American workers, particularly in science and IT related fields, have long suffered as a result of employer abuse of the H-1B visa program. That program has been used to bring large numbers of foreign workers to the U.S. where they have often been used to replace American workers rather than supplement them.

On Friday, September 19, President Trump issued an executive order aiming to reduce or eliminate H-1B visa abuse.

"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 President said in his order. 

He continued: 

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 President noted that the number of foreign workers in science and technology fields more than doubled between 2000 and 2019 even though total employment in those fields "only increased 44.5 percent during that time." 

President Trumps proclamation noted that the information technology field has been most impacted by H-1B abuse. 

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. 

The president cited one unnamed company as a recent example of this practice. 

"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," the President said in his proclamation.

In one particularly alarming example, the President noted that another unnamed "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."

To pause this state of affairs, the President then ordered "the entry into the United Sates of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under [the H-1B program], is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000." 

Unless this restriction is extended, the order notes that it will expire "12 months after the effective date of this proclamation...."

White House Fact Sheet on H-1B Visas

Supporting the President's action to restrict H-1B visas, the White House released a fact sheet detailing what it described as abuse of the program's "economic and national security threat to the nation." 

According to the White House fact sheet:

• The share of IT workers with H-1B visas has risen from 32% in FY 2003 to over 65% in recent years.
• Unemployment among recent computer science graduates has reached 6.1% and 7.5% for computer engineering graduates — more than double the rates for biology or art history majors. The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, while overall STEM employment only increased 44.5% during that time.
• American companies are laying off their American technology workers and seemingly replacing them with H-1B workers:
• • One company was approved for 5,189 H-1B workers in FY 2025, while laying off roughly 16,000 U.S. employees this year.
  • Another company was approved for 1,698 H-1B workers in FY 2025, yet announced it was laying off 2,400 U.S. workers in Oregon in July.
  • A third company has reduced its U.S. workforce by 27,000 since 2022 while receiving 25,075 H-1B approvals.
  • Yet another company reportedly cut 1,000 American jobs in February despite receiving 1,137 H-1B approvals for FY 2025.
• American IT workers have even been reportedly forced to train their foreign replacements under nondisclosure agreements.
• The H-1B program is creating disincentives for future American workers to choose STEM careers, which threatens our national security.
• President Trump is imposing higher costs on companies seeking to use the H-1B program in order to address the abuse of the program, stop the undercutting of wages, and protect our national security.

Critic Reaction

According to the Associated Press, "This year, Amazon was by far the top recipient of H-1B visas with more than 10,000 awarded, followed by Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Geographically, California has the highest number of H-1B workers."

The AP went on to note that H-1B visas, are, in fact, often used to undermine entry-level U.S. workers. Many American companies, AP reported, "find it cheaper to contract out help desks, programming and other basic tasks to consulting companies such as Wipro, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Tata in India and IBM and Cognizant in the U.S. These consulting companies hire foreign workers, often from India, and contract them out to U.S. employers looking to save money."

One critic of the President's action was Doug Rand, a former official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Biden Administration. “This isn’t real policy — it’s fan service for immigration restrictionists,” Rand said according to AP. “Trump gets his headlines, and inflicts a jolt of panic, and doesn’t care whether this survives first contact with the courts.” 

On X.com, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, argued that the new restrictions on H-1B visas would reduce the number of doctors.

"There is a doctor shortage in the US right now," he wrote in his post on the topic. "Every year, hundreds of doctors get H1-B visas to help fill those gaps. If hospitals had to pay an additional $100,000 fee, it's possible they would simply give up and not even try to fill those positions."

Boys and American Education

The H-1B visa abuse scandal and the failure of American colleges and universities go hand-in-hand.

Arguably, companies and hospitals need H-1B recipients because American education institutions have been systematically discriminating against half the American population for decades.

This discrimination starts in American middle and high-schools where boys are disproportionately singled out as disruptive and are often overly medicated to keep them in line. According to the CDC, boys under age 17 are almost twice as likely as girls to be "diagnosed" with ADHD. Depending on the state, the CDC notes that between 38 percent and 81 percent of children with ADHD are then "medicated." 

These children are often derailed from academic success. One study looked at 766,244 children in Scottish schools between 2009 and 2013. Of those 7,413 were receiving medication for ADHD with 84.8 percent being boys. 

