In January 2021, just before leaving office, then-President Trump issued an updated Department of Labor rule to protect the jobs and wages of American professionals and graduates from low-paid foreign H-1B visa workers imported by United States companies to replace them.

“The U.S. Department of Labor is taking these steps to strengthen wage protections, address abuses in visa programs, and protect American workers from being undercut by cheaper foreign labor,” former Labor Department Secretary Eugene Scalia said at the time.

The rule set wage floors so that U.S. companies importing foreign H-1B visa workers would have to do so by paying them at prevailing wage rates. The goal was to stop outsourcing schemes by such companies designed solely to cut labor costs at the expense of Americans.

A report from SHRM.org notes that Biden’s Labor Department, in recent weeks, has moved the wage rule “to its long-term agenda, historically the first step to a proposal being shelved permanently.”