The Class Map of the Labour Regime in Trump's America: H-1B, the Green Card and the Fronts It Has Opened
The Handcuffs Change, the Chain Stays the Same
As the Green Card Closes, the Gold Card Opens
The Class Map of the Labour Regime in Trump's America: H-1B, the Green Card and the Fronts It Has Opened
Dear Young Comrades,
In the two pieces we published today, we looked at the labour order in the United States through two different windows. In The Week's Class Struggle in Technology, we read the US administration's suspension of Microsoft and seven IT companies from the green card programme as "setting worker against worker". In As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone, we showed that Silicon Valley's "good conditions" are not a privilege but a management technique, and that the H-1B visa is the harshest link in that technique.
This piece lays the common ground beneath those two. The question is this: how is the Trump administration reorganising the labour regime in the US? Are the things being done at the same time to H-1B, to the green card, to international students, to undocumented workers, to unions and to public-sector workers separate decisions, or parts of a single class policy?
We have also set aside a section especially for young computing workers in Turkey who dream of going to the US. We talk about what the H-1B and green card route, whose map once seemed clear, has turned into today; whom an administration that "protects its citizens" actually protects; and why hostility to foreigners is not an exception but a climate.
First we give a short summary. Then we open up each heading in detail.
Summary
In one sentence: In the name of "protecting the American worker", the Trump administration is making migrant labour more expensive, more selective and more dependent; at the same time it is weakening the tools with which the American worker could protect themselves, namely unions, collective bargaining and labour law. What is being protected is not the worker but the new hierarchy of the labour-power market.
Key developments:
- A fee wall around H-1B. On 19 September 2025, a $100,000 entry fee was imposed on new H-1B petitions. The fee was blocked in two separate federal courts (June and 30 September 2026). This time, on 25 August 2026, the administration proposed a new fee of $103,265 through rulemaking.
- A wage ranking instead of a lottery. Since 27 February 2026, the H-1B lottery is no longer random but weighted by wage level. Registrations fell by 38.5% in a year (from 343,981 to 211,600).
- The handcuffs tighten. The Department of Labor proposed sharply raising the minimum "prevailing wage" thresholds for migrant workers. The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, proposed abolishing the 60-day period granted to an H-1B worker who loses their job: if the job ends, the status ends the next day.
- The green card door narrows. On 8 October 2026, Microsoft, Adobe and six IT companies of Indian or European origin (Tata, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant, Capgemini) were suspended from PERM, the first step towards a green card. Over the year, the issuing of immigrant visas was halted for 75 countries; the diversity visa (DV, the "green card lottery") is suspended worldwide.
- The gold card is open. On the same day, that is 19 September 2025, an executive order established the "Trump Gold Card" programme, opening a residence route for $1 million ($2 million for companies). A $100,000 wall for the worker and a $1 million door for the owner of capital arrived on the same day.
- Students and researchers. The Department of Homeland Security proposed charging schools $70,000 per student for international students' post-graduation work authorisation (OPT). J-1 investigations were opened into nine universities, including Harvard, MIT and Stanford.
- Raids on undocumented workers. By mid-July of fiscal year 2026, more than 356,000 deportations had been carried out. Workplace raids were stepped up. In construction, even workers with legal status are afraid to come to the site.
- To the young computing worker who dreams of America. Every rung of the ladder, from the student visa to the green card, has been raised or removed. In the wage-ranked lottery a new graduate has 1 entry and a senior engineer 4; consulates scrutinise social media; even working at Microsoft does not secure a green card. Online hate against South Asians rose by 240%; Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student from Turkey, was held in detention for six weeks over an opinion piece. H-1B is no longer a solution but a gamble.
- What was the native worker given? The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) could not meet for months. Hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers lost their collective bargaining rights by executive order. The independent contractor rule was loosened, putting the minimum wage and overtime protections of millions of workers at risk. In September 2026 the economy created only 29,000 new jobs.
The fronts opened: migrant workers, international students and universities, public-sector workers and their unions, labour law and enforcement agencies, and the states and cities that resist immigration policy. The main finding of this piece is this: the war said to have been declared on big tech capital is selective, and it reorganises not capital but the way capital uses workers.
The class thesis: The migration regime is a filter that divides the labour-power market into layers. The Trump administration is turning this filter into a three-layer one. At the top is the owner of capital who buys residence with money. In the middle is the skilled migrant, well paid but handcuffed to the employer. At the bottom is the undocumented worker made to work through fear. What must be set against this order is not a nationalist "our workers first", but visas independent of the employer, equal rights and common organisation.
Concepts First: What Does Each Document Mean?
