The Heritage Foundation has released a blunt set of recommendations to overhaul the H-1B visa program, urging Congress and the administration to tighten rules, stop abuses and prioritize American workers and students, while President Trump publicly defends using skilled foreign labor to rebuild U.S. industries like chipmaking. This piece walks through the think tank’s key demands for DHS, DOL and DOJ, the push to replace the lottery with a wage-based system, and the president’s arguments about chips and American manufacturing returning home.
The Heritage report argues it is time for Congress to act to fix a broken visa pipeline that too often sidelines American students and workers. Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, lays out major structural changes intended to halt recurring abuses and restore the program’s original purpose. “Rather than this regulatory back and forth swing between administrations, it’s past time for Congress to end not only the numerous types of H-1B abuses, but also the administrative state creations that developed the student-to-H-1B-green-card pipeline that adversely affects American students and employees,” Hankinson writes in the report.
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Heritage also argues for a policy reset: “To prioritize American students and workers first, the program should be scaled back to its original intent and scope but revised to account for increased salaries, a changed job market, and AI labor disruption,” the report says. That recognizes automation and AI are changing demand while insisting we should not use H-1B as a shortcut to replace domestic hiring and training.
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President Trump has defended a more pragmatic approach on H-1B, arguing skilled foreign workers are needed now as America rebuilds critical industries. “For instance, if you’re going to be making chips — we don’t make chips too much here anymore, but we are going to be in a period of a year, we’re going to have a big portion of the chip market. But we have to train our people how to make chips, because we didn’t get — we used to do it, and then foolishly, we lost that business to Taiwan, very, very foolishly, because if they had a president that thought like I did, they would not have let that happen,” Trump said. “But it’s all coming back. I think we’re going to have a, within a few years we’re going, and not because of the Chips Act.”
The president was blunt about the Chips Act and manufacturing policy: “The Chips Act was a disaster for America and gave billions of dollars away to other countries.” He added, “Chip makers are all coming back, and I think within a very short period of time, we’re going to have maybe even the majority of the chip making in the world will be right in the United States, where it should have been all along.”
