The Department of Labor will rewrite regulations to prevent major companies from hiring cheap foreign workers instead of skilled Americans, says the agency secretary, Eugene Scalia.

The Proclamation also directs the Department of Labor to make long-term reforms and enhancements to the H-1B visa program, a program that was intended to supplement the U.S.

Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors use the H-1B, L-1, OPT, CPT, and TN pipelines to import at least 1.3 million white-collar visa workers, most of whom are Indian.

The legal visa workforce also works alongside a growing illegal population of foreign college-graduate workers.

But today many visas go to nonimmigrant workers whose skills are not particularly specialized and who are paid an entry-level wage that undercuts the pay of American workers. The H-1B program was never intended to create a pool of foreign labor that displaces Americans’ opportunities for good-paying jobs.

The promised turnabout is good news for American professionals, partly because the labor department has done almost nothing to curb the inflow of visa workers for the last 28 years.

jobs to visa workers, and also to move many other white-collar jobs to India.

At the president’s direction, the Department of Labor will be reforming the H-1B visa program to protect American jobs and wages.  We are strengthening wage protections for American workers and putting an end to abuses of the program, such as when non-U.S.

Similarly, foreign workers who are deemed necessary to the immediate and continued economic recovery may also be exempted. The Department of Labor will be working with the Departments of State and Homeland Security to establish exemption standards over the coming days.

The Labor Department is also increasing its cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security to identify businesses that misuse the H-1B program to the detriment of American workers.

Similarly, there is little oversight over the use of low-wage, “Optional Practical Training” work-permit workers to fill Fortune 500 contracting jobs.

The department also has done little or nothing to enforce current rules that say visa workers must go home within 60 days of losing their jobs in the coronavirus crash