To follow the debate, let us clarify a few concepts. Behind each of them lies a relationship between labour and capital.
| Document / Programme | What is it for? | To whom does it bind the worker? |
|---|---|---|
| H-1B | A temporary work visa of 3+3 years for a university-educated "speciality occupation" worker. Annual cap: 85,000. | To the employer. The visa depends on the employer's petition; if the job ends, the status is at risk. |
| PERM | The Department of Labor's certification that "no suitable American could be found for this job". The first step of an employer-sponsored green card. | To the employer. The process takes years, and during that time the worker struggles to change employers. |
| Green Card | Permanent residence and work authorisation. | To no one. The worker can work in any job, quit and organise. |
| OPT / STEM OPT | Post-graduation work authorisation of 1 to 3 years for an F-1 student. | To the school and, indirectly, to the employer. Often the bridge to H-1B. |
| J-1 | Exchange visitor: researcher, postdoc, trainee. | To the sponsoring institution, usually a university. |
| DV (diversity visa) | About 55,000 green cards a year, distributed by lottery. | To no one. In class terms the most "democratic" door, because it requires no money, no employer and no diploma. |
| Trump Gold Card | A fast track to a green card in return for a $1 million donation ($2 million for companies). | To no one. Freedom is bought. |
The last column of the table sums up the whole piece. The less independent a worker is from their employer, the less power they have to organise. This is exactly the point we quoted from Lenny Siegel in As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone: a worker on a visa pays the price of retaliation twice. They can lose both their job and their right to stay in the country.
Chronology: September 2025 – October 2026
| Date | Development |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox was removed. The Board lost its quorum for a long time. |
| March 2025 | Executive Order 14251: collective bargaining was abolished at many federal agencies on "national security" grounds. |
| August 2025 | The Department of Veterans Affairs terminated the AFGE collective agreement covering more than 300,000 employees. |
| September 2025 | The Department of Labor began H-1B enforcement without waiting for complaints, under the name "Project Firewall". |
| 19 September 2025 | On the same day: the proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1Bs, and Executive Order 14351 establishing the $1 million "Gold Card". |
| December 2025 | A presidential executive order limiting states' power to regulate artificial intelligence. The Supreme Court largely narrowed the legal basis for deploying the National Guard to big cities. |
| December 2025 – January 2026 | Entry restrictions on nationals of 39 countries; a "hold" was placed on these nationals' green card, work authorisation and citizenship applications. |
| January 2026 | The NLRB regained its quorum; expectations of a turn to employer-friendly precedent began. |
| 21 January 2026 | The issuing of immigrant visas to nationals of 75 countries was halted. |
| 26 February 2026 | The Department of Labor published the draft loosening the independent contractor rule. |
| 27 February 2026 | The wage-weighted H-1B lottery came into force. On the same day, the Ninth Circuit lifted the injunction protecting public-sector unions. |
| 27 March 2026 | The Department of Labor published the draft raising prevailing wage thresholds for migrant workers. |
| June 2026 | A federal court in Massachusetts struck down the $100,000 fee as an "unauthorised tax". In Rhode Island, a court struck down the USCIS policies on the 39-country hold. |
| 17 July 2026 | The fiscal year 2027 H-1B cap was filled in the first round. Registrations fell by 38.5%. |
| 21–28 August 2026 | Court rulings lifted the 75-country halt and the DV halt. |
| 25 August 2026 | The Department of Homeland Security proposed a new $103,265 H-1B fee as a draft regulation. |
| 31 August 2026 | The issuing of DV (green card lottery) visas was halted worldwide again. |
| September 2026 | The $100,000 fee was extended by a year. The draft abolishing the 60-day period was published (11 September). |
| 30 September 2026 | In California, in Global Nurse Force v. Trump, the policies implementing the fee were struck down. |
| 8 October 2026 | Eight companies were suspended from PERM. J-1 subpoenas were sent to nine universities. A $70,000 OPT fee was proposed. |
H-1B: The Price of the Handcuffs Goes Up
The fee wall and the courts
The $100,000 fee imposed on new H-1B petitions on 19 September 2025 changed the visa regime overnight. In its first year, the fee hit hospitals, schools and small businesses more than software companies. Because in Google's budget $100,000 is a rounding error; for a rural hospital it is two years of a nurse's salary. That is why it is no coincidence that among those who took the fee to court were organisations that employ nurses.
The legal process went like this: in June 2026, the federal court in Massachusetts struck down the fee, treating it as a "tax" exceeding Congress's authority. In July, the appeals court refused to stay that ruling. In September, the administration extended the fee by a year. On 30 September, in California, Judge Haywood Gilliam struck down the agency policies implementing the fee. That ruling targeted not the presidential proclamation itself but the agency actions implementing it (DiRaimondo & Schroeder, 5 October 2026).
