President Trump is set to sign a pair of executive orders in Wisconsin Tuesday intended to bolster “buy American” and “hire American” regulations regarding high-skilled foreign worker visa programs and federal contracting.
White House officials speaking anonymously told reporters that the existing rules have been “diluted over time” and no longer serve their intended purpose.
The first executive order will call on the Labor Department to more strictly monitor the H1-B visa program for high-skilled workers with the aim of finding ways to prevent the visas from being used to bring in workers at lower pay than similarly qualified domestic workers. Instead, the visa system will be adjusted to prioritize the most highly skilled and highly paid foreign workers. The intention is to make those workers more expensive to hire and therefore less attractive for companies.
The administration has yet to settle on a specific strategy for that, the officials conceded, but they said it could involve raising the fees on employers to sponsor the visas or stopping the visas from being awarded through a lottery system. The official described the latter option as a “very elegant” solution.
“Right now, the lottery system disadvantages masters degree holders” who are in a better position to demand higher wages, the official said. “If you make it harder to abuse the system, you create more of a market for domestic workers.”
The order would not affect the number of visas made available annually. “Administratively, you cannot reduce the number,” the official said. That would be up to Congress.
The second executive order would call on federal agencies to “more narrowly construe” the public interest provisions of federal contracting rules. That would involve strictly limiting the circumstances under which waivers of the rules would be given. Agencies would be told to take into account whether the contract bidders are using materials such as steel purchased from U.S. sources or cheaper materials “dumped” on the U.S. by foreign countries.
