America's Talking - Business leaders respond to H-1B reform, weekend turmoil

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

(The Center Square) – Business leaders and corporations across the country that employ foreign workers through the H-1B visa program have scrambled to respond to President Donald Trump’s recent reform efforts. Last week, Trump announced the United States would charge companies $100,000 for each H-1B visa issued to a temporary foreign worker. The administration imposed a Sept. 21 deadline for charges to start on H-1B visa holders.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxRead more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_afa235d7-3e01-44cf-9fbd-978f3a14b113.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America's Talking, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAaleb, Chief Content Officer at the Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire service. Now that the Trump administration has essentially closed the border to illegal immigration after the border crisis experienced under former President Joe Biden, President Donald Trump is looking to alter the various visa programs that allow foreign nationals to come to the U.S. legally to work. Trump issued a new proclamation to change the process for individual. individuals to receive an H-1B visa to include a $100,000 one-time fee. Joining me to discuss this is the Center Square reporter Andrew Rice. Andrew, first, tell our listeners what the H-1B program is and who it applies to before we get

into what the Trump wants to do and how it will affect the program in various industries. Right. Well, H-1B visas are temporary work visas. They're issued to immigrants in high-skilled, specialized jobs. So to obtain these visas, you have to have at least a bachelor's. degree in a certain field. And employees that earn them end up working in science, technology, or engineering fields because of that high specialization requirement. Congress sets a cap of about 65,000 H-1B visas per year, but does allow an additional 20,000 visas for individuals with advanced degrees like master's degrees or PhDs. To obtain a visa, an employer must petition on behalf of the employer they want to recruit. And in that process, the employer has to be able to. And in that process, the employer

has to show evidence that there are no available American workers to fill a certain position. So they have to recruit high-skilled foreign workers for these positions. Workers can also apply for renewals in the program of up to six years. And in some cases, workers are able to apply for even more renewals beyond that. So this $100,000 fee that the companies would pay for bringing in each individual worker from a foreign country, that would seem to me to be a deterrent to companies hiring foreign workers. What are the companies that most impacted? How is that going to affect them, do you think?

Right. Well, just looking at data from most recently this past year, a lot of technology companies petitioned for these. So in the top five of companies petitioning for H-1B visas was Amazon, meta, Google, well, alphabet, which owns Google. and those were just a few in the top five of companies that were petitioning. Amazon alone petitioned for 10,000 H-WB visas in 2020, in just the first few months of 2025.

So it does seem like this is going to be a huge deterrent for these companies that they're going to have to pay this $100,000 fee for each individual foreign worker that they want to recruit. So it does, and the White House has explicitly stated that they're looking at this as a deterrent for a lot of these companies that use foreign workers in place of American workers. I mean, you mentioned was it Amazon that applied for 10,000 of those particular visas, excuse me, at $100,000, I'm not great at math, Andrew, but $100,000 times $10,000. That's a lot of money to these companies.

I know it's early because Trump just launched this proposed change. But I would think companies would not be willing to pay that much to bring in foreign workers. Is that going to affect jobs? Are there enough Americans to be able to fill those jobs? Right. Well, that's really the big question that's hanging over all this. Are there enough Americans to fill these jobs? The White House has said that companies that petition for these visas use practices to get around this requirement.

Like I said earlier, there's a requirement. for them to provide evidence that there are not enough American workers in these jobs. The White House says a lot of these companies are using go-arounds to prove that there aren't any, that there aren't any American workers. And they do say, the White House does say, that there are enough to fill these. Companies, so far, companies have not publicly stated anything. If anything, they have said that this is a positive, positive effect. the CEO or a chairman on the board at IBM has said that this will be an overall positive effect

for the economy and for his company, but did not specifically specify whether he would be recruiting more H-1B visa workers. So it is really a big question that looms over, and it would be a huge, huge cost increase. So it is a huge question that's looming over. Some companies have said maybe they'd be willing to do it, but there's not been much specific talk on what the plans look like for the future. The H-1B program is just one of many visa programs that allow foreign nationals to come into the U.S. to work. And Trump is looking at changing many of them. Just briefly tell us about what some of the other ones are. Right. So there are H-2A programs. There's H-2B programs. H2A specifically focuses on agricultural workers, seasonal agricultural workers, and a lot of farmers in this space, farmers have been calling for reform to the H2A program.

They're saying that it is not serving them the way that they want it to, and they're calling on the Trump administration and Congress to reform this program, to expand it even. But given the way that Trump has and the Trump administration has moved forward with restricting the H-1B program, It doesn't seem like that's very likely. There's also the H2B program, which is for more low-skilled temporary workers. Those have, in a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, those have been shown to be extremely overcrowded. And employers are using that program to suppress wages, to recruit foreign workers and suppress their wages. So there are many cracks and holes in a lot of other programs. And a lot of employers are calling on the Trump administration to do something.

about it. It still remains unclear to see what that will be, but the reforms so far implemented in the H-1B program show that this administration is looking to crack down and reduce the availability of programs like the visa work program. Obviously, companies need qualified workers to do the jobs. Let's hope this does not hurt these various industries that are impacted. We expect further developments in the coming weeks. And Andrew, thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with all of these developments at thecentersquare.com.