WSJ's conservative editors skewer Trump over $100K 'mistake': 'Abusing his powers'

The conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial board raked President Donald Trump over the coals for his new "mistake" — charging companies $100,000 for every H-1B visa, the work authorization program heavily used by tech companies and other industries that need highly-skilled foreign labor.

"The $100,000 fee is a de facto tax on hiring skilled foreign workers in the U.S., and the transparent goal is to price them out of the market," wrote the board, which has grown increasingly exasperated with Trump's economic policies. "Companies hire foreigners because there aren’t enough Americans graduating from U.S. colleges with the right technical skills. International students account for 71% of the full-time graduate students in computer and information sciences."

As an example, the board noted, Tesla, the flagship automaker headed by Trump's 2024 benefactor and erstwhile government reform adviser Elon Musk, "filed 658 visa applications for manufacturing engineers in 2024, a skill set that isn’t taught at many elite U.S. colleges."

The idea behind this change is to curtail companies' use of cheap foreign labor to undercut U.S. wages — but the whole premise is flawed, wrote the board.

"There’s scant evidence that foreign workers are taking U.S. jobs," the board continued. "Between 2003 and 2024, U.S.-born employment in STEM occupations increased by three million, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. The unemployment rate for computer and math occupations was 3% and 1.4% for architecture and engineering last month, both lower than a year ago. The White House ignores that employers are required to pay visa holders the higher of the prevailing wage or actual wage paid to comparable U.S. workers. So there’s no financial incentive to hire foreign workers. An analysis by Glassdoor found that salaries for 'foreign H-1B workers are about 2.8 percent higher than comparable U.S. salaries' on the job-search platform."

Above all, said the board, Congress didn't authorize this $100,000 charge in the first place, and Trump is trying to claim it's allowed under his emergency national security powers.

"Federal law doesn’t give the President carte blanche authority to set visa fees, so he’s invoking a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that lets a President restrict entry of foreigners to protect national security. He claims, again without evidence, that the H-1B program is a national-security threat," wrote the board. "As with his willy-nilly tariffs, he’s abusing his national-security powers."