sriram Krishnan, who has made past comments about immigration, specifically expansion for Indians.³⁵ He was a Microsoft employee who arrived in the United States on an L-1 Visa (intracompany transfer) in 2007, later obtaining an H-1B visa before being granted a Green Card. Krishnan was appointed as a Senior Advisor to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy on the recommendation of David Sacks, and it set off a fourteen-day media frenzy on social and mainstream media platforms. Social media influencers like Bannon and Laura Loomer and intellectuals like Eric Weinstein squared off against H-1B visa supporters like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Elon Musk lost supporters for outbursts like “take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”³⁶ By all indications, the anti-H-1B crowd won. In this manner, social media platforms helped to create a rift between the Silicon Valley tech billionaires and President Trump’s core base of supporters. Exposed to the public in ways mainstream media could never hope to match, people began to sour on these elites and any influence they may have over the administration.

In the midst of his second term, President Trump has once again taken up the mantle of change. Recent events have shown that the Trump administration is indeed serious about bringing an end to the decades of distortion and abuse authorized by the H-1B visa. The question is how the president’s recently announced changes, particularly the policy of $100,000 fees, are going to impact the labor market; the president has also tasked the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security to initiate rule changes to the H-1B visa program, reviving efforts started at the end of Trump’s first term.

The Department of Labor was tasked with raising and reforming prevailing wage levels. But no further details were provided about how that would look. What the Department of Labor should do is make sure salaries for H-1B workers should not be below the 75th percentile for any of the prevailing wage categories. Currently, there is four-tier, skill-based wage system under the H-1B and PERM programs; this enables employers to classify highly skilled roles at artificially low wage levels, particularly for Level 1 and Level 2, which are significantly below market salaries. This legal wage suppression disincentivizes the hiring of qualified U.S. workers. Under current law, the skill-based prevailing wages that are less than the median are not even lawful for H-1B because 8 U.S.C. § 1182(n)(1) requires H-1B workers to be paid at least the prevailing wage for the occupation and location, not occupation, location, and skill. Specialty occupation foreign workers should not just be set at the 50th percentile, however, but the 75th because that would be sufficient to classify the worker as a high earner in the local area. In addition, the administration should mandate the use of annually refreshed wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or other authoritative sources to prevent wage stagnation.

Another action the Department of Labor could undertake is to facilitate public access to recruitment and hiring data during the PERM (Program Electronic Review Management) process. The labor market test is a critical component of the employment-based permanent residence process that employers must complete before sponsoring an H‑1B visa holder for a green card. This test was intended to demonstrate that there are no qualified U.S. workers available for the specific position before hiring a foreign worker. Employers would frequently exploit the PERM recruitment process, however, by running ads in low-visibility newspapers and requiring applicants to submit résumés via postal mail—methods designed to limit real competition from U.S. workers. These practices are technically compliant but work to fundamentally undermine the purpose of the labor market test. Employers must be required to publicly disclose their job recruitment efforts for each H-1B petition. This data will include job postings, the number of U.S. applicants, the qualifications of U.S. applicants, and detailed explanations for why U.S. workers were rejected. The DOL should make this information accessible to the public to ensure transparency and to allow stakeholders to monitor compliance with H-1B recruitment regulations.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security released a rule for public comment in late September 2025 to overhaul the random lottery used to hand out H-1B visas that has been in place since 2005; it envisions a new lottery system in which applications are weighted based on which of the four prevailing wage experience tiers the applicant falls under. If a foreign worker is classified as Level 4, they get four chances at the lottery, while a Level 3 worker gets three chances, and so on. This represents only a modest reform of the current system because it still keeps a lottery, tilts it toward older rather than younger and higher-earning workers, and enables outsourcing firms to continue to game the four-wage-level tier system, based on recent economic analysis.³⁷

Three Big New Ideas

The prospects for reforming the H-1B visa in the near term are looking better than ever and reform can manifest in several ways. The administration can go even bigger than what they have already done, for it is within the power of the president to help American white-collar workers now.

President Trump could end the H-4 EAD program for spouses of H-1B holders. 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(15)(H) of the Immigration and Nationality Act does not explicitly authorize H-4 spouses to work—in fact, prior to the Obama rule, they were not permitted to work at all. Unlike E and L visa spouses, whose work authorization is explicitly mandated by statute, H-4 work authorization was created through the executive branch’s regulatory authority to administer immigration laws. Hence, President Trump should be able to overturn it via executive order.

The next idea would be to look into federal contracts and H-1B usage. The Federal Procurement Policy Act (FAR) (41 U.S.C. § 1707) gives the president broad authority to prescribe policies and directives for executive agencies regarding procurement. Presidents can issue executive orders that establish additional requirements for federal contractors. That’s exactly what President Trump did on August 3, 2020, when he signed an executive order that directed heads of federal agencies to review federal contracts and assess any negative impact on U.S. workers stemming from the use of temporary foreign labor or offshoring of work and to take corrective action within 120 days. The Executive Order (EO) also directed the secretaries of Labor and Homeland Security to take appropriate actions within forty-five days to protect American workers against any adverse effects on wages and working conditions caused by H-1B visa holders, including work at third party worksites. Any changes to the FAR would likely require notice-and-comment rulemaking, though the president could direct immediate implementation through executive order, pending formal rulemaking. In addition to protecting American workers, this EO would improve our national security posture. Giving foreigners access to our data is inherently insecure and makes the country vulnerable.

The most consequential decision he could make would be to declare an economic emergency to temporarily suspend H-1Bs given the unemployment situation facing recent graduates and job cuts. Recent computer science graduates face a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, according to the New York Federal Reserve, while computer engineering graduates have an even higher 7.5 percent unemployment rate.³⁸ This is notably higher than the overall recent graduate unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. Even more confounding, the overall recent graduate unem­ployment rate is higher than the overall national rate of 4.2 percent.

Furthermore, according to data from Challenger & Gray, there have been 520,039 job cuts at U.S.-based tech companies from 2021 to September 2025.³⁹ This number represents 16.7 percent of all job cuts even though tech workers represent less than 6 percent of the overall workforce. In 2025 so far, the tech industry is the number one private sector industry in terms of workforce reductions. Because of these present conditions, Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) gives the president the authority to suspend entry of any aliens or class of aliens he deems detrimental to the interests of the United States, and this can include H-1B visa holders. The harm caused by the mismanagement and exploitation of the H-1B program is evident in the displacement of American workers, wage suppression, and diminished opportunities for U.S. graduates.

The H-1B visa program was enacted by Congress to allow businesses to hire foreign workers for specialty occupations. While the executive branch, including during the Trump administration, can take steps to restrict H-1B usage in the short term, these measures cannot address the underlying statutory framework. Administrative reforms and regulatory adjustments have proven insufficient to resolve concerns about the program’s impact on American workers. Because H-1B visas exist by legislative mandate, addressing the program’s effects ultimately requires congressional action—either through substantial reform or outright abolition of the program.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 39–56.

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