"America just told the world's governments: stop shipping us your best and brightest. Make your own country great again! President Trump has thrown a grenade into America's immigration system - and it's exactly what the country needed. By slapping a $100,000 filing fee on H=1B visas, the White House has declared the days of cheap labor pipelines and visa abuse officially over."
"For decades, the H-1B program has been tech's favorite loophole, a foreign government's free subsidy, and one of the most quietly exploited corners of U.S. immigration. Now, it's facing a hard reset. Critics cry "protectionism." They're wrong. This isn't about shutting doors. It's about raising the bar. America is saying loud and clear: we want the best, not the cheapest. And the truth is, other nations should stop complaining - and start learning."
"In the 1990s, the H-1B made sense. The Y2K panic, the dotcom boom, the internet's birth - America desperately needed coders, and India delivered. Win-win. Many rose to lead U.S. tech. But this is 2025. AI is rewriting the rules. Silicon Valley giants admit: AI will write code within a year. Tech companies are already cutting thousands of jobs. The age of mass coding armies is ending. The future belongs to a smaller pool of elite innovators - not vast back-office battalions."
"Let's be real. The 10 largest U.S. tech giants are worth a mind-blowing $23 trillion ( Nvidia, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Broadcom, Tesla, Oracle, Netflix)- about the size of China and India's GDP combined. For them, a $100,000 visa fee is pocket change. They already burn billions on stock buybacks, perks, and lavish campuses. If they want that one-in-a-million AI researcher, they can pay up. Instead of paying taxes, they would happily pay for H-1B fee to the government."
The White House imposed a $100,000 filing fee on H-1B visas to end cheap labor pipelines and reduce visa abuse. The policy aims to shift hiring toward elite, high-value innovators rather than large back-office coder armies. Historical reliance on H-1B workers during Y2K and the dotcom era met past U.S. needs, but AI and automation are reducing demand for mass coding labor. Major tech firms, collectively worth trillions, can absorb such fees while startups maintain sizable funding environments. The policy intends to compel other countries to develop domestic talent and raise hiring standards.
Read at Fortune
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