In a bid to court working class voters, Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to revamp a temporary visa programme used to bring foreign workers to fill jobs in the US. The president will use a visit to a manufacturing company in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial state he snatched from Hillary Clinton in the election, to promote his latest “Buy America Hire America” offensive. This includes an attempt to redress alleged abuses in the H-1B visas, which are used largely by the tech industry, and on which has Trump shifted position several times during the election campaign.

H-1B visas admit 65,000 workers and another 20,000 graduate student workers each year. Most of the visas are awarded to outsourcing firms, which critics say exploit loopholes to fill lower-level IT jobs with foreign workers, often at lower pay. The White House intends “a total transformation” of the programme from a lottery to a merit-based system, a senior administration official said.

Trump’s executive order will call on government departments to introduce reforms to ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the “most skilled or highest paid applicants”, the official told reporters.(guardian)…[+]