Having lost in court, the administration changed route. On 25 August 2026, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a fee of $103,265 for every cap-subject H-1B petition, this time through ordinary rulemaking (Cozen O'Connor). Where the court said "the procedure is missing", the procedure is being completed, but the aim does not change. There is a detail here worth noting in class terms: extensions and changes of employer are exempt from this fee. In other words, the fee targets not the worker already working in the country but the bringing in of new labour power from outside. And that turns the H-1B worker already inside into a more "valuable" asset, and therefore one that is more indispensable to their employer and must be held more tightly.
A wage ranking instead of a lottery
Since 27 February 2026, the H-1B lottery is no longer drawn at random. Each registration receives between one and four entries according to the level of the offered wage: the lowest wage level (Level I) gets one entry, the highest (Level IV) four (Boundless). In the first round under the new rule, registrations fell from 343,981 to 211,600, a drop of 38.5%. The cap was filled in the first round (F1Jobs analysis).
The prevailing wage threshold
On 27 March 2026, the Department of Labor proposed sharply raising the minimum "prevailing wage" thresholds for H-1B and PERM (HCAMag):
| Wage level | Current threshold (in the occupation's wage distribution) | Proposed threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Level I (entry) | ~17th percentile | 34th percentile |
| Level II | 34th percentile | ~52nd percentile |
| Level III | 50th percentile | ~70th percentile |
| Level IV (senior) | 67th percentile | 88th percentile |
Here we have to be honest: raising the wage floor for migrant workers is, in itself, a demand unions have long voiced. The fact that an entry-level H-1B worker could be paid from the bottom fifth of wages in their occupation was an open instrument of wage pressure. Let us not shy away from saying so.
But when we look at what was done in the same weeks, the picture changes. As the wage floor rises, the worker's dependence on the employer is not reduced; on the contrary, it is increased.
The 60 days disappear: the lock on the handcuffs
Under the draft published on 11 September 2026, workers on H-1B, L-1, O-1, TN and similar statuses will lose the 60-day "find a new job" period they currently have when they lose their jobs. Status will end the day after the job ends (Boundless).
Think about what this means in a workplace. An H-1B worker who objects to overtime, reports harassment or attends a union meeting could fall out of legal status on the evening they are fired. Together with their family, their children and their rent. This is not a wage regulation but a disciplinary one. A worker type that is "expensive but obedient" is being designed.
The Green Card: For Whom Does the Door Close, for Whom Does It Open?
The PERM suspension: Microsoft and the Indian outsourcing companies
On 8 October 2026, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that new and pending PERM applications from eight companies would not be processed: Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini (TIME, 9 October 2026). Vance said that last year, while laying off 6,000 American workers, Microsoft had received 6,300 H-1B approvals and about 3,000 green card approvals. Then he added: for every worker laid off, "one and a half foreign indentured servants" had been taken on (The Next Web).
Microsoft's response was interesting: 80% of its H-1B petitions were to extend or change the status of people already working at the company. New hires amounted to 1% of its US workforce.
Three points get lost in this debate:
First, the target of the decision is not H-1B but the green card. H-1B visas remain exactly as they were. What has been suspended is the road to permanent residence that would let the worker get free of the employer. As Doug Rand, one of the Biden-era immigration advisers, pointed out, the green card increases an H-1B worker's freedom to change jobs. So shutting PERM means shutting the door that would free the so-called "foreign indentured servant" from servitude. A policy that accuses the worker of being a servant makes servitude permanent.
Second, the list is selective. According to figures cited by TIME, the employer with the most H-1B approvals in fiscal year 2026 was Amazon, followed by Tata, Infosys, Apple and Microsoft. Amazon and Apple are not on the list. Which company counts as an "abuser" and which as a "great American company" is determined not by wage data but by political choice.
Third, capital moves. Nasscom, the association of India's IT sector, said the impact would be limited. Dinesh Pai of Zerodha said this: if companies cannot bring talent to the US, "they will take the work to India". When the worker's movement is restricted, capital continues its own. The code is written in Bangalore, in Istanbul, in Warsaw; the wage gap still stays with capital.
Country lists and the lottery
Over the year, the green card route was also narrowed by country of origin. Entry restrictions were imposed on nationals of 39 countries, and their residence, work authorisation and citizenship applications were put on hold. From 21 January 2026, the issuing of immigrant visas to nationals of 75 countries was halted on "public charge" grounds. These measures were lifted by court rulings between June and August (Clinch Law).
