Is Trump Driving Down Demand for Skilled Worker Visas?

The number of H-1B petitions that employers filed continued to climb from 2012 to 2016. Now it’s dropped for the second year in a row.

“Employers are nervous about what this administration is doing,” Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, told Bloomberg Law April 13.

“We do know that the economy’s improving, that there’s not a huge supply of labor right now,” Pierce said. “It’s hard to point to any other reason” for the drop in petitions “than this administration’s policies and rhetoric around the H-1B visas.”

“There’s a lot of hostility in this administration to ...