President Donald Trump’s next move likely to provoke the ire of Silicon Valley could leave companies scrambling to find staff.

On the back of Trump’s highly controversial immigration ban comes the possibility of new work visa regulations aligned with Trump’s promise to “brings jobs home.” The administration has reportedly drafted an executive order that would affect the work visa programs that tech companies require in order to employ tens of thousands of foreign workers.

Neither the timing nor the ultimate specifics of the order are clear yet. Bloomberg reported that the order would essentially initiate an “Americans first” hiring policy. If tech companies – likely the “biggest beneficiaries” of the H-1B visa program that allows them to employ skilled foreign workers – want to hire foreigners, then the highest-paid workers would get in first, according to Bloomberg.

The visas have been issued to allow companies to hire mostly highly skilled foreign workers for technical jobs, when local talent can’t be found. This has come under some scrutiny, with critics saying that less skilled workers make up most of the 85,000 H-1B visas. Many of these workers, critics say, don’t end up at the big companies such as Apple Inc. or Microsoft Corp. on wages of $100,000-plus, but are hired for lower-paying roles by outsourcing companies such as India-based Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd.

Tech executives, including Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and former Microsoft Corp. CEO Bill Gates, have in the past pushed for government to expand its immigration policies to make life easier for immigrants. The execs have asked to fix what they see as a “broken system,” stating that very qualified foreigners have to face constant immigration issues in spite of their talent.

News of the proposed changes to work visa regulations could be about as far away from the execs’ idea of fixing the system as they could have possibly imagined. Bloomberg managed to get a copy of the draft proposal, which stated that a country’s immigration policies should serve its own nationals first. The next part reads:

“Visa programs for foreign workers … should be administered in a manner that protects the civil rights of American workers and current lawful residents, and that prioritizes the protection of American workers – our forgotten working people – and the jobs they hold.”

Even so, the Trump administration isn’t the only one in the government looking to reform the system. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, last week introduced a bill that in broad outline doesn’t sound radically different from Trump’s. It would narrow requirements for H-1B visas to focus on more highly paid and skilled workers.

And it’s possible that tech firms would be affected less by either proposal than outsourcing companies, which according to Ron Hira, an associate professor at Howard University cited by Bloomberg, pay H-1B workers was less than $70,000 on average. Google Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft paid more than $100,000.

But if tech firms do find more limits on the visas, it’s a sure thing they’ll look to farm out that work overseas — which would put them in further opposition to Trump, who has threatened Apple and other companies with tariffs or other trade restrictions if they don’t manufacture more products in the U.S.

Meanwhile, protests against Trump’s immigration policies continued Monday. More than 2,000 Google employees around the world staged a walkout that was supported by management, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin, both immigrants.

Photo: Joel Kramer via Flickr