Enhancing Program Integrity and Integrity and Interagency Coordination in the Administration of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Program

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1.  Purpose.  The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to identify uniquely skilled and highly specialized foreign temporary workers to strategically supplement the United States economy.  Instead, the program has been widely abused by certain employers, third-party placement groups, and outsourcing firms to undercut and displace the supply of skilled United States labor.  The large-scale, systematic abuse of the H-1B program to obtain non-qualifying foreign labor has undermined the additive purpose of the program and harmed the wages, working conditions, and job opportunities of skilled American workers.  

The abuse of cheaper H-1B labor places downward pressure on domestic pay.  H-1B visa holders earn far less than comparable United States-born workers, despite the statutory mandate that H-1B workers be paid equally to their domestic peers, with the estimated wage gap starting at $9,000 and climbing as high as $20,000 in H-1B reliant industries.  One company even warned its shareholders that restrictions on cheap H-1B labor could force the company to use “local” workers, which “may only be available at higher wages.”

Many employers have laid off large numbers of highly skilled American workers, only to promptly hire large numbers of H-1B workers who are often lower-skilled and lower-paid.  For instance, technology sector employers have collectively requested H-1B visas for hundreds of thousands of workers, yet have also laid off somewhere between 800,000 to 1.3 million American employees from 2022 through 2026.  Employers have even forced laid off American workers to train their foreign replacements.