Sorry, paywall popped up; better:
https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-is-unlawful-us-judge-rules-2026-06-08/
“Unlawful tax”
Sorry, paywall popped up; better:
https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-is-unlawful-us-judge-rules-2026-06-08/
“Unlawful tax”
The H1-B visa system is a trash system.
It is intended to cover cases where companies can’t find a domestic talent pool that meets their needs.
In reality, it’s a way for companies to import cheap labor, then hold their visas over their heads to drive down wages.
It should be prohibitively expensive to outsource work to foreign labor. Instead, it’s cheaper, which is why the system is being abused, and why tacking an effective tax on that labor was good.
Agreed 10x. $100k was far too low. Should’ve been several times that. For that matter, H1-B should be capped at several hundred in the country, maybe a thousand, max.
Except $100,000 is a pittance to any company big enough to be importing cheap labor in the first place. These are companies that shrug off billion-dollar fines, they have $100k in the executive boardroom couch cushions, so it’s absolutely worth it for them to pay $100k to the government in exchange for getting a $50k per year discount on labor for that role.
It’s a 3yr visa and a $100k application fee. So yeah, if you’re paying someone $50k/yr under market value, that’s a savings of $50k (as opposed to the $150k savings it was without the fee).
I agree it might not kill the program outright, but it shouldn’t. The actual stated intent of the program is good. But it would curb abuse somewhat, as it takes away a huge portion of the proposed savings.
Sure, in theory. But they’re not pulling people over here for a year or two. They’re getting them over here for several years, and every year they keep them on is another $50k saved.
But on the other end, you have small businesses who need specialized labor that’s not available in the US. Or family businesses who want to bring other family members from out of the country and hire them to work for their little mom-and-pop shop, to further help bring their family out of poverty. Neither were likely to hire anyone local to do the job, and the $100k might be everything the business earns in a year after expenses.
So the $100k fee does nothing to curb the onshoring of cheap labor by big companies who are causing the problem you want to solve, but it completely kills the ability of people in developing nations or people here who are trying to do right by their community to hire anyone who doesn’t already have the right to work in the US.
I just realized I didn’t address the three year limit. Sure, they’re only saving $50k over the term of the visa now. But they’re gambling that the visa situation will be more favorable in three years, or that the job market will be in such shambles that they can afford to cut pay across the board, or replace people with AI, or whatever. It doesn’t just save them $50k, it lets them defer that cost for three years, which is three years that money can be earning interest for them. Plus, if they write it down as compliance or governmental fees or whatever, I believe there are beneficial tax implications.
Rather than dancing around it we should just be taxing the rich. Crap like taxing yachts, or country club memberships, or tailored suits just present a slight nuisance to billionaires. The problem isn’t that they buy these things but that they have insane amounts of money to throw at their problems.