The "public charge" rationale says a great deal in class terms: the immigrant visa was being closed to poor families who might receive state assistance. Poverty was being defined as a barrier to migration.
On 31 August 2026, the diversity visa, the only green card door that requires no diploma, employer or money, was halted worldwide again.
Same day, two prices: the gold card
Let us keep 19 September 2025 in mind. Two documents were signed that day:
| Document | Aimed at | Price | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| H-1B fee proclamation | The university-educated migrant worker and the employer who will employ them | $100,000 | Temporary work authorisation tied to the employer |
| Executive Order 14351 (Gold Card) | The owner of capital | $1,000,000 ($2 million for a company; $5 million proposed for a "Platinum" card) | Permanent residence and a path to citizenship |
Let us also note that the gold card has attracted little interest in practice. As of May 2026, according to homeland security figures, only 338 applications had been made (Wikipedia: Trump Gold Card). But the issue is not the number of applications; it is the principle. When the right to permanent residence in a country becomes something that can be bought with money rather than earned with labour, citizenship takes the form of a commodity. Freedom of movement is sold to capital and rented to labour in handcuffs.
Students and Universities: The Labour of the Next Generation
Under the draft published on 8 October 2026, schools will pay $70,000 when they first recommend a student for OPT and $30,000 for each subsequent recommendation. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that in 2024 there were about 194,000 OPT and 95,000 STEM OPT participants (Wolfsdorf). In its rationale, the department openly defines OPT as a source of "cheap foreign labour".
On the same day, subpoenas over the J-1 programme were sent to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT, alleging that they "abused it to undercut American wages". The effect was already visible in the figures: the number of new J-1 researchers fell by 27% in a year. New international student enrolment fell by 17% in autumn 2025 and by 20% in spring 2026 (TIME).
Two fronts overlap here. On one side, migrant students are targeted with the rhetoric of cheap labour. On the other, the administration's reckoning with the universities since 2025, that is, the ideological control of scientific production, is being deepened through immigration policy. The postdoctoral researcher is the lowest-paid and most precarious link in knowledge production in the US. Striking this link in the name of "protecting wages" means never opening to debate the real source of wage pressure in the laboratories: the regime of precarious project contracts.
The Undocumented Worker: The Economy of Fear
Beneath the handcuffed H-1B worker there is one more layer: undocumented workers. The tool used against them is not a visa fee but the raid.
- As of 21 July of fiscal year 2026, 356,389 deportations had been recorded. 65,765 people were in detention. The administration is aiming for 2,000 arrests a day (ABC/GMA).
- Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced that 2026 would "more than surpass" 2025. Even anti-immigration circles on the right say the target can be reached only "if worksite enforcement becomes the backbone of operations".
- According to the National Association of Home Builders' October 2026 survey, migrants make up more than 25% of the construction workforce. In some markets, even workers with legal status are not coming to the site for fear of ICE. Projects are being cancelled, and US-born workers are paying the price too, by losing their jobs (KJZZ, 1 October 2026).
The class mechanism here needs to be grasped well. The aim of the raids is not to remove undocumented labour from the economy entirely; that would halt agriculture, construction and food processing. The aim is to make that labour work in fear. A worker who fears deportation does not demand wages, does not report workplace accidents, does not go near a union. The raid punishes the worker, not the employer. How rare it is for the boss who knowingly employed those workers to go to prison, while dozens of workers at a workplace are detained, confirms this.
So What Happened to the "Protected" American Worker?
All these steps draw their legitimacy from the same sentence: protecting the American worker. Then let us ask: what happened, in the same period, to the American worker's own means of self-protection?
| The rhetoric of "protecting the American worker" | What was done to the American worker in the same period |
|---|---|
| A $100,000 fee on H-1B | An NLRB member was removed; the board that rules on workers' union and unfair labour practice complaints could not meet for about a year. |
| Microsoft "must hire Americans" | Executive Order 14251 abolished the collective bargaining rights of hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers; the agreement at the Department of Veterans Affairs alone covered more than 300,000 employees (FedSmith). |
| An OPT fee against "cheap foreign labour" | The independent contractor rule was loosened; minimum wage and overtime protections for home care, cleaning, landscaping, app-based couriers and drivers were narrowed (NELP). |
| A J-1 investigation against "undercutting wages" | The Department of Labor stopped seeking damages from employers in administrative wage settlements; the PAID programme, in which employers report their own audits to themselves, was relaunched (Jackson Lewis). |
| "American workers first" | The EEOC withdrew its harassment guidance and stopped pursuing disparate impact complaints. |
| "Against the tech monopolies" | A December 2025 executive order limited states' power to regulate artificial intelligence; the industry had lobbied for it (As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone). |
| "Jobs are coming back" | In September 2026, only 29,000 new jobs were created across the whole economy, 9,000 of them in manufacturing (Manufacturing Dive). |
The unionisation rate stayed at 10% in 2025 (BLS). In computer and mathematical occupations the rate is 3.7%. For an unorganised worker, being "protected" always means being left to the mercy of someone else, that is, the state or the boss.