The study found that "These children had higher rates of unauthorized absence"; "more commonly had a record of special educational need"; "achieved lower academic attainment"; "were more likely to leave school before age 16 years"; "and were more likely to be unemployed."

Worse, ADHD is very commonly misdiagnosed, especially in the youngest children. A news release in 2010 from Michigan State University highlighted research conducted by economist Todd Elder that was set to appear in the peer-reviewed Journal of Health Economics. 

According to the MSU news release; "Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest – and most immature – in their kindergarten class." 

Many of these children, whose brains are in the early stages of development, are given medications that modify neurotransmitter activity. The long-term effects of such drugs on developing brains is still a matter of some question. One study in 2021 put it this way: "...literature on the duration and dose of continued use [of ADHD medication] on the brain is scarce." That study, published in the journal NeuroImage: CLINICAL, found that higher ADHD medication use "was associated with smaller hippocampus volumes in the CA1 and SR/SL/SM subregions in medicated children with ADHD, and that these effects were independent of ADHD severity, sex, and age." 

Still, consequences are hard to discern, and the researchers who conducted that study noted that "the effects of prolonged ADHD medication use and dosage on human brain structure remain elusive."

Boys, thus, are more likely to receive mind and brain altering medications at young ages without the medical and education industries having even a basic understanding of the long-term impact. 

At the post-secondary level, political repression has resulted in a steep drop off of male enrollment and, consequently, attainment of professional degrees in science and medical fields.

According to the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of young male high school graduates enrolled in college in 2011. That number dropped to 39 percent by 2023. 

This should not be surprising. As more women enter activities, and reach a majority in them, fewer men will seek to enter those same fields. In education, in addition to over diagnosis and over medication for ADHD, the general message delivered is that girls are better behaved, more graceful, more successful and more intelligent than boys. 

And, boys get the message. Ironically, in the UK a feminist journalist, Catherine Carr, investigated what boys experience in school as part of a BBC radio series on boys. A 17-year old told her "me and my friends heard the phrase 'kill all men' at least 5 times a day" since becoming a teenager. A younger boy told her that if he had to sit in "another assembly [morning lecture] on girls in STEM" he would "die from boredom." Another boy told her: "In secondary school, we had multiple assemblies on like, again, Andrew Tate but also things like boys behavior and sexual assault ...the boys felt like they were being like, sort of targeted a little bit...." 

In both higher education and professional career fields, men perceive, even if this is not overtly communicated, that there is pro-female positive feedback loop that they will need to navigate for success, adding an opaque challenge that feels unwelcoming. Many men will avoid this entirely by staying away from college. In professional careers, avoidance is impossible where many, if not most, corporate HR departments are now staffed by young women. Not coincidentally, middle-aged men are being mustered out of the workforce and are unlikely to find subsequent employment as a result. There are many complicating factors, but according to Jonathan Rothwell writing for the Institute for Family Studies in 2023, "young and middle-aged American men are less likely to be working now than at any time in U.S. history." 

These trends have meant that fewer American men get advanced degrees than might otherwise, including in medicine. According to the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), 73% of doctoral degrees were awarded to men in 1980 with that number dropping to 43 percent in 2022. In medicine, specifically, AIBM reported: "Men are now the minority of MDs, and their numbers have plummeted in other health fields: enrollment in veterinary programs, for example, has declined by 40% for men over the past 40 years while female enrollment has surged by about 400%."

On a side note, but one that is still concerning, men are going to be less and less likely to find male legal representation in the future, as AIBM noted also that "Male law school enrollment is at a 50-year low." 

The Problem is Bigger than H-1B Visas

These trends in how men and boys are treated in American society and education are directly related to the increase in importation of skilled foreign labor under the H1-B visa program. Despite economic growth over the last 70 years, rather than double the skilled workforce by increasing the share of women alongside men, these trends have only elevated women, while driving men out of the skilled labor force. The deficit is being made up, it seems, by importation of foreign skilled labor.

Restricting H-1B visas certainly is a method of attacking the symptoms currently facing the U.S. but it may not be sufficient as a corrective. That will ultimately require a removal of the leftist ideologies that have demonized men since the 1960s and driven many of them out of the skilled workforce and even to, in all too many cases, homelessness, addiction and suicide.

This effort may already be underway in some quarters, but "Rome wasn't built in a day," as the saying goes. The undermining of men was accomplished only after decades of radical left-wing activism. 

A reversal or a reset may take just as long, if it is even possible.