President Trump’s latest executive order slapping a $100,000 annual fee on new H-1B visa applications couldn’t come at a better time for American workers who’ve been sidelined by Big Tech’s addiction to cheap foreign labor. This move directly tackles the rampant abuse of a program that’s supposed to bring in top talent but instead floods the market with lower-wage imports, driving down salaries and shutting out our own graduates.
Look at the numbers: The share of IT workers holding H-1B visas has ballooned from 32% in 2003 to over 65% today, while unemployment among computer science grads sits at 6.1% and computer engineering at 7.5%.
As the White House put it, “The H-1B program is creating disincentives for future American workers to choose STEM careers.”
That statement nails the core issue—why pour time and money into a degree when companies like Amazon and Microsoft prefer outsourcing firms to hire foreigners at a discount? It’s no wonder national security takes a hit when we’re discouraging our brightest minds from entering fields vital to innovation and defense.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick laid it out plainly: “The whole idea is no more will these big tech companies or other big companies train foreign workers. They have to pay the government $100,000, then they have to pay the employee, so it’s just not [economical].”
Elaborating on that, this fee flips the script on the economics that have favored foreign hires. For years, outfits like Cognizant and Infosys—top H-1B users—have exploited the system to undercut American wages, hiring tens of thousands of visa holders while laying off domestic staff.
A report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that in 2022 alone, the top 30 H-1B employers snapped up 34,000 new visa workers even as they axed at least 85,000 jobs, proving the program’s become a tool for mass outsourcing rather than genuine skill gaps. Lutnick’s point drives home that with this hefty fee, companies will finally think twice before bypassing qualified Americans, forcing them to invest in training and hiring from our own talent pool.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers echoed this America-first approach: “President Trump promised to put American workers first, and this commonsense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages. It also gives certainty to American businesses who actually want to bring high-skilled workers to our great country but have been trampled on by abuses of the system.”
Building on Rogers’ words, the certainty she mentions is key—real innovators needing specialized expertise can still pay up if it’s worth it, but the days of flooding the lottery with applications from low-cost contractors are over. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has long warned that such abuses “may negatively affect US workers, decreasing wages and opportunities as they import more foreign workers,” and this policy directly combats that.
Of course, not everyone’s thrilled. India’s Ministry of External Affairs voiced concerns, saying, “Skilled talent mobility and exchanges have contributed enormously to technology development, innovation, economic growth, competitiveness and wealth creation in the United States and India. Policy makers will therefore assess recent steps taking into account mutual benefits, which include strong people-to-people ties between the two countries.”
Fair enough—India’s tech sector relies heavily on H-1B exports, with companies like TCS and Wipro among the biggest beneficiaries. But let’s be real: Mutual benefits shouldn’t mean American jobs get sacrificed on the altar of globalism. If India’s talent is truly irreplaceable, firms can foot the bill or use the new “gold card” option at $1 million for individuals or $2 million for businesses, paving a path to citizenship without the cheap-labor loopholes.
Venture capitalist Deedy Das warned on X that “If the U.S. ceases to attract the best talent, it drastically reduces its ability to innovate and grow the economy,” adding the fee “creates disincentive to attract the world’s smartest talent to the U.S.”
Das overlooks how the current system stifles homegrown innovation by making STEM paths less appealing to Americans. Plus, for those elite minds, the Trump Platinum Card at $5 million offers tax perks and extended stays—plenty of incentive if you’re bringing real value.
Reactions from tech giants tell another story: Amazon and Microsoft are scrambling, advising H-1B holders to stay put or rush back before potential travel bans kick in, showing just how dependent they’ve become on this flawed setup.
Lutnick claims “All of the big companies are on board,” which might surprise some given the internal memos flying around. But if they’re truly committed to American prosperity, they’ll adapt by prioritizing our workforce. This isn’t about shutting doors—it’s about ensuring they’re opened first to those who’ve invested in this country. In the end, Trump’s fee restores balance, protecting jobs and wages while still welcoming the best under fair terms. American workers deserve no less.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
