President Trump just made it a lot more expensive for companies to hire foreign workers through the H-1B program. The White House announced Friday that Trump signed a proclamation requiring employers to pay a hefty $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications, an enormous jump from the current $215 lottery registration fee.
H-1B visas allow U.S. companies to hire foreign workers in fields that typically require technical expertise like IT, engineering, mathematics, or medicine. The program is capped at 65,000 new visas annually, plus an additional 20,000 for foreign graduates with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. The visas are awarded through a lottery system and typically last three years, though holders can extend them or apply for green cards.
The administration’s new move is designed to crack down on what it calls widespread abuse of the program, which it blames for displacing American workers. According to the White House, the share of IT workers with H-1B visas has skyrocketed from 32% in 2003 to over 65% today, while unemployment among recent computer science graduates has hit 6.1%.
Silicon Valley will undoubtedly be up in arms over the initiative. The restrictions take aim at a program that helped create some of the region’s biggest success stories.
Elon Musk, Trump’s close ally for most of this year, initially worked in the U.S. on an H-1B after arriving as a student. In fact, Musk, taking issue with a perceived critic of the H-1B program in December on his platform X, tweeted to the individual that, “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Mike Krieger, the …