Presidential Actions RESTRICTION ON ENTRY OF CERTAIN NONIMMIGRANT WORKERS
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION
The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor. The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security. Some employers, using practices now widely adopted by entire sectors, have abused the H-1B statute and its regulations to artificially suppress wages, resulting in a disadvantageous labor market for American citizens, while at the same time making it more difficult to attract and retain the highest skilled subset of temporary workers, with the largest impact seen in critical science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
Information technology (IT) firms in particular have prominently manipulated the H-1B system, significantly harming American workers in computer-related fields. The share of IT workers in the H-1B program grew from 32 percent in Fiscal Year (FY) 2003 to an average of over 65 percent in the last 5 fiscal years. In addition, some of the most prolific H-1B employers are now consistently IT outsourcing companies. Using these H 1B-reliant IT outsourcing companies provides significant savings for employers: one study of tech workers showed a 36 percent discount for H-1B “entry-level” positions as compared to full-time, traditional workers. To take advantage of artificially low labor costs incentivized by the program, companies close their IT divisions, fire their American staff, and outsource IT jobs to lower-paid foreign workers.
Further, the abuse of the H-1B visa program has made it even more challenging for college graduates trying to find IT jobs, allowing employers to hire foreign workers at a significant discount to American workers. These effects of abuse of H-1B visas have coincided with increasing challenges in the labor market in which H-1B workers serve. According to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates in the country at 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively — more than double the unemployment rates of recent biology and art history graduates. Recent data reveals that unemployment rates among workers in computer occupations jumped from an average of 1.98 percent in 2019 to 3.02 percent in 2025.
Reports also indicate that many American tech companies have laid off their qualified and highly skilled American workers and simultaneously hired thousands of H-1B workers. One software company was approved for over 5,000 H-1B workers in FY 2025; around the same time, it announced a series of layoffs totaling more than 15,000 employees. Another IT firm was approved for nearly 1,700 H-1B workers in FY 2025; it announced it was laying off 2,400 American workers in Oregon in July. A third company has reduced its workforce by approximately 27,000 American workers since 2022, while being approved for over 25,000 H-1B workers since FY 2022. A fourth company reportedly eliminated 1,000 jobs in February; it was approved for over 1,100 H-1B workers for FY 2025.
American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance. This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.
The high numbers of relatively low-wage workers in the H-1B program undercut the integrity of the program and are detrimental to American workers’ wages and labor opportunities, especially at the entry level, in industries where such low-paid H-1B workers are concentrated. These abuses also prevent American employers in other industries from utilizing the H-1B program in the manner in which it was intended: to fill jobs for which highly skilled and educated American workers are unavailable.
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