The conclusion is clear: the administration is offering the worker not protection but an enemy. The native worker's anger is directed not at the boss, at layoffs or at the lack of organisation, but at the Indian engineer at the next desk, the Mexican worker on the building site, the Chinese postdoctoral researcher in the lab.
What Is Changing as Class Policy?
This picture needs to be read not as individual decisions but as a whole. In our view, three transformations stand out.
1. The migration regime is turning into a pricing regime
In the previous period, the US immigration system, flawed as it was, rested on the lottery, family reunification and the employer. Now every door has a price tag: a $1 million gold card, a $100,000 H-1B fee, a $70,000 OPT fee. The lottery is weighted by wage ranking; the diversity visa, the only door without money or an employer, is being shut; poverty is excluded as a "public charge". Migration is being reorganised according to the movement not of labour power but of capital.
2. The labour-power market is being split into three layers
| Layer | Who? | How are they managed? |
|---|---|---|
| Top | The migrant owner of capital | Purchased freedom: the gold card |
| Middle | The university-educated migrant worker (H-1B, OPT, J-1) | Expensive but handcuffed: high wage threshold, no 60 days, green card route closed |
| Bottom | The undocumented worker | Fear: raids, detention, deportation |
This layering is not new; but for the first time it stands before us this openly, this priced and this directly arranged by the state. In As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone, we described Silicon Valley's "two-tier workforce" model, the chasm between the staff engineer and the contract worker. Now that model is being built on a national scale, through citizenship law.
3. "Economic nationalism" uses one fraction of capital against another
Let us look closely at the companies targeted: Indian outsourcing companies (Tata, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant), a European consulting giant (Capgemini) and two tech companies that have at times clashed with the administration. Amazon and Apple are absent. Tech companies with military and surveillance contracts are absent altogether. So this is not a "war on the tech monopolies"; it is a renegotiation, within capital, of who works with the state and on what terms. Intimidating one company works hand in hand with offering it limited protection.
It is instructive here to recall the lines Marx wrote in 1870 about English and Irish workers: the English worker saw the Irish worker as a competitor who lowered his standard of living, and for Marx this antagonism was the secret of the English working class's impotence despite its organisation. The capitalist class was aware of this secret and kept the antagonism alive through the press, the pulpit and the comic papers. Today the phrase "foreign indentured servants" does exactly this job.
Where Have They Declared War?
| Front | What was done? | Class meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Migrant workers | The H-1B fee, the wage-ranked lottery, the abolition of the 60 days, the PERM suspension, the country lists, the DV halt, workplace raids | Dividing labour power and disciplining migrant labour |
| International students and universities | The OPT fee, J-1 subpoenas, student visa revocations, moves against Harvard | Ideological control over knowledge production and the casualisation of research labour |
| Public-sector workers | Executive Order 14251, the termination of collective agreements | Targeting the strongest fortress of organised labour: public-sector unionism |
| Labour law institutions | Disabling the NLRB, transforming the EEOC, the independent contractor and joint employer rules | Readjusting the arbitrating institutions in the employer's favour |
| States and cities | National Guard deployments (limited by the Supreme Court), curbing states' power to regulate artificial intelligence | Narrowing local democratic oversight in favour of the central executive |
| Selected companies | Microsoft and the outsourcing companies | Renegotiation between fractions of capital; selective intimidation |
What the fronts in this table have in common are the collective tools in workers' hands: the union, the collective agreement, the arbitration board, local government, the public university, permanent residence. While the individual worker is told "I am protecting you", the tools with which workers could protect themselves together are being dismantled one by one.
To the Young Computing Worker Who Dreams of America
We are writing this section especially for our young comrades in Turkey who work at a software company, an agency or a bank's IT department, look at US job ads on LinkedIn in the evenings, calculate their grade point average for a master's application, and think "if I could just get an H-1B, everything would be fine".
Let us first say this plainly: we do not look down on those who have this dream. In Turkey, a computing worker's salary melts away against inflation; overtime is unpaid, there is no union, and dismissal comes by email. The country's political climate narrows young people's dreams of the future. It is entirely understandable that someone who wants to leave sees it as an individual salvation. But a decision is only free if it rests on real information. Here we want to put that information on the table, without embellishment.
