Washington: US President Donald Trump justified the H-1B visa programme, claiming that the country needs foreign expertise in specific fields.
In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Tuesday (local time), Trump was asked if his administration planned to deprioritise H-1B visas. He responded, “You do need to bring in talent.”
When Ingraham said, “We have plenty of talent,” Trump replied, “No, you don’t.”
“You don’t have certain talents….And people have to learn, you can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, I’m going to put you into a factory. We’re going to make missiles,” he added.
Trump’s statement comes as he issued a proclamation in September to crack down on H-1B visas, charging a $100,000 application cost.
Last week, the US Department of Labour (DOL) started at least 175 investigations into alleged abuses in the H-1B visa programme as part of the Trump administration’s larger push to crack down on the foreign worker visa system.
The ‘Project Firewall’ programme was established in September to target enterprises accused of abusing the visa system, which allows US firms to hire foreign workers in specialised occupations such as information technology, engineering, and healthcare.
“The Department of Labor is using every resource at our disposal to put a stop to H-1B abuse and protect American jobs,” the DOL Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a post on X.
In October, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that he would urge the state’s Board of Governors to discontinue the use of H-1B visas at public universities, stating that positions now held by visa holders should be filled by Florida natives.
“Why are we bringing people in to assess our accreditation on an H-1B visa? We can’t do that with our own people?” DeSantis said, adding that the practice amounts to “cheap labour” and calling on university leaders to reassess hiring practices.
Days later, the White House emphasised that President Donald Trump’s aim in changing the H-1B visa program is to put “American workers first” and promised to fight lawsuits filed against the administration’s crackdown.
The administration’s H-1B visa strategy has been met with widespread resistance from lawmakers and legal challenges, including two major lawsuits filed in court, one by the US Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business group.
On October 31, five US congressmen wrote to Trump, urging him to reconsider his September 19th decree on H-1B visas, citing its “potentially negative impacts” on the India-US relationship.
India-born workers received more than 70% of all authorised H1-B visas in 2024, owing to a massive backlog of applications and a large number of skilled immigrants from India.
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File photo: Xinhua/IANS
–IANS
