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.
Section 3(a) instructs the Secretaries of State, Labor, and Homeland Security to take into account, on any labor condition application, petition, visa, or entry, whether the sponsor has carried out, directly or indirectly, layoffs in the previous year or plans future layoffs that would hit similarly situated US workers. Section 3(b) gives the Department of Labor, through the Wage and Hour Division, 30 days to begin examining the labor-condition data sponsors have already submitted and to decide whether section 212(n)(2)(G) of the Immigration and Nationality Act warrants action against those employers. The same order tells those three secretaries to consult Commerce, Education, and the Small Business Administration for wage, industrial, and employment figures the visa offices have not had as a matter of course. It runs through statutes already on the books. It does not invent a new crime or a new cap.
The purpose section puts a number on the mismatch. Technology employers have requested H-1B visas for hundreds of thousands of workers while laying off somewhere between 800,000 and 1.3 million American employees from 2022 through 2026. Employers have forced laid-off Americans to train their replacements. That is the White House’s account, written into the order itself, and it is the pile of cases the new review is supposed to sort.
I came late to wanting even this much. On January 4, 2024, I posted on 𝕏 that the US should make skilled immigration easier. I believed what most admirers of American technology companies believe: that the country wins when the best engineers in the world want to work here, and that the H-1B visa was the door they walked through. By December 28, 2024, with Elon Musk and much of the MAGA base fighting over the program on 𝕏, I asked for higher wage floors, real oversight, and the freedom for a visa holder to change employers. I still thought the design was mostly sound. A year ago, on September 19, 2025, I published “Scrap H-1B, Build Merit” and proposed a first-principles rule blunter than anything in Thursday’s text: “If a company has laid off American workers in the past year, it may not hire foreign replacements. No exceptions.” The order is narrower than that rule, and better for it. A firm closing in one city and hiring for different work in another has an answer. Last year’s rule would have treated that firm as if it had none. I think this is the most useful thing anyone has done to the H-1B program in a decade.
The record that moved me is old enough to be embarrassing. In 2015, Disney laid off hundreds of American IT employees and made training their H-1B replacements a condition of severance. Southern California Edison ran the same play. DHS data showed more than 85% of approvals landing in the two lowest wage tiers. In FY2024, employers submitted over 780,000 lottery registrations for 85,000 slots. The year before, more than 400,000 entries came from individuals registered multiple times, a practice USCIS itself calls often fraudulent. Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services built billion-dollar businesses on bulk allocations. Sold as a hunt for the exceptional, the program had become a volume trade.
The paper that precedes every petition gets a seven-day look. Before an H-1B case moves, the employer submits a labor condition application attesting to the job and the wage. The Department of Labor describes that review as a check, finished within seven working days, for completeness and obvious inaccuracies. A builder’s signed assurance that a structure meets the fire code matters. The inspector still walks the building.
Kishore Dattapuram understood the gap. He co-owned Nanosemantics, a San Jose staffing business, and on April 21, 2025, Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced him to 14 months for visa fraud and conspiracy after a November 2024 guilty plea. The firm submitted applications describing jobs at named client companies that did not exist. Dattapuram sometimes paid companies to pose as the end-client. With visas already in hand, Nanosemantics could place workers faster than competitors who waited for a real assignment before asking for a real visa. He forfeited $125,456.48 and paid a $7,500 fine. The victims included every staffing firm that told the truth.
Some of this happens before an American ever sees the posting. On February 25, 2026, the Justice Department announced a settlement with Elegant Enterprise-Wide Solutions, a Virginia IT-services provider, over allegations that its AI-generated job advertisements limited consideration to applicants holding H-1B, OPT, or H-4 status. The civil penalty was $9,460. A settlement resolves allegations and is not a conviction. It was the department’s eighth such settlement since it relaunched the Protecting US Workers Initiative in 2025.
Microsoft is harder to call, which is why agencies are now told to look at the paperwork instead of the press release. In July 2025, the Washington Examiner set the company’s large layoffs beside labor-condition filings covering 14,181 positions. Microsoft answered that the figure far exceeded its actual petitions, that 78% of its petitions in the preceding year were extensions for people already on staff, and that H-1B employees were among those let go. Both accounts may be accurate. Until September 18, no one in Washington was required to put them side by side.
Critics say a layoff proves nothing. Companies restructure constantly. A firm shedding mainframe programmers may truly need chip designers. The displacement rules Congress actually wrote bind mainly H-1B-dependent employers and willful violators, so on this view the order licenses harassment of any large company that ever trims a division. Section 3(a) reaches layoffs of similarly situated workers, people doing comparable work in the same period. An employer whose new hires do different work has a complete answer and can give it in an afternoon. The wage statute already requires a sponsor to pay the higher of the prevailing wage and the actual wage it pays comparable employees. Comparing payroll to the petition is a duty Congress wrote years ago. Nobody ran it.
The wage evidence is unsettled, and the people who say so have a paper. In February, Jiaxin He and Adam Ozimek of the Economic Innovation Group published a replication putting the average H-1B wage gap at 5.1%, far below the 16% estimate behind the administration’s fee. They found that older H-1B workers earn less than comparable natives while younger ones earn more. An average cannot convict or acquit a particular employer. Kevin Lynn warned in the Daily Caller on May 22 that firms facing higher wage thresholds “will simply reclassify more positions into the revised Level I category while continuing to pay below market rates.” That is why any serious look has to match the stated job to the work performed.
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 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.
If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe
Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
"An employer whose new hires do different work has a complete answer and can give it in an afternoon."
Different work? For how long? I've been in IT for 45 years. Every position is labelled as generically as possible. "Member of the technical staff" doesn't tell you what work they are actually doing.... or from where.
A good start but not a total solution to a difficult issue. Has anyone noticed that the H1B visa is a symptom of a larger and underlying problem? Many of the companies promoting H1B visa hiring claim that they need them because similarly educated, trained and motivated employees are not available in the existing U.S. market. If true, this points, once again, at a failure of the education system to produce graduates prepared to fill positions required by today’s companies and markets. If there is any truth to this argument, the education system needs to be addressed. If, on the other hand, the H1B visa applications are revealed to be purely economic, they need to be curtailed dramatically.