American workers have spent a generation doing exactly what they were told. Go to college. Learn a new skill. Retool for the digital economy. Millions of them listened, took on mountains of debt, and held up their end of the bargain. Somehow, the reward for all that sacrifice keeps shrinking.

Here’s the part nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: the labor market isn’t broken by accident. It’s been deliberately engineered. Mega-corporations spend fortunes lobbying for government programs that let them swap out American employees for cheaper foreign labor — then slap a feel-good label like “global competitiveness” on the whole operation. American families absorb the damage. Corporate balance sheets have never looked better.

Now, at least one congressman has stopped playing nice.

From Fox News:

A West Virginia congressman is fed up with popular work visas, and revealed to Fox News Digital a behind-the-scenes surge of Republican lawmakers who also support abolition of the foreign worker program.

“I think the H-1B visa program is a scam, and it’s one that has been perpetrated on the American worker for far too long,” Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., said in an interview.

Let that land for a second. A sitting U.S. congressman just called one of corporate America’s favorite hiring tools a flat-out scam — on the record, without hedging. That kind of candor is rare enough in Washington to qualify as an endangered species. But honestly? The only surprising thing is that it took this long. When you look at what major employers are actually doing right now, this reckoning was overdue by years.

When the numbers speak for themselves

Consider the case that lit the fuse. Microsoft — a company so profitable it practically prints its own currency — just slashed 4,800 jobs worldwide. Among the casualties: 1,600 positions in its Xbox gaming division. Painful, but corporations restructure. It happens.

Except here’s the part that should make your blood boil. In that very same year, Microsoft was approved for 2,273 H-1B foreign worker visas. The company ranks as the sixth-largest user of the program in the entire country. You don’t need an accounting degree to see the math doesn’t add up.

Microsoft’s official line? The layoffs were driven by “business necessities,” and H-1B holders were impacted too. Sure. That’s a bit like a restaurant claiming it values local farmers while importing all its ingredients from overseas. The corporate PR writes itself, but nobody’s buying it.

And Microsoft isn’t an outlier. Amazon, IBM, Infosys, Cognizant — the biggest names in tech are all heavy H-1B users. This isn’t one bad actor. It’s an industry-wide habit.

A rigged market wearing a free-market costume

Moore nails the deeper problem. Companies using H-1B visas aren’t even required to demonstrate that they tried to hire an American first. Let that marinate. The entire justification for the program — that these are “highly skilled” workers filling roles no American can handle — collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

“Essentially, we shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas and people were told to ‘learn how to code,'” Moore told Fox News Digital. “Well, now they’re being replaced with the H-1B visa workers on the coding jobs as well. So when is the American worker actually going to get a win here?”

He’s not wrong. And the “temporary” nature of these visas? Another convenient fiction. H-1B authorizations can be extended up to six years, and federal data from USCIS shows that 80% of H-1B holders who gain permanent residency do so through employment-based green cards. “Temporary” is just the word they use to get it past the public.

Moore doesn’t mince words: “This is a rigged market against American workers. It’s not free market capitalism at all, because the government is handing these out and also setting the levels.”

A quiet revolution building steam

The genuinely encouraging part of this story is the momentum behind the scenes. Moore told Fox News Digital that “many, many” of his congressional colleagues have approached him privately to voice support. He’s the loudest voice — his words — but hardly the only one.

Vice President JD Vance has publicly insisted that American jobs belong to American workers, and the Department of Labor has launched dozens of investigations into suspected visa fraud. President Trump attempted to impose a $100,000 fee on H-1B applications, though a federal judge struck the order down, ruling it amounted to a tax that only Congress can levy.

That ruling actually strengthens the case for legislative action. Executive orders can be blocked. Laws are harder to undo.

Moore left Fox News Digital with a line that deserves to be carved into the wall of every congressional office: “The American worker is the only worker on the planet that has to compete with labor from all over the world inside their own borders.”

That’s not global competitiveness. That’s not innovation. That’s a raw deal — and the people in Washington who keep enabling it should have to answer for it.

Key Takeaways

• Rep. Riley Moore calls the H-1B visa program a “scam” that systematically displaces American workers.
• Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs while securing over 2,200 foreign worker visas this year.
• Companies face no requirement to prove Americans can’t fill the roles H-1B workers occupy.
• A growing coalition of Republican lawmakers is quietly backing efforts to abolish the program.

Sources: Fox News, Streamline