H-1B visas are issued to highly skilled non-Americans whose training and resumes are valued by companies based here, from small start-ups to massive high tech operations that are already mega-successful and are looking to become even more so.
Now that President Donald Trump’s administration has pushed the price of the visa from a few thousand dollars and legal fees that average around $10,000 to an extraordinary $100,000, only the biggest, already thriving American companies will be able to pay the price for new expertise.
That may be fine for Trump’s new-found billionaire friends in the Silicon Valley C suites. But it is lousy for start-up entrepreneurs just beginning to create their dreams of similar success. In fact, it’s a terrible thing for American business in general; makes no economic sense; seems to be, as with so many capricious moves by the White House, based more on the president’s current mood and grudges against other world leaders — in this case his trade beef with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose citizens won 71% of H-1B visas in the 2024 lottery — than on any logic helpful to our nation.
What an absurd way to help steer an economy — as with tariffs, to create schemes that make it worse.
It would be nice if our higher education system created enough native-born people with “a body of highly specialized knowledge” — mostly in engineering — that is required of successful H-1B applicants.
But it doesn’t. That’s a simple fact. Our universities and their students can try to rectify that fact. Meanwhile, while that work is being done, our economy in order to be successful demands a supply of mostly Indian and Chinese engineers with those specific tech skills.
And what a success the visa program has been, for them and for us. For instance, Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft, and Sundar Picha, head of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, both came to the United States on the H-1B visa program, as did Indra Nooyi, who ran PepsiCo for 12 years.
“There were more than 300,000 Indians working in the United States on an H-1B visa as of 2024,” The New York Times reports. “They, along with their spouses and children, made up about a tenth of all Indian-origin people who reside in the country legally. Possibly millions of Indian Americans, including many living in India, owe their U.S. citizenship to their own or their parents’ use of the program.”
A good deal for all concerned. But now the president is in a tiff with the Indian prime minister, and would seem to see this as a way to weaken India’s economy, by limiting the number of Indian H-1B visa holders here who would otherwise be sending money home to their families, and by lessening ties between Indian and American companies.
And, in the process, weakening the ability of American tech companies, many of them based in California, to achieve their goals. Other than scoring points in international brinksmanship, what’s the good for us in that?
“As a start-up, you’re always tight for cash,” a 21-year-old California entrepreneur and COO of an AI startup, told the Times. “So you can’t go out and spend a bunch of money or have that kind of luxury that you’d see at a bigger company.”
The big guys are fine with it. Reed Hastings, chairman of Netflix, calls the $100,000 fee “a great solution … It will mean H-1B is used just for very high value jobs.”
His company had $11 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter. He can afford the charge. The little guys can’t. The radical uptick in visa fees is yet another administration misstep in international economics.