How Trump Is Cracking Down on Two Major Immigration Fraud Schemes

President Donald Trump is prioritizing American workers with two key immigration visa policies that will protect U.S. citizens, especially younger generations, against unfair competition from cheap foreign labor.

First, in mid-September, Trump signed an executive order and proclamation cracking down on abuses in the H-1B visa program.

H-1B visas were created to allow U.S. employers to temporarily hire foreign workers for specialized jobs when they say they cannot find enough qualified American workers to fill those positions. The program primarily covers “specialty occupations” requiring advanced knowledge and typically at least a bachelor’s degree, including jobs in technology, engineering, medicine, and finance.

However, H-1B visas have become a notorious vehicle for abuse of the immigration system, as the program has become rife with blatantly obvious fraud. Universities have used H-1B visas to hire golf and tennis coaches, marketing professors, and assistant librarians. The University of Notre Dame incredulously claimed it had to go overseas to find someone qualified to teach English.

Major corporations, including Microsoft and Disney, also have been credibly accused of importing cheap foreign workers while laying off Americans. Adding insult to injury, companies sometimes force Americans to train their foreign replacements.

The Center for Immigration Studies reported in 2025 that H-1B visas are a source of “industrialized fraud,” with persistent patterns of “forged degrees, falsified employment credentials, and the role of third-party staffing companies in bypassing the program’s original rationale of admitting skilled workers to meet temporary shortages.”

In short, the H-1B program has become a back door into the United States to allow hundreds of thousands of foreigners to bypass the normal immigration process – and displace American workers.

Accordingly, Trump’s order and proclamation direct federal agencies to increase scrutiny of H-1B petitions in cases where U.S. workers could be displaced. Federal agencies are now required to consider an employer’s recent or planned hiring decisions and layoffs of similarly situated U.S. workers when reviewing H-1B applications.

As Vice President JD Vance put it, “One of the things that I find just shocking about this is you’ll have a company that applies for an H-1B, and they’ll say, oh, we’re desperate for workers, we can’t find the workers. And then you go and look at their history, and they’ve laid off 5,000 people. Well, that’s ridiculous.”

Additionally, Trump has renewed his effort to impose a steep fee on companies that want to hire H-1B workers.

Last September, Trump initially imposed a $100,000 fee for H-1Bs. However, enforcement of that rule is currently being blocked by a district court judge in Massachusetts.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a separate $103,265 charge on H-1B petitions while the original $100,000 fee structure makes its way through the court system.

The purpose of the fee is to offset the perverse incentive for companies to displace Americans with cheaper foreign workers. The Trump administration believes that imposing this additional cost will ensure that companies who pay it really do need to look outside the United States to hire skilled labor.

These changes will especially benefit younger workers who are competing against foreigners for entry-level and early career positions in IT, coding, and computer science. H-1B registrations dropped 40 percent in the past year, according to the Trump administration. This means Americans had fewer pressure from foreign workers, which raises wages for Gen Z and Millennial Americans.

Ensuring American jobs go to Americans is particularly important for recent college graduates, since computer science and engineering graduates – two fields with heavy H-1B usage – have struggled to land jobs. Prior to Trump’s changes, grads in these fields saw double the unemployment rate of even art history majors.

While those changes help entry-level workers after graduation, a second change will ensure American college students gain valuable experience while in school.

In August, the Trump administration told colleges they can only place foreign students in internships if they are required for everyone in the program.

The change is intended to crack down on another immigration program rife with fraud called “Day 1 Curricular Practical Training.” Under this program, foreign students can “intern” at places like Microsoft, Oracle, or Amazon as “work experience” allegedly needed for their major.

In reality, however, these “students” are often workers pretending to be students while taking jobs at discounted rates that would otherwise go to Americans. Even left-leaning Bloomberg called the scheme a “two-year visa disguised as a degree.”

While these two Trump policies are massive wins for American workers and young workers in particular, not all conservatives are on board. Samuel Gregg, president of the American Institute for Economic Research, wrote on X that “businesses must be free to hire and fire as they need, subject to the demands of the rule of law.

Gregg wrote that post in response to Vice President JD Vance saying: “Our message to corporate America is simple – We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor.

Libertarian writer Stephanie Slade similarly argued, “Why should the government have any say over who companies employ?”

But critics of Trump’s actions miss that the entire point of a nation is to protect the security and economic interests of its citizens. The United States is not some globalist economic zone that anyone from anywhere in the world should have equal access to. It is a country of citizens who have every right to expect their government to put them and their children first – to preserve economic opportunity for Americans first and foremost.

Moreover, American taxpayers spend billions of dollars per year subsidizing public schools, public universities, and student loans for private universities. They do so with the understanding that Americans, including their own sons and daughters, are being educated to get good jobs, contribute to the economy, and be able to provide for their families.

The American economy did not become the strongest in the history of the world by kicking homegrown talent to the curb in favor of cheaper labor from Beijing or Mumbai. When corporations are allowed to betray American workers without consequence, it tears at the economic and cultural fabric that binds the country together.

A good economic policy, like the one Trump is pursuing, treats Americans as citizens and, more fundamentally, as human beings, not simply cost inputs into a spreadsheet.

American jobs should go to Americans first.