President Donald Trump is using the nation’s multiple visa programs to encourage foreign investment, but not to replace Americans, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.
“There’s been a lot of [media] misunderstanding of the president’s position,” Leavitt told reporters in a Monday gaggle outside the White House. She explained:
The President does not support American workers being replaced. You are mischaracterizing what the President said … The President has a very nuanced and common-sense opinion on this issue …
He wants to see if foreign companies are investing trillions of dollars in the United States of America, and they’re bringing foreign workers with them to create very niche things like batteries. He wants to see that at the beginning, to get those manufacturing facilities in those factories up and running, but ultimately, the President always wants to see American workers in those jobs. He’s told these foreign companies that are investing here, you better be hiring my people if you’re going to be doing business in the United States.
Leavitt spoke after she was asked, “Is it MAGA to support American workers being replaced with H-1B visa holders? Are Americans not capable of filling most of these positions?”
The comment came after Breitbart News spotlighted the White House’s zig-zagging between Trump’s pro-visa business allies and by many swing voters angry about their displacement by imported visa workers.
Leavitt’s comment came as administration officials touted pending regulatory actions to reduce the routine cheating in the H-1B outsourcing visa.
For example, on Tuesday, the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a statement that reminded employers that it is illegal to discriminate against American in hiring policies. Additional curbs on some visa programs are being considered — and are the target of intensive lobbying by investors, universities, and employers behind closed doors.
The Leavitt statements came after repeated media claims that Trump had endorsed the H-1B job-outsourcing visa in comments about encouraging foreign companies to set up new factories in the United States with foreign investment and expert workers.
“The last week was really bad for Trump … he was defending H–1B visas, which have really come out of nowhere to be a real issue on the Right… and this is becoming like a real key issue,” said Will Sommer, a reporter at the NeverTrump Bulwark Online news site.
“MAGA is whatever [Trump] says MAGA is at any given instant, no matter if it conflicts with what MAGA was an instant before,” sniffed Conor Friedersdorf in response to a tweet which claimed that Trump was suddenly “speaking in favor of H-1B Visas.” Friedersdorf is a pro-migration reporter for the pro-migration Atlantic Monthly magazine.
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“Trump makes perfect sense,” said radio host Bill Mitchell. “We need H-1B talent to help us ramp up. Anyone who doesn’t comprehend this is an idiot.”
The confusion emerged because few reporters understand the deliberately confusing variety of white-collar visa programs. Also, Trump panders to his business allies by conflating the training visas with the outsourcing visas, even though he has dealt with the issue numerous times.
Under the L-1 and B-1/B-2 visas, companies are allowed to import employees for uncontroversial short-term projects, such as installing production lines, training Americans on specialized machines, or attending industry conferences.
In contrast, companies are allowed to replace Americans with cheaper foreign workers imported via the H-1B, H4EAD, J-1, and F-1/OPT programs. For example, roughly 1 million mixed-skill H-1B workers and their H4EAD spouses are holding jobs that would otherwise go to young American graduates.
In September, public anger over the outsourcing visas prompted Trump to issue a proclamation setting a $100,000 border fee on some H-1B workers for 2026. His proclamation also said that 2.5 million white-collar jobs are held by visa workers:
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019 [emphasis added]. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
However, all of these programs are ruthlessly exploited by revenue-maximizing executives, often in violation of the law, and nearly always with the passive cooperation of federal agencies.
For example, the L-1 visa program is used to keep several hundred thousand mixed-skill foreign workers in U.S. jobs. Many companies also use the short-term B-1/B-2 program to rotate foreign workers through for several months at a time. Similarly, the H-1B program is often used to force Americans to train unskilled foreign workers so the work can be offshored to other countries, such as India.
Business-funded lobby groups that support the outsourcing visas often try to blur the distinction between the training and outsourcing visas. For example, advocates often claim that companies must import the mixed-skill foreign workers because there is a supposed shortage of American graduates who can write software, treat patients, or complete accounting statements.
The economic incentives to exploit these programs are vast.
For example, every million dollars apparently saved on cheap foreign labor can bump up a company’s stock price by $30 million, so generating bonuses for top U.S. executives. Similarly, the visa programs allow foreigners to buy jobs held by American professionals via black-market transactions by mid-range executives, managers, and subcontractors. The purchases are made possible by kickbacks from the migrants’ new salaries.
But this corrupt hiring practice slashes companies’ productivity and innovation, so harming shareholders and national innovation.
Journalists in the establishment media are not allowed to investigate or spotlight this government-enabled black market in white-collar jobs, even though it has caused huge losses to their white-collar professional peers, shareholders, U.S. economic power, and to national security.
The damage is so great that millions of displaced American professionals and sidelined Generation Z graduates are pushing past media gatekeepers to protest the federal government’s complicity in the outsourcing.
Those protests were supercharged by the media’s recent portrayal of Trump’s unpopular endorsements of the training visas as endorsements of the predatory outsourcing visas.
“My most serious disagreement with Trump has to do with heritage Americans, STEM, and the knife he’s putting into the heart of young Americans working in STEM – including my children,” said X user “Labrador Skeptic.”
Some Trump supporters welcomed Leavitt’s clarifications.
“Everything he’s doing looks on point to me,” said an X commenter named EngineerChiefCE. “Call me an optimist – I am seeing it! ”
But other H-1B opponents called for more pressure on Trump and his deputies.
