BillLawrenceOnline

Trump Must Slash Employment Visa

By Joe Guzzardi

President Donald Trump has a second golden opportunity to end the H-1B visa program that, since it became commonly used in the early 1990s, has displaced millions of qualified Americans.

During his first presidency, Trump—who campaigned on a “Hire American” platform—let the opportunity to cut 85,000 H-1B visa foreign nationals from the labor market and replace them with U.S. tech workers slip through his hands. In 2017, President Trump’s first year in the White House, the H-1B visa represented a grave threat to U.S. tech workers and recent college graduates seeking entry-level, white-collar technology jobs. Today, the tech job market is more dire.

A recent social media post revealed depressing statistics that America First supporters should note. President Trump must examine these numbers closely and end the job-destroying H-1B program. In 2024, 384 tech companies—including Cisco Systems, Intel, mMicrosoft, Meta, and Amazon—laid off 124,000 workers. Combined with the 428,449 tech workers who lost their jobs in 2022 and 2023, plus those laid-off in 2025, the employment picture is ominous. In the current year to date, 100,000 jobs were cut. Meanwhile, H-1B petitions hit the fiscal year cap within six months, and foreign nationals received 82% of all new tech jobs. Offshoring has reached record highs, with entire shadow economies emerging worldwide to replace American tech jobs which led to office closures across the nation. Meta, Microsoft, Instagram, and Walmart Tech have shut offices in Austin, Portland, Menlo Park, and other IT centers. U.S.-based employers have expanded hiring abroad faster than domestically for the past seven years—a trend especially evident among tech and consulting firms.

Salesforce, having recently announced major Bay Area workforce layoffs, provides a good example. Concurrently, over the past five years, the company has shifted its employee base increasingly to international hires. Salesforce is not alone: U.S.-headquartered multinational enterprises that employ workers both abroad (offshore) and domestically (onshore) have grown their offshore workforce faster in recent years than their onshore workforce. Among these companies, the number of offshore workers grew by 32% since 2019, while those employed onshore grew by 16.7%—a net 15.3% increase in offshore employment.

President Trump has done outstanding work securing the Southwest border. Within six months, border apprehensions dropped to zero—an all-time monthly low. Now is the time for the president to turn his attention to ending the dozens of temporary non-immigrant visas that include work authorization. He should start by curtailing the H-1B, an idea that first came to him in June 2020. More than five years ago, President Trump signed an Executive Order that directed the Secretaries of Labor and Homeland Security to take appropriate actions within 45 days to protect any adverse effects on wages and working conditions caused by H-1B visa holders including doing work at 3rd party sites.

Nothing productive came of that EO perhaps because by November President Trump would be a lame duck. At a recent White House AI summit, however, President Trump hinted that he’s again leaning in the right direction. For too long, the president said, much of America’s tech industry has pursued “radical globalism” that left millions of Americans feeling “distrustful and betrayed.” Many of our largest tech companies, the president continued, “have reaped the blessings of American freedom while building their factories in China, hiring in India, and shifting profits to Ireland. All the while dismissing [via H-1B hires] and even censoring their fellow citizens right here at home. Under President Trump, those days are over.”

Congress has also taken notice of the negative impact the H-1B visa has in academia. Representatives Tom Tiffany (R-WI) and Andrew Clyde (R-GA) introduced the Colleges for the American People Act, or CAP Act, which would end the long-standing H-1B visa cap exemption for U.S. colleges and universities. If enacted, all prospective foreign hires seeking to enter on a U.S. visa—including administrators and professors—would be required to compete under the existing visa cap. Wisconsin Right Now found that the University of Wisconsin System employs nearly 500 foreign workers on H-1B visas, earning salaries totaling almost $43 million annually—income that could have gone to qualified U.S. citizens.

Guest worker visa programs have operated on autopilot for so long that both Republican and Democratic administrations have either forgotten about or stopped caring about its collective and devastating effect on the domestic labor market. In 2024, an estimated 740,000 H-1B holders and an additional 100,000 H-4B visas designated for H-1B holders’ spouses were issued. Another j500,000 work-authorized foreign nationals with temporary, unnecessary visas compete with Americans for employment in a shrinking labor market.

For President Trump to fulfill his America First agenda, he must slash legal visas that allow temporary workers easy access to blue and white-collar jobs yet rarely require them to return home. He should take aim at the biggest offender—the H-1B visa, which President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall called “one of the best con jobs ever done on the American public and political systems.” Ample evidence from left-leaning and conservative think tanks supports Marshall’s brutally honest assessment of the H-1B visa.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org