It used to be a road with a known map
Ten years ago, the map of this road was more or less known: an undergraduate degree in Turkey, a master's in the US (F-1 visa), 1 to 3 years of work on OPT after graduating, entering the H-1B lottery during that time and winning after a few tries, the employer starting the green card process (PERM) while you worked on H-1B, a green card a few years later, citizenship five years after that. The road was long, exhausting, and the dependence on the employer was heavy, but at least it was predictable. Everyone knew what the next rung was.
Today almost every rung of this ladder has been raised, made slippery or pulled out.
| Rung | Before | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Student visa (F-1) | A largely routine process with an admission letter and proof of funds | Social media review, revocation of thousands of student visas, new international student enrolment down 17% in autumn 2025 and 20% in spring 2026 |
| Post-graduation work (OPT) | Almost automatic on the school's recommendation | A proposed fee of $70,000 per student paid by the school, and $30,000 for each subsequent recommendation; the cost is expected to be passed on to the student or the employer |
| H-1B lottery | Random; equal chances for everyone | Weighted by wage level: the entry-level (Level I) young graduate has 1 entry while the senior engineer has 4 |
| H-1B cost | A few thousand dollars in fees and lawyer's costs for the employer | A $100,000 fee stuck in the courts and a proposed $103,265 fee in its place; employers think twice before hiring a new foreign graduate |
| Consulate | Visa interview | From 15 December 2025, an "online presence review" for H-1B and H-4 applications: social media accounts are expected to be public; posts by spouses and children are also reviewed (SHRM) |
| Working on H-1B | 60 days to find a new job if you were laid off | A draft abolishing the 60 days: if the job ends, the status ends the next day |
| Green card (PERM) | A routine procedure for the employer | Eight companies suspended, including Microsoft, the country's largest PERM filer |
| Green card queue | A few years for those born in Turkey | In the October 2026 Visa Bulletin, the worldwide final action date retrogressed to 1 January 2025 for EB-2 and 15 May 2024 for EB-3; the queue is getting longer again (Visa Lawyer Blog) |
| Lottery (DV) | The only door without an employer or money | Visa issuance suspended worldwide |
What this table means for a young software developer is this: H-1B is no longer a solution but a gamble. And in this gamble, the one sitting at the table with the smallest chips, that is, the new graduate without experience, is you.
The "if I get into a big company I'll be safe" fallacy
The most common strategy was this: rather than being ground down at a small consultancy, get into a big tech company; they have a legal department and will sort out your green card quickly.
8 October 2026 shook this strategy too. At the top of the suspended companies is Microsoft, according to Department of Labor data the largest PERM filer in the country. So even working at one of the most valuable companies in the world does not secure the road to a green card. More importantly, when we look at who made the list and who did not, we see this: Amazon, which received the most H-1B approvals, is not on it. The criterion is not wage data but politics.
What this means for a migrant worker is heavy: your right to stay now depends not only on your employer, but on your employer's relationship with the White House. If your boss falls out with a vice president, the process you have built up over years can freeze with a press conference. Think of an engineer at Microsoft approaching the end of the six-year H-1B limit: if the H-1B runs out before the green card process starts, they may have to leave the country. This is exactly the first risk immigration lawyers warn about.
The real face of an administration that "protects its citizens"
All these policies are defended with a single sentence: protecting the American worker. It is easy to believe; seen from outside, it seems reasonable for a country to think of its own citizens first.
But we have shown above: the same administration, in the same period, weakened the American worker's union, collective agreement, labour tribunal and overtime protection. In the tech sector, layoffs in the first half of 2026 exceeded 150,000 and are on pace to surpass the whole of 2025 (Metaintro layoffs tracker). So this administration does not protect the American software developer either; it only shows them a target for their anger. And that target is you.
Let us sum up the situation in a plain sentence: in the US today, the computing worker who is a citizen is not protected; the computing worker who is a migrant is made a target. You would be going there in the second category.
Hostility to foreigners is not an exception but a climate
It would be wrong to think that anti-migrant sentiment in the US is aimed only at undocumented Latin American workers. The so-called "skilled migrants" are directly in the line of fire too.
- According to the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) report of September 2026, hate posts targeting South Asians on X rose by 240% between January 2024 and June 2026. Almost half of these posts accuse them of "invading" and "stealing jobs". The researchers link the waves of hate directly to the H-1B debates, especially to September 2025, when the $100,000 fee was announced. In July 2026, an Indian Muslim shopping-centre worker was stabbed in Utah, and the case is being prosecuted as a hate crime (Al Jazeera, 28 September 2026).
