H-1B visas: Trump admits the US doesn’t have enough talent!

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: You may like or dislike him, but you can’t ignore him!

Now, he has admitted that America doesn’t have enough skilled talent to meet its labour needs and that it depends on immigrants!!

In a Fox News interview on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump defended the need for skilled foreign workers, arguing that the US lacks specific talents.

Ironically, his own policies and allies have been attacking the H-1B visa programme time and again, and made it harder for firms to hire workers from other countries.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked him about H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers and whether his administration would make them less of a priority. She argued that visas would make it harder for Trump to achieve his goal of raising wages for US workers.

When Ingraham said the US already had “plenty of talented people here,” Trump responded with an emphatic “no.”

“You don’t have certain talents. And you have to, people have to learn. You can’t take people off, like an unemployment line, and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory. We’re going to make missiles,’” he said.

Trump’s comments, that some level of skilled workers are needed, came after he slapped a USD 100,000 application fee on the H-1B visa, which is widely used by some of America’s largest companies, especially technology industry giants, to bring in skilled workers from other countries.

That policy change in recent weeks drew a lawsuit from the US Chamber of Commerce, highlighting the clash between corporate America and Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In his second term as US President, Trump has since January 2025 ramped up deportations of undocumented migrants, including through the deployment of troops to major cities to assist immigration officers, spurring worries about the impact on the labour supply for businesses.

However, his allies may not agree with him in this.

Recently, the US Department of Labor accused businesses of exploiting the H-1B visa programme by replacing young Americans with foreign workers, pointing directly to India as the biggest beneficiary of the system.

“Young Americans have had the American Dream stolen from them, as jobs have been replaced by foreign workers due to rampant abuse of the H-1B visa,” the department said in a post accompanying its new campaign video on social media.

“For generations, we’ve told Americans that if they work hard enough, they can achieve the American Dream. But many young Americans have had this dream stolen from them,” the video’s narrator says, as text on screen hails President Trump and Labour Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer for “putting America first.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also criticised the H-1B visa programme, calling it a “total scam.” During a Fox News interview, he said “Most of them are from one country, India.”

“There’s a cottage industry about how all those people make money off this system.”

American workers are often made to train their replacements before being dismissed.