Microsoft laid off 9,000 American workers in July and then applied for 9,000 H-1B visas to replace them.
That's not a coincidence.
That's a business model – and Donald Trump just shut it down.
The Scheme That Ran for Decades
Disney did it.
Southern California Edison did it.
Abbott Laboratories did it.
The playbook was always the same.
Fire the American workers, make them train their foreign replacements at a fraction of the salary, and then claim – with a straight face – that no qualified Americans were available.
The H-1B visa was created in 1990 to bring in exceptional foreign talent when Americans genuinely weren't available for a role.
https://twitter.com/eclipsethis2003/status/2100923418665206083?s=20
What actually happened was something different.
India-based IT outsourcing firms gamed the lottery by submitting bulk applications for run-of-the-mill tech workers paid 36 percent below market rate.
American workers got fired.
Their jobs went to cheaper foreign labor.
And the corporations pocketed the difference.
This wasn't a glitch in the system.
It was the system.
“We looked at the fraud in the system and we said, you know, one, Congress is not going to pass a law changing this, there just isn’t the political will to do it. So what are the things that we can do administratively to ensure that if a tech company is going to try to get an H-1B visa, it it’s an actual genius,” Vance said.
What Trump Just Signed
On September 18, Trump signed an executive order directing the Departments of State, Labor, and Homeland Security to consider whether a company has laid off American workers before approving a single H-1B petition.
The lookback covers one year – direct and indirect layoffs, affecting similarly situated American workers.
JD Vance called out the scam directly: "You'll have a company that applies for an H-1B and they'll say, 'Oh, we're desperate for workers. We can't find the workers.' And then you go and look at their history and they've laid off 5,000 people. Well, that's ridiculous."
“Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vance posted on X.
The order also extends the $100,000 fee Trump imposed last September on H-1B applications through September 2027.
That fee already collapsed the outsourcing industry's grip on the program.
The largest IT outsourcing firms cut their H-1B registrations by 92 percent after the fee hit. Consular processing requests from those same firms dropped nearly 97 percent.
Not a correction.
A collapse.
The Numbers Washington Buried
The White House order put a number on the scale of the fraud.
Technology employers collectively sought H-1B visas for hundreds of thousands of foreign workers while laying off between 800,000 and 1.3 million American employees from 2022 through 2026.
That's not an industry struggling to find talent.
That's an industry replacing American workers at scale and using a visa program as the mechanism.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/2101438696658456586?s=20
It ran for decades while Washington looked the other way.
This Is America First Actually Working
The Department of Labor has until October 18 to begin reviewing labor condition applications already on file – meaning companies that played this game for years are now under federal scrutiny.
Trump's message to corporate America is the one your grandfather would have recognized: you don't get to fire your workers on Friday and import cheaper replacements on Monday.
Democrats spent years watching this happen and called it a labor market.
Trump called it fraud – and proved the point by making outsourcing industry H-1B registrations collapse in a single year.
Your job is worth protecting.
Someone in Washington, DC finally agrees.
Sources:
- Ben Whedon, "Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs," Just the News, September 24, 2026.
- "H-1B Outsourcing Registrations Take A 92% Hit As $100K Visa Rule Stays Put," Dallas Express, September 19, 2026.
- "JD Vance calls out Big Tech for firing Americans while hiring cheap foreign H-1B visa replacements," Fox Business, 2026.
- "Trump renews $100,000 H-1B fee, targets layoffs," Telangana Today, September 19, 2026.
