Donald Trump has by no means made his distaste for immigrants a secret. It’s been a cornerstone of his political motion since he descended that escalator on June sixteenth, 2015 and began hurling racist vitriol within the normal course of Mexico and Mexican People. On the floor, his assault on the H-1B visa program looks as if a part of the White Home’s ongoing marketing campaign to cut back the variety of immigrants within the nation. It may need that impact, however the largest purpose for Trump might not be forcing corporations to rent extra People or slicing down on the variety of employees from India shifting to the US. It’s giving the federal government extra leverage over his perceived enemies, notably the world of tech.
The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) of this part shall not apply to any particular person alien, all aliens working for an organization, or all aliens working in an trade, if the Secretary of Homeland Safety determines, within the Secretary’s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation employees is within the nationwide curiosity and doesn’t pose a risk to the safety or welfare of the US.
Briefly, it looks as if the Secretary of Homeland Safety can exempt any individual, firm, and even a whole trade from the journey restrictions and the $100,000 at their (or extra probably, the president’s) discretion. It’s this carveout that betrays a serious function of the proclamation.
The tech trade and Donald Trump had been lengthy at odds with one another, even when the president has largely introduced it to heel in his second time period. The White Home has already made a giant present of constructing tech CEOs journey over themselves to see who can fawn the toughest over Trump or wow him with the gaudiest present. Now, it might probably wring additional concessions and flattery out of the likes of Satya Nadella, lest he have to decide on between dropping half-a-billion {dollars} on visa charges or changing over 5,000 highly-skilled workers.
Corporations like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon aren’t the one main beneficiaries of the H-1B program. The monetary trade, together with corporations like JP Morgan Chase and Deloitte, every have over 2,000 H-1B employees on their payroll in response to federal knowledge. It wouldn’t come as a shock if the Secretary of Homeland Safety determined to grant JP Morgan a waiver after it, say, all of a sudden granted a mortgage to the Trump Group or made a considerable donation to his MAGA tremendous PAC. He used comparable ways to squeeze pro-bono authorized work out of legislation corporations.
Faculties and universities additionally make intensive use of the H-1B program to draw prime expertise for professorships, particularly for nursing and medical applications. Harvard, which the president has tussled with fairly publicly in 2025 has roughly 280 H-1B employees on its books, and Columbia College has over 200 as nicely. Now the White Home can threaten their overseas born professors and researchers in addition to their funding.
That is the tariff mess another time. Trump dangled the specter of a 100% tariff on chips, solely to grant exemptions to corporations that gave him a PR win by pledging even small investments in manufacturing within the US. And for all of the White Home’s speak about nationwide safety issues surrounding Nvidia’s AI chips, a little bit kickback for the federal government is seemingly sufficient to make these issues disappear.
And the loophole undercuts potential advantages for anybody who does imagine H-1B restrictions will assist American employees — as a result of as quickly as Trump will get what he desires from an trade, he can merely exempt it.
Identical to the tariffs, and identical to every part else the Trump administration does, the brand new visa restrictions are transactional instruments. In the event that they occur to cut back the variety of jobs going to overseas employees, the president can tout it as a win. But when the patterns of the previous yr maintain, he’ll probably take much more satisfaction in universities and tech corporations humbling themselves in change for a cross.
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