Trump DOJ to Crack Down on Potential Abuse of Foreign Worker Visa Program

The Trump administration will be cracking down on companies that discriminate against American citizens by hiring less costly foreign workers for highly skilled jobs, a situation happening frequently in the tech industry. 

Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon said the Justice Department is focusing on H-1B visas. 

H-1B visas are given to certain foreign workers so they can work in the U.S. in specialty occupations that usually require a college degree. The Department of Labor places a cap of 85,000 such visas per year, but sometimes, exemptions are made.

“Before the holiday weekend—Labor Day, after all—I thought it would be kind of cute to say [to my colleagues], ‘Hey, guys, we are enforcing our federal employment laws. That includes the Civil Rights Division law that penalizes employers for putting foreign workers over American workers,’” Dhillon said Tuesday at the National Conservatism Conference. 

She said she didn’t anticipate a lot of interest but was surprised at the response.

“There were almost 100 new complaints over the weekend, which in our department is massive,” Dhillon said, noting that past Republican and Democrat administrations had ignored the problem. “People on both sides were benefiting from the cheap labor that left American workers out in the cold. We are not doing that any longer in this administration.”

“This [H-1B] program allows companies to replace American workers with cheap foreign labor, and it mostly benefits one country: India,” Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told The Daily Signal. 

More than two-thirds of H-1B visa recipients, or 72.6%, are from India, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The distant-second group is at 12.5% and is from China.

Hankinson is completing a report calling for the H-1B visa program to be reduced and reformed, contending it has ballooned beyond its intended scope. He said “fraud and nepotism are rife” in the program that drives down wages in America and exploits foreign workers.

“It’s hitting college graduates,” Hankinson said. “Everybody used to tell young Americans, ‘learn to code,’” referring to an admonition to keep one’s job skills up-to-date by learning to write computer software. “They did learn to code, and they can’t get jobs.” 

Labor Department rules require employers to post job listings in at least two major Sunday newspapers to demonstrate an attempt to recruit U.S. applicants before recruiting foreign workers.  

The H-1B program has its supporters. 

In May, a group of House Democrats and one House Republican wrote Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging him to reinstate a pilot renewal process for H-1B visa holders to allow the workers to stay longer in the United States. The House members argued this would increase government efficiency and would assure the flow of skilled workers for industries such as technology and health care continues to benefit American businesses. 

Meanwhile, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said he would not have come to the United States if not for the H-1B program. But he also called for reforms to the system.

In fiscal year 2024, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a fraud investigation after it found 408,891 H-1B applicants were registered more than once for the H-1B visa lottery system. 

That’s a significant increase from 165,180 multiple registrations in 2023 and 90,143 in 2022. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that companies were trying to cheat the visa lottery system by entering the same applicant multiple times to increase his or her chances of getting a visa.

This prompted the USCIS, even during the Biden administration, to take notice. 

A USCIS statement said at the time: “Based on evidence from the FY 2023 and FY 2024 H-1B cap seasons, we have undertaken extensive fraud investigations, denied and revoked petitions accordingly, and continue to make law enforcement referrals for criminal prosecution.”