President Donald Trump announced plans in September to impose a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications, a move that could pose a challenge to companies, particularly in the technology sector, that rely heavily on highly skilled foreign workers.
“Now this is a big change because the typical fee is currently a couple thousand dollars,” said Stephanie Roth, chief economist at Wolfe Research. “So this could potentially change the program pretty significantly.”
“The whole idea is, no more will these Big Tech companies or other big companies train foreign workers,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “They have to pay the government $100,000, then they have to pay the employee. So it’s just not economic.”
The H-1B visa program, created by Congress under the Immigration Act of 1990, allows U.S. employers to hire foreign professionals on a temporary basis for positions that require highly specialized expertise. H-1B visa approvals, which are valid for three years and can be extended for up to six years, are capped at 65,000 per year, with an additional carve-out of 20,000 for individuals with advanced degrees.
“The program was designed to bring in people, especially since technology was starting to ramp up in particular, bring in people that the U.S. did not have in terms of actual labor supply,” said Roth.
Big Tech, in particular, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B visa program. According to the latest data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, tech giants including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google were among the top 10 employers of H-1B holders in fiscal 2025. Notable past recipients of the H-1B visa include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
The Trump administration, which separately proposed changes to the H-1B lottery selection system last month to prioritize higher-paid foreign workers, has defended the reforms as a way to push American companies to hire more domestic talent.
“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,” said Lutnick.
Meanwhile, critics of the fee hikes say the move could stifle innovation by restricting the flow of overseas talent to the United States.
“If you think about people like Elon Musk, for example, when they were startups, they were on a very slim budget and working out of their garage,” said Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “All of those business never would exist today if that was the situation that we found ourselves in.”
“On one side, you don’t want it to be that cheap labor comes and replaces America opportunity. I think there’s some truth to that,” said Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst. “On the other side, you don’t want to have labor not be there and actually meet the needs of these startups and then slow down progress for our businesses. Nobody wants that. “
Watch the video above to find out the impact of President Trump’s H-1B visa reforms on Big Tech — and how the new $100,000 fee could reshape hiring strategies for American companies going forward.
