By The Trump administration is taking another step toward putting American workers first, this time by targeting an Obama-era rule that gave tens of thousands of spouses of H-1B visa holders the ability to compete for American jobs.
The Department of Homeland Security has placed a proposal to eliminate employment authorization for certain H-4 visa holders on its 2026 regulatory agenda.
The proposal would reverse a 2015 Obama administration rule allowing certain spouses of H-1B workers to obtain Employment Authorization Documents, or EADs, and work essentially anywhere in the American labor market.
Trump admin is on a generational run right now. All stemming from JD Vance's fraud taskforce uncovering what we all knew. All these visas are scams that take jobs away from Americans. https://t.co/5fWC0dpBQ4
— Aesthetica (@Anc_Aesthetics) August 29, 2026
And while the full repeal will take time, the effects of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on foreign work authorization could begin becoming visible much sooner.
That is because DHS has already eliminated automatic extensions for many EAD renewal applications filed on or after Oct. 30, 2025, including H-4 applications. Previously, eligible workers could continue working for hundreds of days after their cards expired while the government processed their renewals.
Now, when an affected H-4 worker’s employment authorization expires before USCIS approves the renewal, that worker has to stop working.
That means positions occupied today by foreign workers could begin becoming available to American workers as EADs expire and pending renewals work their way through the system.
The numbers being circulated online should be treated cautiously. Claims that 600,000 jobs are suddenly about to become available appear to confuse the entire H-4 population with the much smaller number of H-4 spouses actually authorized to work.
But the real number is hardly trivial.
USCIS data show that the government was already approving tens of thousands of H-4 employment authorization applications annually. In fiscal 2023 alone, USCIS recorded nearly 75,000 approvals and more than 78,000 renewals in the C26 H-4 category.
Those workers are not confined to some special H-4 labor market. An H-4 EAD generally allows its holder to work for virtually any employer, meaning H-4 spouses can compete directly with Americans for jobs in technology, finance, health care, consulting and other professional fields.
That is what makes the Obama policy so consequential.
Congress created the H-1B program to allow employers to hire certain foreign workers in specialty occupations. But in 2015, the Obama administration went considerably further, using regulation to create a separate avenue into the labor market for some of those workers’ spouses.
To qualify, an H-4 spouse generally must be married to an H-1B worker who has an approved employment-based immigrant petition or has received an H-1B extension while pursuing permanent residency.
In practical terms, one H-1B visa could therefore bring not merely one foreign worker into the American labor market, but potentially two.
Trump’s DHS now wants to unwind that policy.
The proposal appearing on the administration’s regulatory agenda says DHS intends to remove those H-4 spouses from the class of noncitizens eligible to request employment authorization and restore the department’s pre-2015 policy.
There is an important catch: this particular change is not happening overnight.
DHS has classified the H-4 proposal as a “Long-Term Action,” and the government currently lists the date for a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking simply as “To Be Determined.” The administration would ordinarily still have to publish the proposed rule, receive public comments and eventually issue a final rule before eliminating the program.
So Americans should not expect 100,000 H-4 workers to disappear from their jobs next week.
But the direction is unmistakable.
The administration has already stopped granting automatic EAD extensions to many new renewal applicants, including H-4 spouses. As existing work permits expire over the coming weeks and months, some workers whose renewals remain pending will have to leave their jobs until the government grants them new authorization.
Those jobs do not disappear.
Employers still need software engineers, analysts, accountants, consultants and other professionals. When a worker can no longer legally occupy one of those positions, the employer must either wait, reshuffle its workforce or hire someone else.
And that someone else may be an American.
The broader H-4 rollback would magnify that effect dramatically if it becomes final, potentially removing a six-figure population of foreign workers from direct competition with Americans.
Immigration advocates will argue that the policy hurts families and makes the United States less attractive to H-1B workers. Employers will complain that they could lose talented employees.
But immigration policy is supposed to serve the interests of the people of the United States, not guarantee that every temporary foreign worker who enters the country can also bring another worker into the American labor market.
There is nothing radical about saying that American jobs should primarily be available to Americans — or that Congress, rather than an executive agency, should decide when entirely new classes of foreign nationals receive permission to work here.
Obama opened that door in 2015.
Trump is now moving to close it.
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