Donald Trump's first initiative as president was issuing the "Buy American and Hire American" order in April 2017 that instructed the U.S. Immigration Service to drastically restructure the job-destroying H-1B "temporary foreign worker" program.
Republican President George H.W. Bush joined Democratic senator Ted Kennedy to pass the Immigration Act of 1990 that expanded U.S. foreign worker visas, implemented family chain migration, and launched the H-1B "specialty occupations" visa program.
The so-called "Einstein Visas" program was designed to allow employers having difficulty hiring enough skilled U.S. college graduates, to temporarily sponsor "green card" work visas for up to 85,000 foreign college graduates. But Silicon Valley tech giants used low-cost H-1B foreigners to dump higher paid American employees. When H-1B temporary workers' visas expire, many fail to return home and just keep working.
Senator Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 in opposition to offshoring U.S. jobs and displacing U.S. tech workers with temporary H-1B visas. Obama trumpeted that, if elected president, "I will stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America."
But in his first six years as president, the H-1B program swelled to 460,000 non-immigrant foreign graduates taking U.S. jobs, plus another 107,000 foreign workers taking American tech jobs under an H-1B unlimited hiring exemption for U.S. universities.
Just 16 days after Democrats lost nine Senate and 13 House seats in the 2014 elections, President Obama issued his "Immigration Executive Order" that gave green card work permits at least 136,393 H-1B dependent spouses and children and authorized 330,000 Curricular Practical Training work visas to foreign graduates of U.S. colleges.
"Save Jobs USA," an organization of U.S. information technology workers who lost jobs to H-1B workers, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security in early 2015 to stop the alien work permit expansion.
After the Justice Department won a precedent-setting ruling in federal court in September 2016 that the U.S. workers could not demonstrate any "direct injuries," the Obama administration set in motion a convoluted nine-step rulemaking process to permanently ingrain the liberalization for issuing foreign worker visas.
But Trump's Justice Department joined the Save Jobs USA plaintiffs and won a decisive Court of Appeals reversal last June 2018 stating DHS had no authority to grant H-1B-dependent green cards and immigration rules must consider...