- This climate is fed not from below but from above. When the vice president calls foreign engineers "indentured servants", that becomes the official language of this hate.
- And there is a Turkish counterpart to this. Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was detained on the street by plain-clothes federal agents on 25 March 2025 over an opinion piece she had co-signed with three friends in the student newspaper, and was held for six weeks at an immigration detention centre in Louisiana. A judge released her, noting that there was no evidence supporting her detention. Court documents unsealed in January 2026 showed that the visa revocation was based largely on that opinion piece. After completing her doctorate, Öztürk returned to Turkey (Wikipedia).
The lesson is this: for someone with migrant status in the US, freedom of expression is also tied to visa status. Social media accounts reviewed at the consulate, detention over an opinion piece, a green card that depends on the employer's political relationships... Under these conditions, the expectation that "I cannot speak in Turkey, I will be free there" must also be tested against reality. Where you go, you will also be expected to stay silent, and this time at the cost of your job and your right to stay.
So what should one do?
We are not telling anyone "don't go". Going and staying are both individual decisions, made under the concrete conditions of life. But the class content of this decision has to be seen: going is an attempt to solve the problem through exit. As we said when writing about Coxon's resignation, exit does not replace voice. The conditions that crush computing workers in Turkey do not change when you leave; they simply crush someone else who comes in your place. And where you go, a new boss, new handcuffs and, this time, an order that does not speak your language await you.
We suggest that young comrades thinking of leaving ask themselves a few questions:
- To whom is my visa tied? If I lose my job, within how many days must I leave the country?
- Is my green card process in my employer's hands? What is that employer's relationship with the government like?
- How many lottery entries does my wage level give me? If I am applying at entry level, what are my real chances?
- Does the contract I will sign contain a forced arbitration clause? If I am wronged, will I be able to go to court?
- Is there a tech workers' union or a solidarity network at the company or in the city I am going to? How do organisations such as the Alphabet Workers Union, for example, protect their migrant members?
- Is there anything on my social media, or my spouse's, that a consular officer might consider "hostile to the US"? And how does having to think about this square with the idea of freedom I want to go to?
- Will I keep my organised ties in Turkey? Will I be a lone individual where I go, or part of a solidarity network?
The last thing both those who leave and those who stay need to know is this: the problem of computing labour is not national but a matter of class. The overtime of a software developer in Istanbul and the 60-day fear of an H-1B engineer in Seattle are two faces of the same logic of capital. If companies cannot bring talent to the US, they will take the work to where the talent is; so as the doors in the US narrow, computing workers in Turkey will be pushed further into remote work paid in foreign currency but without a union, and fully protected by no country's labour law. That is why the solution is not an individual visa but organising, here as well as there. The Computing Worker's Handbook was written precisely for this purpose.
Two more notes, seen from Turkey
Turkey is not on the lists, but it is in the lottery. Turkey was not included in the 39- and 75-country lists. But the diversity visa, which thousands of people apply for in hope every year, is suspended worldwide, and the winners from Turkey are affected too.
We have the same rhetoric. What is done in the US with the rhetoric of "foreign indentured servants" is done in Turkey through Syrian and Afghan workers. The migrant worker employed off the books, silenced by the fear of deportation, whose wage demands are suppressed; and the nationalist politics that cites their presence as the reason for the native worker's low wages. A young person thinking of going to the US, while thinking about what it means to be a "migrant" there, should also think about how they look at migrant workers here. In both countries, anger is directed at those at the very bottom; the boss's profit, meanwhile, stays where it is.
Concrete Tasks
- Let us put forward the demand that "the visa be independent of the employer". As long as a migrant worker's status is tied to a single employer, the worker remains unorganised however high the wage floor is raised. Our demand: freedom to change jobs, a short path to permanent residence and a reasonable job-search period after dismissal.
- Let us organise migrant and native workers in the same union. We know that in US tech unions, H-1B workers hold back out of fear of retaliation. The antidote is not to leave them outside but to build special protection mechanisms for them.
- Let us target the employer, not the worker. It is the employer who employs undocumented workers, who pays workers on visas low wages, who lays people off and replaces them with someone cheaper. The direction of pressure and penalties must be turned towards the employer.
- Let us draw up the balance sheet of "protectionism". Whenever we hear the rhetoric of "protecting native workers", let us ask: what happened, in the same period, to union rights, collective bargaining and labour law?
- Let us inform young computing workers in Turkey who are thinking of going abroad. The destination country's visa regime, union rights and degree of dependence on the employer are as important points of comparison as the salary.
