President Donald Trump late Sept. 19 afternoon signed an executive order requiring tech companies to pay $100,000 per year for each H-1B visa holder working in their company.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller presented the executive order to the president, stating: “One of the most abused visa systems in our current immigration system has been the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program. This is supposed to allow highly skilled laborers who work in fields that Americans don’t work in to come into the United States of America.”
Supporting American Workers
“What this proclamation will do is raise the fee that companies pay to sponsor H-1B applicants to $100,000. It ensures that the people they’re bringing in are actually very highly skilled and that they’re not replaceable by American workers.”
“So it’ll protect American workers, but also ensure that companies have a pathway to hire truly extraordinary people and bring them to the United States to work,” said Miller, who has long been a critic of the H-1B visa program.
Trump said the order has the full backing of tech titans. “We need workers,” he said, in response to Miller. “We need great workers. And this pretty much ensures that is what’s going to happen.”
‘Train Americans’
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick defended the order as Trump signed it during a press conference in the Oval Office. “So the whole idea is: no more will these big tech companies or other big companies train foreign workers. They have to pay the government $100,000. Then they have to pay the employee. So it’s just not economic.”
“If you’re going to train somebody, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land. Train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs. That’s the policy here. $100,000 a year for H-1B visas, and all of the big companies are on board,” said Lutnick. He incorrectly stated that companies would have to pay employees: H-1B workers are not employees of companies, but rather contractors, hired by an outside company.
In 2024, Amazon was the largest recipient of H-1B workers, followed by Indian IT companies Tata Consultancies and Cognizant, which contract workers to US tech companies. Google and Meta also took in a large share of H-1B workers.
There are currently 1.3 million H-1B workers in the US. Almost 3/4 are from India. Each year, the US allots 85,000 additional H-1B visas via a lottery system.
Hurting American Innovation
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington, was deeply critical of the move. “These are visas for skilled workers — doctors, scientists, and engineers. This move will hurt US innovation and exacerbate an already serious shortage of medical professionals. In what world does this make sense,” she tweeted.
“There is a doctor shortage in the US right now,” tweeted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “Every year, hundreds of doctors get H-1B visas to help fill those gaps. If hospitals had to pay an additional $100,000 fee, it’s possible they would simply give up and not even try to fill positions,” he wrote.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
