THE MORNING RANT: Trump Executive Order Targets Employers that Lay Off American Citizens to Hire Foreign H-1B Labor

There was great news over the weekend, as President Trump just issued an Executive Order to combat H-1B abuses, and to hold accountable those employers who terminate American employees and then replace them with foreign H-1B labor.

The H-1B issue has become a major political issue, with growing disgust among the American public about employers bringing non-citizens from foreign countries to the states for the purpose of displacing American workers. As I have previously documented, the appeal of H-1B labor for those abusing it is usually for one of the following reasons:

1) It’s a form of chattel labor, in which the H-1B worker is paid less than American prevailing wages, creating a de facto indentured servant relationship, because the H-1B employee may not seek other employment.

2) A way for those of an anti-American bent to provide employment in the United States to preferred foreign demographics.

There are a disgusting number of stories to be found about corporations laying off American citizens to replace them with foreign H-1B labor right here on American soil. Microsoft is one of those dishonorable companies:

“Fury erupts as US brand fires 1,600 employees after securing thousands of foreign worker visas” [Fox News – 7/09/2026]

Microsoft announced that it will lay off 4,800 people total and 1,600 from the corporation's XBOX division, which makes and sells the dominant video game console. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been approved this year to hire from foreign countries 2,273 employer-sponsored, non-immigrant workers under what is known as the H-1B visa program.

The business fad of replacing American employees with foreign chattel labor had become so “respected” that even the semi-public TVA utility tried to do this a few years ago – until President Trump got wind of it. Then-CEO Jeff Lyash thought it would be clever to find “cost savings” by laying off American citizens. Apparently cost savings helped justify his $8 million compensation. Even worse, Lyash made the laid-off employees train their foreign replacements – the corporate term was “knowledge transfer.” President Trump was so angry that he fired several TVA board members, including the chairman, for allowing this to happen, and for not immediately firing Lyash. Donald Trump takes H-1B abuse seriously.

Disney also engaged in the despicable practice of making employees train their own H-1B replacements before dismissing them: “It’s Not A Small World After All: Disney IT Employee Trains His Own H-1B Replacement Then Gets Laid Off” [The Dallas Express – 4/27/2026]

It’s often a condition in these situations that if the employee being let go wishes to receive a severance package, he must first train the indentured servant H-1B who is taking his job.

Ideally, the president wouldn’t have to address the H-1B mess with executive orders if Congress would do its job. Unfortunately, there is a solid bi-partisan majority in Congress in favor of replacing American labor with foreign labor, specifically:

1) Democrats who despise the United States, its people, and its heritage; They therefore seek to aid foreign nationals (and their homelands) at the expense of Americans.

2) Corporate / Chamber of Commerce Republicans who have embraced slavery-adjacent forms of labor in their quest to reduce labor expense to as close to $0 as possible.

It is tiresome that those of us who oppose the H-1B replacement of American workers are branded as “racist” by Democrats, RINOs, and the media. I’d like to push back and ask how it’s not racist that 70% of all H-1Bs come from just one country – India. Is it not racist that hiring managers trying to hire for “jobs Americans won’t do” look almost exclusively to India?

America’s adversary, the People’s Republic Of China, provides another 12% of all H-1Bs. A whopping 82% of all H-1Bs come from India and Communist China.

Returning to the specific subject of today’s post, here is what President Trump’s new Executive Order entails:

• Companies petitioning for H-1B employees (or subcontracted H-1Bs) must disclose all previous and planned layoffs. Federal agencies must ensure that laid off workers are not being replaced with H-1Bs.

• To approve an H-1B going forward, a byzantine tangle of bureaucratic approvals will be needed from various federal agencies, with input required from the Departments of State, Labor, Homeland Security, Commerce, Education, and SBA. The process full of red tape is part of the deterrent.

• The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division is going to start auditing previous applications to determine if violations have occurred and if enforcement penalties should be imposed.

There may be consequences for employers replacing Americans with foreign labor, but the obvious intent is to re-set the playing field so that employers stop trying to find workarounds to replace their American workforce with imported labor.

The text of President Trump’s executive order can be found at this link. Here is a sample of what it says:

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.

One last comment: Socialism is flourishing as a political and economic concept right now. We on the political / economic right must repel the advance of socialism and protect the free market economy. But it is extremely deleterious to our cause when the corporate class is seeking the replacement of the American workforce with a foreign workforce by using the indentured servant model of labor.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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