- Let us expose the hate speech directed at migrant workers in Turkey by the same measure. Failing to see in Turkey the mechanism we see in the US would be inconsistent.
The Handcuffs Change, the Chain Stays the Same
Dear Young Comrades,
The Trump administration's one-year balance sheet on migration and labour shows us this: capitalism always divides workers in two. Sometimes as "skilled" and "unskilled", sometimes as "native" and "foreign", sometimes as "documented" and "undocumented". This division is itself a management technique.
The two documents signed on the same day, 19 September 2025, are like a summary of this year: a million-dollar golden door for the owner of capital, a hundred-thousand-dollar wall for the worker. One buys freedom; the other rents the handcuffs.
We closed As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone under the heading "The handcuffs and the chain". We close this piece from the same place: the handcuffs change, the chain stays the same. What will free the worker from the handcuffs is not a visa fee, nor a wage-ranked lottery, nor a vice president who says "our workers first". The only thing that will free them is meeting the worker at the next desk in the same organisation, whatever passport that worker carries.
To our young comrades who dream of America, we say this: what awaits you on the other side of the ocean may not be freedom but new handcuffs. If you go, do not go unorganised; if you stay, do not stay unorganised. Whatever country we are in, we are links in the same chain.
We choose neither racism nor corporate exploitation. We stand for equal rights for all workers.
The machine is new; the chain is old.
Sources
From Knowledge Commons:
- The Week's Class Struggle in Technology: 6–12 October 2026, 12 October 2026
- As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone: What Tech Workers in Silicon Valley Asked For, and What They Got, 12 October 2026
- A Class Balance Sheet of a Week in Washington
- Knowledge Commons, The Computing Worker's Handbook
H-1B and fees:
- DiRaimondo & Schroeder, $100,000 H-1B Fee Remains Blocked as Second Federal Court Rules Against Implementation, 5 October 2026
- Immigration Analytics, Federal Court Vacates $100K H-1B Fee Policies in Global Nurse Force v. Trump, 1 October 2026
- Cozen O'Connor, DHS Proposes New $103,265 Fee for Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions, August 2026
- Boundless, H-1B Lottery Overhaul: Wage-Based Selection
- F1Jobs, H-1B Registrations Fell 38.5% This Year
- HCAMag, DOL proposes raising H-1B prevailing wages by up to 33 percent, 1 April 2026
- Boundless, H-1B 60-Day Grace Period Proposal, September 2026
Green card, PERM, students:
- TIME, U.S. Expands Crackdown on Green Cards, Student Exchange Visas, 9 October 2026
- The Next Web, US suspends Microsoft and seven other firms from green card programme, 9 October 2026
- Clinch Law Firm, Is the Green Card Paused? 39 and 75 Country Lists, September 2026
- Wikipedia, Trump Gold Card
- Wolfsdorf Rosenthal, Fifteen Things to Know About DHS's Proposed OPT Fees, October 2026
Undocumented workers and raids:
- ABC News / Good Morning America, ICE: 350,000 individuals removed in fiscal year 2026, 21 July 2026
- KJZZ, Homebuilders say ICE workplace raids are stoking fear, adding to already strained labor shortage, 1 October 2026
- Sinclair / KOMO, Secretary Mullin says 2026 deportations will surpass 2025 numbers, June 2026
Labour law, unions, employment:
- FedSmith, Court Ruling Complicates Executive Order Restricting Unions, 20 May 2026
- NELP, New Trump Independent Contractor Rule Will Weaken Minimum Wage and Overtime Protections, 26 February 2026
- Jackson Lewis, The Year Ahead 2026: Agencies Are Off and Running
- BLS, Union membership rate 10.0 percent in 2025
- Manufacturing Dive, September manufacturing employment, October 2026
- JURIST, Trump pulls National Guard out of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland after court ruling, January 2026
For those who dream of America:
- SHRM, State Dept. Adds Social Media Review for H-1B Visa Applicants, December 2025
- Visa Lawyer Blog, October 2026 Visa Bulletin, September 2026
- Al Jazeera, Anti-South Asian 'hate speech' has exploded online in US, report finds, 28 September 2026
- Wikipedia, Detention of Rümeysa Öztürk
- Metaintro, The Tech Layoffs Tracker 2026, June 2026
- Alphabet Workers Union, alphabetworkersunion.org
- The Class of a Resignation, 9 September 2026
Theory:
- Karl Marx, letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870 (Marxists Internet Archive)
This piece is published by Knowledge Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. It is a living document and will be updated as the legal processes move forward. This piece is not legal advice; for your visa and immigration situation, consult current official sources and a lawyer.
