A company firing Americans and hiring H-1Bs will now be flagged by the US agencies.
The Trump administration cited figures that 800,000 to 1.3 million American employees have been fired in the tech sector from 2022 through 2026. Amid mass layoffs being announced by several companies, the Donald Trump administration came up with a new executive order that directly links layoffs with H-1B hiring.
“One foreign country’s foreign minister even publicly admitted that H-1B ‘has become the outsourcing visa’,” the order said, referring to a former Indian minister. H-1B is a visa program that allows companies to hire skilled workers from foreign countries. It is a common allegation that companies fire their workforce while continuing to hire for H-1B as that would cost them much less. In the new executive order, the government is now telling the agencies to look at an H-1B sponsoring company’s layoff record when deciding whether to approve or process H-1B-related applications. But the tech companies are requesting for hundreds of thousands of H-1B workers.