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Trump is planning on signing an executive order on Tuesday that will cause a review of the H1-B program. It is just a review, and undoubtedly business interests will step up the pressure, but there are some interesting ideas:
"If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard or skill or wage, to a skill-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers, because you're not bringing in workers at beneath the market wage," the official said. "So it's a very elegant way of solving systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."
Breitbart of course has an article out (though it reads like they need to hire some native speaking editors) -- still, recent college grads face a huge hurdle:
The federal government releases little data on the many different guest-worker programs, but the available evidence says the national population of white-collar contract workers is up to 1.5 million. That population is roughly twice the population of 800,000 Americans who graduate from college with skilled degrees each year.
And finally, lest people forget that progressives also have issues with H1-B visas, here is Bernie Sanders (a decade ago of course) attacking this ploy to make sure money only trickles up by ensuring low wages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR9QdQIKqMc
[Ed Note: Trump did sign the executive order at a photo op in Wisconsin.]
(Score: 4, Informative) by MrGuy on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:04PM
As I understand it, congress instituted the H-1B program, but with a cap on the number that could be granted in a particular year.
The program is always oversubscribed - H-1B's are generally gone within days of the applications opening.
I do not believe that congress specified the mechanism used to determine WHICH applications get approved when the program is oversubscribed - just that no more than the cap could not be exceeded. The Department of Labor has (to date) used a random lottery to determine which valid applications get approved. The choice of a random lottery is the DoL's choice, not a congressional mandate.
Assuming I'm correct in that, then, yes, an executive order for the DoL to prioritize certain applications (as opposed to using a random lottery) would definitely accomplish something - it would effectively change the process. The DoL works for the executive branch, not congress. As long as congress didn't specify otherwise, the DoL has a lot of lattitude in determining HOW they stay within the cap. And a change like this would be within the scope of their authority.
The impact of this would depend on the specific mix of H-1B applications, but it really could do a lot to curb abuses, such as companies replacing US workers with H-1B workers to save money [workforce.com] and not because they couldn't find US workers (which is the stated purpose of the program). If only higher-salary H-1B applications would get approved, it would remove some of the financial incentive for abuse, because abusers would be less likely to get their H-1B's.