The Journal. - A $100,000 Work Visa Could Rock the Tech Industry

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

The Trump Administration recently announced a new $100,000 annual fee for the coveted H-1B visa. Then the White House walked that back, saying that the charge would only apply to new visa applicants, one-time only. WSJ’s Amrith Ramkumar reports on how the changes set off a wave of anxiety and confusion, especially in Silicon Valley where many H-1B visa holders work. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening:- The Hyundai Plant Raided By Immigration Authorities- Inside the ICE Hiring Blitz  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last Friday, the Trump administration unveiled a dramatic overhaul of a key work visa program, announcing a huge increase in cost for the H-1B visa. What this proclamation will do is raise the fee that companies pay to sponsor H-1B applicants to $100,000. The H-1B program allows U.S. companies to hire highly skilled, foreign workers. And the administration says the goal of this change is to open up more jobs for American citizens. We need workers. We need workers. We need great workers. And this pretty much ensures that that's what's going to happen. The announcement was unexpected. And right away, it caused a lot of chaos and confusion. The proclamation the president put out late Friday said that this new

policy would take effect at 12.01 a.m. Eastern Time Sunday. And that's the message that sent a lot people scrambling? That's our colleague, Amrith Ram Kumar. So you basically had a little more than 24 hours to get back to the U.S. if you were somewhere else. Immediately, there were concerns that H-1B visa holders traveling abroad would have to pay a huge fee to re-enter the U.S. And some lawyers started encouraging people to come back to the states. If you're traveling abroad and you're on an H-1B visa, you better come back ASAP. This is urgent, time-sensitive. If you have a brother, a sister, a best friend, they need to book their flights now and come back. back immediately.

In some cases, folks rushed to change their plans mid-travel. I'm so mad and frustrated right now because me and my wife, we were planning to go to Korea tomorrow for my sister's wedding. Several Indian passengers are disembarked mid-boarding from an Emirates flight to India, leading to chaos at the San Francisco International Airport. And because most H-1V visa holders work for tech companies, the sudden change ignited a firestorm across Silicon Valley. The immediate reaction was pure panic.

The state of plate is still changing as we're discussing this today. So this idea that it's not resolved and you don't know how your company is going to end up handling it is really tough for a lot of people. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, September 24th. Coming up on the show, inside Trump's chaotic overhaul of the H-1B visa. This episode is brought to you by Nespresso Professional.

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you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tap is in ten. might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.ca slash y-Amex. So Amrit, what is an H-1B visa? So the program was created in 1990 as a way to bring in talented.

people from overseas. The idea being you pay a few thousand dollars to go through the process and then you get to be here for three years and you can renew once and that's another three years. Sponsoring employers have typically paid five to ten thousand dollars in government fees, not including the cost of legal work to prepare the application. And not everyone who applies for an H-1B visa gets one. There's a lottery system. So it's been used for a long time and in recent years, it's definitely taken off. The big tech companies have used it a lot. What is it that makes it so popular in the tech world? These companies have a hard time filling all the jobs they need to, and anytime they can

find different sources of labor, they're going to take advantage of it. So it's been a huge boon in some ways to them and been part of what has made the tech sector so successful. A lot of people say. And so why is the Trump administration changing it now? The Trump administration sees this as a symbol of everything that's wrong with the current immigration system and how corporate America hires people. They see it as a way companies have gotten around hiring American workers. They think it's part of this push for years and decades to go overseas for everything, right? To push business overseas, to hire people from overseas and sort of neglect people who are born here and sort of deserve these jobs. So they see that as fundamentally unfair, and they think cracking down on it can help push companies to hire more American workers without disrupting things too much in the tech sector.

Whose idea was it to focus on the H-1B visa? In this case, it was mostly Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. 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. Why would the Secretary of Commerce be leading the charge on immigration policy? It is very unusual for the Commerce Secretary to be driving a big chunk of immigration policy in this way. Normally you would expect Department of Homeland Security, which oversees all the immigration aspects and maybe even Department of Labor to be heavily involved. And those departments were listed in the proclamation that the administration put out. You have to

understand the Commerce Secretary to understand this policy and how it fits into the bigger picture. So he's the one championing all of the revenue-raising ideas. Lutnik is a former investment banker. And since joining the Trump administration, he's been a big promoter of all kinds of programs that could bring money into the government. And so that's sort of how he and the president view the world, right? Everything is a potential deal to be made. And immigration policy and the H-1B visa is no different. So any time they can raise some money and they feel like they have companies in a tough spot where they have leverage and they can ask for another $100,000 or a million dollars

or even a billion dollars, they're going to do it. Letnik's biggest idea for monetizing immigration is a project called the Gold Card. The idea is to provide a path to citizenship for foreigners willing to pay a million dollars. But the gold card wasn't well received by some Trump allies. they saw it as a pay-for-play scheme that didn't really restrict immigration. So Lutnik brought forward a new idea, a $100,000 H-1B visa fee. So going into Friday, no one, as far as we can tell, really knew that this was going to happen. Even a lot of the people in the administration had no idea this was going to be rolled out late on a Friday.

