President Donald Trump is trying once again to impose massive new taxes on businesses that hire foreign workers by executive decree — and it cuts directly against what he ran on, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote on Friday.
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The administration previously proposed a $100,000 fee on businesses for hiring workers under H-1B visas, which are used for high-skilled immigrants like tech workers. A judge struck this down as an unconstitutional tax without Congressional approval, but the administration is now trying to re-impose the fee using a different law.
Trump’s supporters have claimed this would free up more jobs for American workers — but in reality, this would be a disaster, wrote the board.
“Businesses invest heavily in training U.S. workers, but colleges are educating too few graduates with particular skill sets that employers need — e.g., cyber-security and robotics,” said the board. In fact, data from the National Foundation for American Policy indicates that “foreigners account for roughly 75% to 80% of full-time graduate students in AI-related fields.”
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Moreover, the board continued, this is a complete reversal from what Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail — which was one of the only concessions he made in favor of immigration.
“Mr. Trump during the 2024 campaign backed expanding the foreign talent pipeline,” noted the board — at the time, Trump said foreign students at American universities “should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card,” because “you need brilliant people.” Flash forward to today, the board said, and his DHS plan “amounts to a tax on businesses that often bring in brilliant people.”
The bottom line, the board concluded, is that “smaller businesses and startups might struggle to afford the tax and would have a harder time competing for foreign talent against Big Tech companies. Many of America’s great companies, including Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and SpaceX, were founded in part by immigrants. Why does the Administration want to keep out the next Elon Musk?”
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