Donald Trump is not the first world leader trying to replace a skilled minority group with a politically favored majority. He will not be the first to fail.

Shortly after the British Empire’s conquest of Uganda in the 1890s, the territory’s colonial administrators imported roughly 30,000 laborers from India in order to build a railway spanning the region. Though most of these workers returned to their homes once that task was complete, some 7,000 remained in the new colony, establishing other businesses and setting down roots. The British supported this development, seeing the newcomers as a natural middle class between themselves and the African Ugandans, and encouraged the Indians to participate freely in commercial activity. Over time, Indians became traders, bankers, and skilled workers; by 1962, on the eve of Uganda’s independence, 80,000 to 90,000 Indian Ugandans made up only around 1 percent of the nation’s population, but owned nearly nine-tenths of its businesses and paid roughly the same proportion of its taxes.

Closing the wide gulf between the wealthy Indians and the poorer Africans became a priority for the post-colonial governments of Uganda. After independence, President Milton Obote attempted a handful of redistributive reforms, requiring quotas of Africans to be hired in business and restricting the economic activities that Indian Ugandans could legally undertake on their own. When Obote was overthrown by army officer Idi Amin in 1971, the new leader tried a dramatically different approach: expelling all the Indians from the country and confiscating their businesses, goods, and accumulated wealth. In doing so, the Amin government hoped to create a new African upper class—ideally one that could be relied upon to be loyal to the new regime.

The expulsion policy delighted Amin’s populist supporters, and in its early days it was regarded as a success: stores and factories were handed over to Africans with political connections, who quickly began to enjoy the spoils of their new positions. “There are now Black faces in every shop and industry,” Amin boasted of the forced transition. “All the big cars are now driven by Africans, and not the former bloodsuckers. The rest of Africa can learn from us.”

Amin’s words quickly proved Delphic. After the expulsions, the African nouveau riche class was incapable of managing the economic levers it had been given, and Uganda descended into an intractable economic crisis. The country’s GDP declined precipitously, dropping by 5 percent from 1972 to 1975. From 1972 to the end of the decade, total manufacturing output across the country declined by two-thirds, and the overall economy is thought to have contracted by 20 to 25 percent. Amin, who had initially enjoyed widespread popularity in Uganda, quickly came to be regarded as a tyrant dependent on intimidation and brute force to remain in power. When the self-anointed “Conqueror of the British Empire” launched a spectacularly ill-advised war against neighboring Tanzania in 1978—and was soundly beaten and driven from power—few in Uganda mourned his departure.

Following Amin’s failure, other nations facing similar gaps between haves and have-nots largely declined to implement such extreme methods to level their own playing fields. A notable exception was Zimbabwe, where longtime leader Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF political party expropriated the farmland and businesses of wealthy white Zimbabweans from the late 1990s onward and handed them to politically favored Africans. The effects of this policy were even more disastrous than in Uganda: in the decade following the initiation of the seizures, the country saw the halving of food production, the collapse of its nascent manufacturing sector, a skyrocketing unemployment rate, an exodus of skilled labor, and the reduction of the Zimbabwean dollar to worthlessness.

It is worth pondering the cases of Uganda and Zimbabwe in the context of the Trump administration’s recent moves against the H-1B visa program. The analogy, of course, is somewhat tenuous. The United States has few political, economic, or social similarities with either of those nations. It possesses a skilled domestic workforce, with some 135 million fully employed workers in America, of whom only around 650,000—fewer than 0.5 percent—are present on H-1B visas (estimates vary). Nor do H-1B workers hold jobs that no Americans can fill; the United States has a top-notch university system capable of educating native-born Americans and foreigners alike to exacting standards.

Yet President Trump’s recent decision to raise the annual application fee for an H-1B visa application from $1,000 to $100,000—justified as a move against foreign workers “stealing jobs” from US citizens—nevertheless represents a step down the same dubious path: the assumption that once a disfavored group of skilled workers is pushed out, it is easy to replace it with a favored one.

There is no guarantee that Trump’s changes will dramatically reshape the H-1B program, let alone the US tech sector as a whole. H-1B visas are nominally capped at 85,000 per year, but in 2024, there were nearly 500,000 applications for those slots. If demand stays high in spite of the fee, and the Trump administration makes no further moves to suppress skilled immigration, then the entire matter may simply become an annual $8.5 billion tax on American tech companies, for better or worse.

Even then, however, Trump’s assumption about the interchangeability of tech workers is likely to be troublesome. As the Mercatus Center at George Mason University put it, “In general, research indicates that limiting H-1B visas decreases the number of American high-skilled jobs, induces more American companies to hire workers overseas, harms small technology startups, and reduces America’s global leadership in innovation.” As in Uganda, dismissing a skilled workforce of undesirable people does not overnight create a new, equally talented workforce of desirable ones.

Trump’s supporters contend that the new policy is intended to ensure that the H-1B program is used to attract truly exceptional talent. Bill Gates once quipped that a single great software writer was worth 10,000 average ones; a one-time $100,000 fee would clearly be worth it for a multibillion-dollar tech firm to hire a known superstar from abroad. Yet the fee would certainly block future undiscovered talent, too. Just as in the NFL, many of the tech sector’s leading lights emerge not on Draft Day, but only after their career is well underway. Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s initial H-1B visa was for an entry-level materials engineer job at Applied Materials. Under normal circumstances, would AMAT have paid an extra $100,000 for an unknown new graduate in an arcane field with no previous experience? Had it left him at home, how might Google be different today? Questions like these are worth pondering, particularly at a time when China produces over a quarter of the world’s top AI researchers and more science graduates than all of America—and appears intent on picking up those from abroad that the United States leaves behind.

Crucially, the negative economic impacts of an anti-H-1B policy would almost certainly fall on US citizens as well. A 2008 study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that each H-1B visa in a STEM field created five to 7.5 non-skilled jobs for American workers. If these numbers are accurate, many more low- and semi-skilled laborers would experience workplace struggles from a crackdown on H-1B holders in the long run than the H-1B holders themselves would. This is to say nothing of the national security consequences of voluntarily surrendering the United States’ ability to attract the most highly qualified scientists and engineers from around the world, including many from adversary nations where they would otherwise be put to use on projects detrimental to American interests.

Of course, Trump’s move will presumably be challenged in court. Congress created the H-1B visa, not the president, and the president likely cannot simply change the terms without congressional approval—particularly if his changes should turn out to render the program non-functional. There are also concerns that Trump’s proposal could entice corruption. After all, under the terms of the executive order, the White House has the discretion to waive the $100,000 payment for “any individual alien, all aliens working at a company, or all aliens working in an industry” at the executive branch’s discretion. It is not hard to imagine how this caveat might be weaponized: if LeftTech is critical of the president, and RightTech donates to his campaign, which is more likely to receive exemptions from the H-1B rule? This will all be grist for the media mill, and ultimately up to the courts to sort out.

In the interim, will America end up like Uganda? Almost certainly not—at least not from expensive H-1Bs alone. Yet the fact remains that blocking tens or hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, in the hope that other workers of a more politically-favored heritage might come to take over their positions, has been tried before. It did not work in Uganda or Zimbabwe. It is unlikely to work in the United States.