Trump announces skilled worker visas will now cost $100,000

All the fawning by tech CEOs wasn’t capable to person Donald Trump to backmost disconnected his crusade against immigrants. Yesterday the president announced that the authorities would beryllium adding a $100,000-a-year interest connected each H-1B visas successful an effort to discourage their use. 

While galore industries marque important usage of the H-1B programme to pull highly skilled overseas workers, the tech manufacture is peculiarly reliant. Amazon has astir 14,000 H-1B workers crossed its aggregate entities, acold much than immoderate different institution according to information from the federal government. But Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Tata Consultancy (a large IT services firm) each person much than 4,000 employees moving connected H-1B visas. 

The interest volition lone use to caller applicants and it’s apt to look ineligible challenges, but adjacent conscionable the specter of this alteration appears to person immoderate companies scrambling. There are reports that Microsoft and Amazon issued internal memos advising immoderate workers presently overseas that run connected a visa to instrumentality to the US earlier the caller fees footwear successful astatine midnight tonight. When asked, Microsoft declined to remark connected the leaked memo oregon the changes to the H-1B program. Unsurprisingly, tech companies person already been informing those moving connected visas not to permission the US for fearfulness that they mightiness not beryllium capable to return.

Broadly erstwhile the White House talks astir attracting the “top, apical people” to the US, it seems they’re talking astir wealthiness not skill. It besides unveiled a alleged “gold card” programme that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick volition regenerate the existing EB-1 and EB-2 visa programs. Those programs are for radical of “extraordinary ability” (often artists, athletes, educators, and executives) oregon those with precocious degrees successful competitory fields. The replacement programme demands that applicants “prove [their] exceptional worth to the United States of America by contributing a cardinal dollars.”

Under the golden paper imaginable immigrants would wage $1,000,000 arsenic portion of a fast-tracked exertion process, and that interest could ascent to $2,000,000 if the idiosyncratic was sponsored by a institution for employment. Clearly this caller programme would favour wealthiness implicit existent skills, though the Trump medication claims (without immoderate information to backmost it up) that it volition rise implicit $100 cardinal that it volition usage to wage down the indebtedness and little taxes. 

Of course, with the nationalist indebtedness presently exceeding $37 trillion, and the national authorities expected to adhd much than $2 trillion successful 2025, immoderate gross raised by the golden paper programme oregon fees connected H-1B visas would beryllium insignificant.

Updated September 20th: Added effect from Microsoft.