Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Indiana is leading a coalition of 13 Republican states to support the U.S Department of Labor’s proposal to increase the minimum salary an employer must pay a foreign worker, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced Thursday.
The March 26 proposed rule would require employers to pay workers in the H-1B visa and Program Electronic Review Management, or PERM, systems up to 33% more, on average, than the salary of similarly qualified U.S. workers, according to a recent analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy. This means the change would likely price foreign workers out of the U.S. labor market, of which they comprised about 19% of in 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We’re talking about changing a federal program that currently enables and, in many ways, almost encourages employers to replace American workers with low-cost foreign labor,” Rokita said in a press release Thursday. “It’s difficult to imagine a more disastrous and harmful policy. I am proud to lead these states and stand with the Trump administration to fix it.”
The attorneys general assert that many aspects of the country’s immigration laws fail to put America first, including chain migration, or family-based immigration, which they say allows foreigners to gain permanent national status “without regard to merit” or to an immigrant’s capacity “to assimilate.”
“America’s immigration system should serve Americans’ interests,” the letter stated.
The attorneys general say the current immigration system encourages U.S. employers to import “cheap” foreign labor over American workers.
According to Rokita’s office on Thursday, the current system also has legal deficiencies because it was implemented without proper notice-and-comment rulemaking.
“The proposed rule would significantly increase the prevailing wages that employers must pay H-1B workers, making the program more consistent with its original purpose of allowing employers to fill genuine specialty occupation shortages with highly skilled workers — not serving as a tool to cut labor costs at the expense of American workers,” the Attorney General’s Office said.
But the National Foundation for American Policy, or NFAP, concluded that the Department of Labor’s proposed rule could be illegal.
According to NFAP, the Department of Labor currently determines the prevailing wage from government data and applies a mathematical formula to make a four-tiered wage structure for each occupation.
Under the new proposal, each tier would be raised from where it currently sits. Level 1 would be raised from 17th percentile to 34th percentile; Level 2 from 34th to 52nd; Level 3 from 50th to 70th; and Level 4 from 67th to 88th.
“The [Immigration and Nationality Act] does not state that H-1B visa holders and employment-based immigrants should be paid 33% more (at Level I) than comparable U.S. workers,” NFAP’s report stated. “Congress could have required employers to pay a wage premium for foreign nationals, but did not.”
The DOL has said that the proposed rule would still use grounded percentile thresholds from government statistics, but that it would “modernize” the existing wage levels.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.