Trump Tries Again to Reform H-1B

Trump 45 had the right instincts when his Department of Homeland Security tried to end H-1B temporary visa abuse by terminating the long-standing, ineffective lottery system. President Trump instead proposed giving priority to applications according to employers’ proffered salaries and the applicants’ skill levels. The president’s goal was to terminate the practice of using H-1B visas to replace or displace American workers and to block qualified recent college IT graduates from landing white-collar positions. The proposed rule functioned on the commonsense principle that the larger the starting salary, the less likely American employers would be to pass over U.S. tech workers in favor of less skilled foreign nationals. Even immense H-1B users point out the existing lottery method’s flaw.

Elon Musk, SpaceX founder, stated unequivocally that the H-1B program’s negative impact on American workers can be “easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.” DHS under Trump 45’s administration agreed that “a prevalence of relatively lower-paid and lower-skilled H–1B workers is detrimental to U.S. workers” and has resulted in “downward pressure on wages in industries and occupations with concentrations of relatively lower-paid H–1B workers”, and that “in some circumstances, U.S. employers are replacing qualified and skilled U.S. workers with relatively lower-skilled H–1B workers.”

Despite three decades of employers’ wailing that the tech industry is dependent on cheap imported labor for its success, the H-1B visa was deliberately created to displace American workers and lower salaries for existing job classifications. Former Carter administration Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall called the H-1B program "one of the best con jobs ever done on the American public and political systems." Congress was willing to do donors’ bidding even though no tangible evidence ever existed that tech jobs could not be filled with domestic labor. Employers’ standard claim that the IT sector had more openings than viable candidates was always a smoke screen to promote the "jobs Americans can't do" argument. The H-1B visa is and always has been about legally providing employers with low-paid, compliant labor. George Fishman, the Center for Immigration Studies Senior Legal Fellow, compared the salaries employers have paid H-1B workers in computer-related occupations over the past two decades with the salaries that software developers have been paid in the overall American economy over the same period. Here’s a few examples of Fishman’s findings:

• “For H-1B petitions approved in 2023, the average salary that petitioning employers promised to pay new H-1B workers in computer-related occupations was $99,000. Pretty good, huh? Not so fast. In that same year, the average software developer’s salary was $132,270. The average new H-1B worker was paid 25.2 percent less.”
• “The average starting salary for 2023 graduates of U.S. universities with master’s degrees in fields in Computer/Information Sciences was $114,144. The average new H-1B worker was paid 13 percent less.”
• “What about high-paid H-1B workers? In 2023, the 75th percentile (the top quartile) for promised salaries for new H-1B workers in computer-related occupations was $126,000 — 5 percent less than the average software developer’s salary.”

Mass IT layoffs over the last several years have not dampened Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for H-1B visas. After punishingly high IT layoffs in 2022 and 2023, the wave continued through 2024. That year, more than 150,000 job cuts occurred across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Major corporations like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft executed sizable layoffs in 2024, while smaller-sized startups also experienced firings and, in some cases like Uber’s alcohol delivery service Drizzly, shut down operations altogether. Through 2025’s first four months, the layoff trend has continued unabated. Between January 1 and April 30, another 50,000+ have been laid off, this time the workers were dismissed by Meta, Intel, Expedia, and others.

Far-reaching tech dismissals followed shortly thereafter by large numbers of H-1B hirings from the most recent lottery is an annual and shameless practice. U.S. Customs and Immigration Services’ analysis found that the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420. Stated differently, that is almost 600,000 job that Americans should be doing Immigration laws that apply to H-1Bs provide only token protections to U.S. workers who end up victimized.

When President Trump says, as he often has, that “I want a lot of people to come into our country, but I want them to come legally,” he should remember that legal includes employment-based visas that directly lead to U.S. workers firings, an inevitability that doesn’t Make America Great Again.

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