President Trump has succeeded in shutting down illegal immigration, but he can’t seem to make up his mind whether to eliminate legal immigration too. Witness his recent moves to put the H-1B skilled-worker program out of the reach of all but the richest companies.
The President last Friday issued an executive order that requires employers to pay the government $100,000 for each foreign worker they bring into the country on an H-1B visa. The Department of Homeland Security this week separately proposed overhauling its annual H-1B lottery to give priority to the highest-wage foreign workers.
The $100,000 fee is a de facto tax on hiring skilled foreign workers in the U.S., and the transparent goal is to price them out of the market.
Companies hire foreigners because there aren’t enough Americans graduating from U.S. colleges with the right technical skills. International students account for 71% of the full-time graduate students in computer and information sciences. Tesla filed 658 visa applications for manufacturing engineers in 2024, a skill set that isn’t taught at many elite U.S. colleges.
THE ORDER claims that companies abuse the H-1B program to hire cheap foreign workers who take the jobs of U.S.-born workers and suppress their wages. But Congress has restricted H-1B visas to 85,000 a year, and demand has exceeded the quota for the last 20 years.
Employers filed 442,000 applications this year, five times the limit, and a lottery is held each year to allocate the visas. Some 30,000 employers were approved last year for at least one new H-1B visa, which shows the broad demand.
THERE’S SCANT evidence that foreign workers are taking U.S. jobs. Between 2003 and 2024, U.S.-born employment in STEM occupations increased by three million, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. The unemployment rate for computer and math occupations was 3% and 1.4% for architecture and engineering last month, both lower than a year ago.
The White House ignores that employers are required to pay visa holders the higher of the prevailing wage or actual wage paid to comparable U.S. workers. So there’s no financial incentive to hire foreign workers. An analysis by Glassdoor found that salaries for “foreign H-1B workers are about 2.8 percent higher than comparable U.S. salaries” on the job-search platform.
As for DHS’s lottery proposal, wealthy companies that can afford to pay foreign workers more will be at an advantage over startups. If companies aren’t allowed to hire foreign workers in the U.S. because they are too expensive, they’ll go abroad. There will be fewer startups and less innovation. This will not help the U.S. in the AI race with China.
Federal law doesn’t give the President carte blanche authority to set visa fees, so he’s invoking a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that lets a President restrict entry of foreigners to protect national security. He claims, again without evidence, that the H-1B program is a national-security threat.
AS WITH his willy-nilly tariffs, he’s abusing his national-security powers. His order may violate the Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine, which says the President needs clear authorization from Congress for economically significant actions.
The White House is worried about a softening labor market. But the President’s mass deportations are partly to blame by reducing the supply of workers in industries like agriculture and construction. Mr. Trump said last summer that any foreigner who graduates from a U.S. college “should be able to stay in this country.” What happened to that fellow?
— The Wall Street Journal
