No New Fees, No New Caps: Trump's Latest H-1B Order Bets on Federal Coordination Instead

Editor's note: The most recent Executive Order (number hasn't been issued yet) directs federal agencies to tighten oversight of the H-1B visa program, which allows companies to hire foreign workers for specialty jobs, because the administration says the program has been widely misused by employers and outsourcing firms to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor (like trucking companies) rather than filling genuine skills gaps. It requires the State Department, Labor Department, and Homeland Security Department to coordinate with the Commerce Department, Education Department, and Small Business Administration when reviewing H-1B applications, sharing wage, employment, and industry data to catch violations of existing visa laws. It instructs officials to factor in whether a sponsoring company has recently laid off American workers or plans to do so when deciding whether to approve that company's H-1B petitions and visas. It also orders the Labor Department to begin reviewing past wage applications within 30 days to determine whether enforcement action is warranted against employers who may have violated pay requirements. The order does not create a new fee, cap, or outright ban; it focuses on stricter interagency review and enforcement of rules already on the books, and it takes effect immediately under existing law and available funding.
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ENHANCING PROGRAM INTEGRITY AND INTERAGENCY

COORDINATION IN THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE H-1B

NONIMMIGRANT VISA PROGRAM

Executive Orders

September 18, 2026

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to identify uniquely skilled and highly specialized foreign temporary workers to strategically supplement the United States economy. Instead, the program has been widely abused by certain employers, third-party placement groups, and outsourcing firms to undercut and displace the supply of skilled United States labor. The large-scale, systematic abuse of the H-1B program to obtain non-qualifying foreign labor has undermined the additive purpose of the program and harmed the wages, working conditions, and job opportunities of skilled American workers.

The abuse of cheaper H-1B labor places downward pressure on domestic pay. H-1B visa holders earn far less than comparable United States-born workers, despite the statutory mandate that H-1B workers be paid equally to their domestic peers, with the estimated wage gap starting at $9,000 and climbing as high as $20,000 in H-1B reliant industries. One company even warned its shareholders that restrictions on cheap H-1B labor could force the company to use "local" workers, which "may only be available at higher wages."

Many employers have laid off large numbers of highly skilled American workers, only to promptly hire large numbers of H-1B workers who are often lower-skilled and lower-paid. For instance, technology sector employers have collectively requested H-1B visas for hundreds of thousands of workers, yet have also laid off somewhere between 800,000 to 1.3 million American employees from 2022 through 2026. Employers have even forced laid off American workers to train their foreign replacements.

Many jobs held by H-1B workers eventually leave the United States entirely. Employers with outsourcing business models use teams of H-1B visa holders to replace United States workers at third‑party client businesses and liaise with other individuals working off-site from their country of origin. As soon as practicable, much of their own work is transferred offshore. In Fiscal Year 2026, the top six users of the H-1B program operating with this outsourcing business model accounted for over 25,000 H-1B cap registrations. One foreign country's foreign minister even publicly admitted that H-1B “has become the outsourcing visa."

The systematic and organized abuse of the H-1B program is also a national security threat. Domestic law enforcement agencies have investigated H-1B-reliant outsourcing firms for engaging in visa fraud, conspiracy to launder money, and other illicit activities to encourage foreign workers to come to the United States. Abuses of the H-1B program also present a national security threat by discouraging Americans from pursuing careers in science and technology, risking vital United States leadership in these fields.

Numerous executive departments and agencies (agencies) have flagged employers' large‑scale, systematic abuse of the H-1B program to obtain lower‑paid, lower-skilled labor from abroad. These ongoing Government probes continue to identify widespread fraud and noncompliance among H-1B employers, such as: displacing American workers or otherwise giving preference to alien workers; misrepresenting the duties, requirements, or working conditions of job opportunities to avoid hiring or training American workers, falsely qualify jobs as specialty occupations, or lower applicable wage requirements; and misrepresenting aliens’ qualifications to perform specialty occupations by submitting questionable foreign degrees from diploma mills as support for their H-1B visa applications. The pervasiveness of these violations and the persistence of the violators confirm that more needs to be done to preserve the H-1B program’s integrity.

I have determined that continued efforts must be made to protect and prioritize the American workforce. It is therefore the policy of the United States that all relevant agencies shall implement appropriate measures to protect American workers from abuse of the H-1B program and ensure that the program serves the national interest.

Sec. 2. Interagency Coordination. When processing petitions, labor condition applications, and visas for the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)), the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall coordinate and consult with the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration to ensure the compliance of such petitions, applications, and visas with statutory requirements, including those in sections 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), 212(n), 214(i), and 274B of the INA. The Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration shall provide any relevant wage, employment, academic, industrial, or other economic information.

Sec. 3. Consideration of Applications, Petitions, and Visas. (a) Consistent with sections 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), 212(n), 214(i), 215(a), and 274B of the INA, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take into account in any labor condition application, petition, visa, and entry of aliens entering or attempting to enter the United States as H-1B nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation whether the employer sponsor directly or indirectly engaged in layoffs within the previous year or plans future layoffs that negatively affect the employment of similarly situated United States workers.

Please go to whitehouse.gov to continue reading.

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Editor's note: This executive order relies almost entirely on agency follow-through rather than binding new rules, creating no new visa fee or cap and setting only one concrete deadline, a 30-day Labor Department wage-data review. Historically, similar Trump-era H-1B orders (like the 2017 "Buy American, Hire American" order) produced strong rhetoric but limited concrete outcomes, since real changes require lengthy rule-making that invites lawsuits. Enforcement is also entirely federal, so the common assumption that "blue states won't enforce it" doesn't really apply since states have no formal role in H-1B processing; the more accurate issue is that H-1B-dependent employers are concentrated in blue-state metro areas, a market fact rather than a jurisdictional one. Practical hurdles like limited DOL and USCIS staffing, pushback from tech and outsourcing industry lobbyists, and likely litigation if enforcement gets aggressive all make it plausible this order under-delivers relative to its stated goals. Whether it breaks from that pattern will largely depend on what the Labor Department's wage review turns up and whether it leads to real enforcement actions. Up until now the massive importation of H-1B visas that were replacing America's professional class with imported foreigners like form India (see: Servitors of Empire: Studies in the Dark Side of Asian America):

You Will Not Replace Us!

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