Donald Trump’s bids for the presidency have long been defined by incendiary anti-immigration rhetoric. On the campaign trail over the last year, the president-elect doubled down on his positions, declaring that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and repeatedly touting his plan to oust millions of undocumented immigrants, in what he has described as the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Trump has also said he would end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S., and reinstate the worksite raids that were conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during his first term to detain workers.
As Trump now gears up for a second term, however, his administration is likely to crack down on all kinds of immigration, even visa programs like the H-1B, which tech companies and other employers have relied on for years to attract highly skilled foreign talent.
Over the years, Trump has often claimed to support legal immigration. But both Trump and his soon-to-be vice president JD Vance have argued that the H-1B and other visa programs encourage employers to hire foreign workers at lower pay, thereby taking those opportunities away from American workers. While campaigning, Vance has echoed the idea that there should be a ceiling on immigration.
In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal report indicates that Trump advisors—among them Stephen Miller, who helped craft his immigration policies while in office—have already drafted executive orders and regulations that would curtail legal immigration. Their proposals could undermine policies that enable companies to employ foreign workers, by halting new applications for employment-based green cards; according to the Journal, the plans also include more extreme measures to restrict immigration, such as reviving the controversial travel ban Trump introduced in 2017 that targeted Muslim-majority countries.
Trump’s track record
Trump tried to introduce a number of measures in his first term that did not ultimately pass through Congress intact or hold up to legal challenges. (Some of those policy changes were also eventually reversed under the Biden administration.) Still, they offer a blueprint for how he might curb immigration going forward—and what the effect could be on employers.
Leading up to the 2016 election, Trump had said the H-1B visa program was “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers and that it should largely be reserved for a select group of applicants. Just months into his presidency, he introduced an executive order that increased scrutiny of H-1B applications with the intent of limiting them to only the most skilled or highest paid of workers. According to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration think tank, Trump rolled out 52 policies to limit access to visas and green cards for highly skilled workers during his time in office.
While in office, Trump made the U.S. citizenship test more complex—and therefore more difficult to pass—and proposed a bill that would alter family immigration to ban permanent residents from bringing their parents or siblings to the U.S. The same bill would have slashed the number of green cards issued annually from a million to 500,000 (though the proposal never made it through Congress).
Trump also tried to cut the number of poor and disabled immigrants who would need to rely on government assistance, and in response to the pandemic, he put a freeze on several forms of legal immigration, from work visas to family immigration. The number of refugees dropped significantly during that period, as did student visas. In late 2020—again, reportedly as a response to the pandemic—Trump increased the pay floor for H-1B workers and made eligibility guidelines more stringent, in an effort to discourage employers from hiring foreign workers.
What this could mean for employers
Both Trump and Vance have distanced themselves from Project 2025, an initiative to support the next Republican president that was spearheaded by many former Trump officials. But buried in Project 2025’s extreme policy proposals is a mention of how H-1B visas can be used to suppress wages and outsource wages—in line with the president-elect’s stance on work visas. “The oft-abused H-1B program should be transformed into an elite program through which employers are vying to bring in only the top foreign workers at the highest wages so as not to depress American opportunities,” the authors wrote.
At times, Trump has struck a different tone with respect to immigration, particularly when courting business leaders and Silicon Valley donors. During an appearance on the All-In podcast back in June, he made a bold claim that as president, he would automatically grant green cards to foreign students. “What I will do is—you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges,” he said.
But his campaign was quick to effectively disavow this statement, noting that any policy of this kind would only be applicable to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America” and would exclude “all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters, and public charges.”
During his first term, some of Trump’s desired immigration reforms drew resistance from business leaders whose companies depend on immigrant labor. Elon Musk, for example—perhaps the most notable Trump donor leading up to the 2024 election—has often expressed his support for legal immigration (though recent reporting has revealed that Musk himself may have worked in the U.S. illegally while on a student visa). It’s possible that despite his intentions to restrict immigration, legal or otherwise, some of Trump’s plans may meet opposition from the likes of Musk and other business leaders who now have his ear.