Trump’s H-1B Advocacy Infuriates His Base

As then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan said with a smile to incumbent Jimmy Carter in their 1980 debate, “There you go again.” The simple sentence that helped Reagan win 44 states and 499 electoral votes came to mind when President Donald Trump insisted to Fox News host Laura Ingraham that the United States needs “to bring in more talent,” a reference to H-1B visa holders. To the disappointment of his MAGA base, Trump has too-often indicated that he favors an H-1B expansion. The unfair, anti-U.S. tech worker H-1B is a serious national problem and does not deserve a smile like Reagan’s in response to Carter’s propaganda.

“H-1B visa thing won’t be a big priority for you? If you wanna raise wages for Americans, you can’t flood the country with thousands of foreign workers,” Ingraham asked. Trump replied, “You have to bring in talent.”

Ingraham pushed back and correctly noted that America’s universities and colleges have graduated plenty of skilled IT workers, all eagerly looking for jobs. Every year, MIT, Georgia Tech, Cal, and myriad other universities turn out top-notch talent. Trump is wrong to promote, on national television, more foreign-born Indians and Chinese to displace Americans from their well-paid, white-collar jobs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in his unsuccessful attempt to help Trump out, later said that what the president meant was that Indian engineers would travel to the U.S., train Americans, and then return home. Ironically, the existing H-1B program means that Americans train the arriving overseas workers—or lose their severance packages—- and then head to the unemployment line. When Trump’s ill-advised H-1B advocacy spread throughout the Internet, his MAGA base was understandably shocked and outraged.

Trump’s position on illegal immigration since his 2016 campaign has been clear. The president adamantly opposes illegal immigration in all its forms and has proven his opposition by immediately closing the border after his 2024 election. He also ended Biden’s parole programs that included illegally granting employment authorization for unvetted aliens and put into motion the removal of Temporary Protected Status recipients when their 18-month valid periods expired.

But Trump’s thoughts about legal immigration, especially regarding the H-1B visa scam, have always been muddled. A few weeks before his 2025 inauguration, Trump supported Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s thinking that more H-1B visas were essential to keep the economy humming along. At the time, Trump said, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them.” Ramaswamy left to campaign for Ohio’s gubernatorial office and Musk feuded with and then divorced the president, so nothing came of the DOGE duo’s influence.

Since the Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B, the visa has given license to employers to import cheap labor to displace Americans and at the same time discourage qualified American tech students from applying—a pointless exercise when corporate America has predetermined that job openings will be filled with Indians or Chinese. Essentially defined, the H-1B and other employment-based visas mean that a job will go to a foreign-born worker.

If Trump wants to make a big splash before the 2026 midterm campaigning begins in earnest, he should follow the advice of Center for Immigration Studies fellow, lawyer, and author John Miano, who wrote that the best H-1B solution is to end it. Killing the H-1B would also mark the end of the media gaslighting that has helped keep it afloat.

Statistics support the argument to end the H-1B. In 2023, there were 4,804,840 people working in U.S. computer occupations. By 2024, 4,786,660 people worked in the field. Over that year, the United States lost 18,180 computer jobs. Yet in FY 2025, the U.S. imported 77,000 computer workers on H-1B visas alone. The math proves that the H-1B is not filling shortages, as Trump and other immigration expansionists argue. Instead, the H-1B functions to displace Americans and satisfy tech mogul donors—exactly as Congress designed it.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org