The often-controversial H-1B visa foreign-worker program may be getting updated under President Trump’s Homeland Security Department.
The program was meant to provide American firms more options to hire qualified workers, including those from foreign countries. However, as WND has covered extensively, the H-1B system has been used countless times to replace Americans with less expensive immigrants.
For example, while U.S.-based Microsoft workers have faced multiple waves of layoffs, including a recent round targeting the Xbox division, the company has already cut more than 10,000 employees across various divisions, including 6,000 in May alone, and hundreds more in June.
Between May and June, Microsoft laid off 2,300 employees in Washington alone, including 817 software engineers, according to official WARN Act filings. But during the same period, Microsoft submitted 6,327 H-1B visa requests for software engineer roles matching the same job titles and location as those affected by the layoffs.
As reported at the National Pulse, Thursday DHS filed a notice of a possible change in H-1B requirements with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
According to the report, the proposal includes a “weighted selection process” for applicants under the capped portion of the program. The filing, however, provides no further details as to how the new system would function. The statutory cap for H-1B visas is set at 85,000 per year.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, prominent supporters of Donald Trump publicly disagreed about the value of the H-1B program, with both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy expressing support. Opinion polls on the program, however, have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of the visa program.
Trump had previously argued that H-1B visas are “unfair” to American workers, saying in 2016, “I know the H-1B very well. And it’s something that I frankly use, and I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have it.”
As the National Pulse points out, critics of the program argue that the current lottery system disproportionately benefits larger companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, and leaves American workers at a disadvantage, having to compete with cheap foreign labor.
A weighted system could potentially replace the random lottery system as a means to prioritize better qualified visa applicants.