The H1-B Visa program has come under scrutiny in recent years because it has been abused by American companies. We have all heard the story about Disney employees being forced to train their foreign replacements. Disney imported workers because foreign workers will work for less money and fewer benefits. It was about their bottom line. That wasn’t the intention of the H1-B Visa.
On Saturday, Amuse On X posted an article about a recent Executive Order by President Trump designed to fix the abuses in the H1-B Visa program.
The article reports:
A company can tell its investors in the morning that it needs fewer workers and tell Washington in the afternoon that it cannot find enough of them. Closing a semiconductor fab in Ohio and hunting for a chip designer in Austin can produce both sentences honestly. The harder case is when the two sentences describe the same desks. For more than 30 years, nobody in the federal government was assigned to sort one from the other. On September 18, President Trump signed an executive order that gives that comparison to the agencies already charged with reviewing H-1B sponsorship.
…Last December 14, defending the president’s $100,000 fee, I wrote that no bureaucrat could tell a real shortage from wage arbitrage and that price should do the screening. The same week as the new order, a companion proclamation renewed that payment for certain petitions through September 21, 2027. The administration reports that lottery registrations from the major IT staffing and outsourcing firms fell from 24,946 to 2,055, a 92% decline. That is the government’s own figure. Several policies changed at once, and a registration is not a hire. Even so, the drop is large enough to take seriously. On July 24, the First Circuit refused to stay the judgment vacating the fee in State of California v. Mullin; the immigration bar’s reading is that collection remains blocked, a price can be enjoined, and this one was, and what is left standing is the power to compare what a sponsor swore to against what its own payroll shows. Examiners cannot read motives. They can read records.
The article concludes:
The next president can quietly withdraw an order. Heritage’s November 25, 2025 report by Simon Hankinson recommended searchable monthly data on petitions, layoffs, complaints, and investigations, and Thursday’s text promises nothing of the kind. Without those numbers, workers and compliant employers have no way to tell an enforcement program from an annoucement. The administration should publish the reviews it opens, the violations it establishes, and the wages it recovers. Daniel Kishi of American Compass proposed in March that sponsors be required to post jobs domestically first and that displacement liability follow the work through the labor contractor to the company that benefits from it. Until that is statute, the client that hands its IT department to an outsourcer stays insulated from the layoffs that follow.
After the American engineer, the people with the most to gain from the review are the foreign professionals hired honestly. Their reputation is currently set by brokers like Dattapuram, and every invented job makes a real one look suspect. If Labor finds that the laid-off and the newly sponsored did different jobs, the sponsors lose a few weeks. If it finds what Disney’s technicians found in 2015, some of the largest names in American business have been swearing to things that weren’t true, and we will finally have it in writing.
This is definitely a step in the right direction.
