The White House is cracking down on a widely used skilled worker visa that’s been criticized by administration officials for displacing the average American worker.
President Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Friday that slaps a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applicants, according to an announcement by the White House. The order restricts entry under the H-1B program — which allows foreign nationals working in speciality occupations to enter the U.S. workforce — unless accompanied by the payment.
“What this proclamation will do is raise the fee that companies pay to sponsor H-1B applicants to $100,000,” a White House official said Friday. “This will ensure that the people they’re bringing in are actually very highly skilled, and that they’re not replaceable by American workers.”
“So it’ll protect American workers, but ensure that companies have a pathway to hire truly extraordinary people and bring them to the United States,” the official continued.
Established by Congress in 1990, the H-1B program is the main pathway into the U.S. for highly skilled foreign nationals, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. These visa holders can eventually become eligible to apply for legal permanent residence, which would allow them to stay in the U.S. indefinitely.
The program is incredibly popular with U.S.-based employers, with new visas capped at 85,000 a year and a lottery system that decides which foreign nationals obtain them. However, the program has long been criticized by Trump and others in his administration for employing foreign workers at cheaper wages to the detriment of American workers.
“If you’re going to train somebody, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land, train Americans,” Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, stated at the White House Friday. “Stop bringing in people to take our jobs. That’s the policy here.”
From 2022 to December 2024, Amazon, Google and Microsoft laid off at least 27,000, 12,000 and 16,000 employees, respectively. However, in that same roughly three-year period, the companies have secured at least 61,000 H-1B visas combined for foreign national workers, according to USCIS.
“At the same time large tech companies are laying people off they are claiming they don’t have sufficient workers,” Eric Ruark, director of research and public relations for NumbersUSA, previously stated to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The H-1B program is designed specifically to allow employers to replace and displace qualified American workers with cheaper, often less competent foreign guest workers.”
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