Executives are using a 1990 law to import another 85,000 mixed skill, lottery picked, contract worker, foreign graduates for U.S. white collar jobs — despite high unemployment among the nation’s young college grads.
The 2025 inflow was announced Friday by an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS] has received enough petitions to reach the congressionally mandated 65,000 H-1B visa regular cap and the 20,000 H-1B visa U.S. advanced degree exemption, known as the master’s cap, for fiscal year 2026.”
But the same agency also announced on Thursday it is drafting a regulation to change how companies import the H-1B workers.
The cryptic announcement merely said: “Weighted Selection Process for Registrants and Petitioners Seeking To File Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions.” The announcement did not provide a schedule or a description of the draft regulation, but the rules may match the short-lived reforms set by President Donald Trump’s deputies in 2021.
The new regulation “is a good idea,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which advocates for U.S. professionals. For example, a Trump-style regulation that allocates visas to companies offering higher pay would “make it less predatory towards more ordinary tech workers and [to new] graduates entering STEM fields,” he said.
USCIS officials recently narrowed the white-collar TN visa worker program, ending its use by foreign doctors, computer experts, welders, and electricians.
“We’re starting to see the impact of having [President Donald Trump’s] good appointments throughout these agencies, at the Department of Labor, at DHS, and the Department of Justice,” said Lynn. “We already have greater public recognition of the problem since the big H-1B kerfuffle over Christmas … there is rising public awareness of the six percent-plus unemployment rate of recent computer science graduates.”
“The best of all possible worlds is that Congress would vote to get rid of the H-1B program,” he said, adding: “The whole concept of the H-1B program is predicated on a [claimed] labor shortage, but wee’re saying the labor shortage doesn’t exist at all, and it is a way to bring in cheap foreign workers to displace Americans.”
USCIS is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees the annual inflow of more than 500,000 foreign graduates via a variety of business-backed programs. The H-1B program keeps at least 700,000 mixed-skill, foreign workers in U.S. jobs, along with perhaps 800,000 other white-collar migrants in the L-1, L-2, H4, J-1, O-1, TN, CPT, and OPT programs.
All told, the federal government allows U.S. executives to keep roughly 1.5 million foreign contract workers in U.S. jobs that would otherwise go to U.S. professionals. Roughly 1 million of those mixed-skill workers are from India. China provides many of the high-skill visa workers in the banking, artificial intelligence, and computer security sectors.
Over his career, Trump has zig-zagged on the program, and most recently aligned himself with H-1B supporter Elon Musk. That relationship has since ended, leaving some additional room for a Trump move to the center.
However, Trump also faces huge pressure from friends on Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies, and from the Indian government to preserve or expand the jobs-transfer program.
The huge inflow of subordinate contract workers into the jobs held by free-speaking American professionals has damaged U.S. research, productivity, and innovation, say critics.
The visa workers hold a huge share of the nation’s computer technology jobs, and are expanding into other professions, including science, recruitment, medicine, and accounting.
The replacement wave is accelerating partly because Indian-born visa workers at U.S. companies are getting green cards and promotions into management jobs. Once promoted, the foreign-born managers can sell the jobs held by unsuspecting American employees to poor foreign graduates. The transactions are aided by home-country brokers and funded by kickbacks from the jobs’ salaries, say Americans and former H-1B workers.
For Indians, “it was just a regular thing … it was customary, they weren’t even upset about it,” said Rex from Dallas, an American who has been working with Indian H-1B workers for decades. “We got we got a few good [Indian workers] here … They’re the ones that tell me a lot of these stories about the kickbacks,” he told Breitbart News.
The foreign visa workers are not immigrants, and they cannot work as free-speaking professionals because they face the everyday threat of being sent home if they anger their executives. Most are also kept subordinate because their employers dangle the promise of U.S. citizenship in exchange for years of hard work.
The annual inflow of roughly 400,000 white-collar visa workers is damaging job prospects and salaries for American graduates.
“The marked rise in unemployment among recent college graduates has been one of the most-talked-about economic trends of the past year,” said a July 18 article in the U.K.-based Financial Times:
Joblessness among highly educated youngsters everywhere from the US to the UK and beyond has climbed above the overall unemployment rate for the first time on record, raising questions about everything from the value of a college education to the role played by AI.
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Most striking of all, recently graduated young men are now unemployed at the same rate as their non-graduate counterparts, completely erasing the college employability premium.
In February, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent for graduates with computer engineering degrees, 6.1 percent for chemical engineers, and 6.1 percent for computer science graduates. Those rates are far higher than the 3.0 unemployment rate for art history graduates, 1.3 percent for early childhood education, and 2.6 percent for ethnic studies graduates.
In North Carolina, seniors and graduates with computer-science degrees are getting excluded from jobs, said Katie in North Carolina, the mother of one graduate. “They have been applying for jobs steadily, like hundreds and hundreds of applications, and are not even able to get an interview,’ she told Breitbart News.
It’s not that they’re being picky and saying, “Oh, I won’t take a job for this much money.” They would like to work in their field. One … has been living with his parents and working as a tutor …When I got out of college [in 1981] I had my pick of solid job offers. I ended up going to work in California, but it is a totally different world 1753028735… these kids are not getting the opportunities that we are.
“Right now, there doesn’t appear to be any positions” for STEM graduates, said Jim from Herndon, an information technology manager. His two nephews “are looking all over the country to be able to get a first job, found nothing [and] so they’re doing lifeguarding again this summer,” he told Breitbart News in May.
“You really only have two years after you graduate to get into the [career] pipeline, and then you’re over, and the managers move on to hiring the next graduates,” he added.
In contrast, two nieces with degrees in sociology and film studies landed jobs at law firms, as an administrator and a social media manager, he added.
Visa workers are also flooding into accounting firms.
In many major accounting firms, “hiring managers are now Indian, and they only hire Indians,” said one American recruiter in the accounting sector. “I see it in my world, and I see it in my husband’s world — he’s a software engineer — and it’s pervasive here,” she told Breitbart News in February.
That replacement is bad for U.S. accountants — and for the reliability and quality of the accounting statements that justify corporate stock values, said Sarah from Scottsdale, an American tech expert in the sector.
For example, top managers at U.S. accounting firms use the H-1B program to train Indians for jobs being outsourced to India, she said. “What ends up happening is because India does such a shitty level of work that the [deadline] work gets pushed up, back up to the U.S. … our timeline is collapsed, and the U.S. people now are expected to do two or three jobs to get it done.”
Indians are also taking recruiting jobs in many major corporations.
“Everybody that I know as a corporate recruiter … they’re all unemployed,” the corporate recruiter told Breitbart News in February. “Three years ago, I had three job opportunities — three! — and now I’m working as a contractor.”
Up to 2025, “I’ve had a stellar career … Do you think we’ve got any hope in this country as Americans?” she asked.
As Trump’s deputies move to reform the visa programs, Americans need to speak up and organize, said Lynn.
“We’re fighting a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans on this,” he said, adding, “We are winning by any measure: Americans are waking up to what’s going on.”