And then the proclamation goes out. But it was mass confusion, so from the beginning, because the Commerce Secretary made it second. like it would be an annual fee and apply to existing visa holders. And the language and the proclamation that went out early Friday evening publicly was a bit vague and hard for people to decipher it. For instance, the proclamation said that the entry of foreigners into the U.S. under the H-1B program, quote, is restricted, effective September 21st, without much further clarity. So some people in companies wondered if they would have to immediately pay $100,000,

especially for visa holders re-entering the country. others worry that they wouldn't be allowed back in at all. So within hours you had these big tech companies that are pretty deliberate and don't always move that quickly jumping into action to send out notes to all their staff. If you're on an H-1P visa, either get back to the country or stay here. And like, we don't know what's going to happen, but we'll be in touch with you, that kind of thing. So that was Friday evening. And then from what we can tell, all these companies in tech trade groups and lawyers and others

were trying to get more information because no one knew what was going on. On Saturday, the day after the proclamation, the White House clarified matters. It said that the $100,000 fee would only apply to new H-1B visa applicants, and it would be a one-time payment, not an annual fee.

But just the rapid walkback also confused people, and then we're talking to, told now that a lot of these discussions are still ongoing and that the Commerce Secretary still supports the fee being an annual payment, not a one-time payment. Even though the administration had already said that it is just a one-time payment. Correct. So where we sit now is the mass panic from Friday, early Saturday, has sort of subsided, but there's still a lot of uncertainty about where this is going to go next and will likely see

legal challenges and all sorts of things coming to. What this change in H-1B visas means for Silicon Valley, that's next. How much does Silicon Valley? How much does Silicon Valley rely on? on H-1B visas? Silicon Valley is hugely reliant on H-1B visas for hiring. They bring in thousands and thousands of people in some cases, depending on the company. And it's a huge source of talent and people overseas who really want to come to the U.S. And work hard and make a life here.

Some of Silicon Valley's biggest names, including Elon Musk and Microsoft CEO Satchin-Adella, have previously been on H-1B visas. Today, companies that sponsor the most H-1B visas include Amazon, Microsoft, and META. Amazon alone had more than 14,000 worker applications approved in the 2025 fiscal year. So it's sort of been a key driver of the tech boom in the past few decades that people have cited and something that's really accelerated innovation in a lot of cases. And that sort of melting pot concept has, again, accelerated a lot of things. So a lot of companies have used it for a long time.

And so what are some of the biggest tech companies saying about this? How would they be affected by this fee? Well, publicly, the companies are not saying anything because they're sort of scared of making the administration mad. And they're very careful at how they handle that relationship. And this is all based on our conversations with administration officials and executives at these tech companies and lobbyists and people at tech trade groups and people in immigration circles over the last few days.

They have a lot of other ways to sort of find talent, but yeah, they also have to determine do we want to get in a fight with the administration over this and join potential lawsuits? So from what we can tell, those are sort of the major questions now and trying to still figure out how this process will work internally, who's running point on it. Is the fee set at one time, or is it still potentially fluctuating after we go past a few months. So there's definitely a level of panic and anxiety there. And you have had some people like OpenAI's Sam Altman and NVIDIA's Jensen Wong, who are both very close to the president. They've said basically that they think it could be a fine policy because you're basically

going to be bringing in a much higher caliber of worker and the companies will have to really support them and really value them to pay the fee. And they think that could be actually helpful in some ways. Here's Jensen Huang on CNBC earlier this week. So I think immigration is really important to our company and it's really important to our nation's future. And I'm glad to see President Trump making the moves he's making. Sam Altman also supported the change in the same segment.

We need to get the smartest people in the country and streamline in that process and also sort of aligning financial incentive seems good to me. While some big companies like NVIDIA and OpenAI are cautiously optimistic, Amrith says smaller startups are less likely to be able to afford that $100,000 fee, especially since they'd have to pay it for each employee. How would this change impact the way some of these companies operate versus what they do now?

It's a really good question, regardless of how this ends up. People have wanted to change the program for a long time, and they don't like the idea that you're bringing in cheaper talent from overseas generally. So I think people were already grappling with some of those questions and making changes to their hiring practices and sort of bracing for some of this. But I think a move like this only accelerates those discussions. It's interesting, you know, the idea behind changing the H-1B visa program

seems to be, want this desire to get more American citizens into some of these high-paying, high-skilled jobs. I mean, are there American citizens that can fill these jobs at the rate that they need to be filled? People around the tech companies say the answers generally no, right? like that they do everything they can to get the talent that's here and they have to go overseas just because they're growing so quickly and they need, again, bodies to fill those jobs

and there aren't enough they can find here. There are already issues for getting talent in the tech sector. Does this make it even harder? Can other countries like the UK and others now take advantage of this and say we're going to do a really friendly policy that is sort of the counter? So there are definitely lots of those questions swirling around. We've seen a lot of big tech companies try to,

forge or strengthen the relationships with this administration. Those executives were lined up behind him at the inauguration. Many of them have been to the White House in these meetings, thanking him at press conferences. How, if at all, could this change in the H-1B visa program affect that relationship? Yeah, it's another example of this tension that keeps coming up, right? You have Trump and the big tech folks sort of playing nice and being super cozy together. In general, even if this change could be okay for them. most tech executives, honestly, if they were talking, would say the H-1B program has been a critical driver of growth in Silicon Valley over the past few decades.

And it's definitely a tension point. And that's why, though, people think the administration is also starting to walk things back and might ultimately soften them because they also know they don't want to anger the tech companies too much because the tech companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. not more. I think the big takeaway is that Trump and his administration are caught between these two very strong forces. The MAGA base that wants to crack down on immigration, the MAGA base that's also very skeptical of AI, for example, and then the tech community that the administration is embracing that wants to bring in high-skilled people overseas without a ton of barriers. That's all for today, Wednesday, September 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode from Michelle Hackman, Terini Parti, and Rolf Winkler. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.