- Visas are mainly utilized by tech industry.
More than 70% of H-1B visa beneficiaries arrive in US from India.
Latest step in Trump’s wider crackdown on immigration. - WASHINGTON: The Trump administration announced on Friday it would request that businesses shell out $100,000 a year for H-1B employee visas, potentially sending a substantial shock to the tech industry that greatly depends upon well-qualified employees from China and India.
Since his inauguration in January, Trump has launched a broad-based crackdown on immigration, including efforts to restrict certain legal immigration. The move to overhaul the H-1B visa program is his administration’s most visible attempt so far to remake temporary work visas.
“If you’re going to train someone, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates of one of the great universities in our country. Train Americans. Stop bringing people in here to steal our jobs,” US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated.
The threat by Trump to crack down on H-1B visas has been a huge point of contention with the tech sector, which donated millions of dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign.
Opponents, such as most US tech workers, claim it lets companies stifle pay and push aside Americans who might be able to perform the work. Defenders, such as Tesla CEO and past Trump supporter Elon Musk, claim it imports highly skilled professionals needed to help close skills gaps and keep companies competitive. Musk, a naturalised US-born South African, has held an H-1B visa.
A few employers have used the program to suppress salaries, harming US workers, the executive order Trump signed on Friday stated.
Between 2000 and 2019, the number of foreign science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers in the US grew more than twice to almost 2.5 million, while total STEM employment rose by just 44.5% over the same period, it stated.
Move could deter global talent
Adding new charges “creates disincentive to bring the world’s brightest people to the US,” said Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das on X. “If the US no longer brings in the best brains, it severely diminishes its potential to innovate and expand the economy.”
The policy could cost companies tens of millions of dollars, potentially affecting smaller tech companies and start-ups hardest.
Reuters could not immediately determine how the fee would be handled. Lutnick indicated the visa would be $100,000 per year for three years its duration would last but that the specifics were “still being considered.”
Some analysts indicated the fee could spur companies to ship some of their high-value work abroad, undermining America’s competition in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race with China.
“In the near term, Washington can reap a bonanza; in the long term, the US stands to tax itself out of its innovation advantage, opting for short-term protectionism at the cost of dynamism,” eMarketer analyst Jeremy Goldman said.
Most H-1B visas go to India
India was the biggest recipient of H-1B visas in the last year, representing 71% of approved recipients, while China was a distant second at 11.7%, government data shows.
In the first six months of 2025, Amazon.com and its cloud-computing arm AWS had been approved for over 12,000 H-1B visas, and Microsoft and Meta Platforms each had more than 5,000 H-1B visa approvals.
Lutnick stated on Friday that “all the big companies are on board” with $100,000 annually for H-1B visas.
“We’ve talked to them,” he stated.
Numerous big US banking, tech and consulting firms refused to comment or did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The Indian embassy in Washington and the Chinese Consulate General in New York did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Stocks of Cognizant Technology Solutions, a company that utilizes heavily on H-1B visa recipients, fell close to 5%. US-traded stocks of Indian IT companies Infosys and Wipro closed between 2% to 5% down.
Immigration crackdown
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director of the American Immigration Council, doubted the legality of the fees. “Congress has only authorized the government to charge fees to recover the cost of adjudicating an application,” he responded on Bluesky.
The H-1B program provides 65,000 visas a year to employers hiring temporary foreign workers in special fields, with 20,000 extra visas for advanced degree holders.
Under the existing system, filing for the lottery of the visa involves a minimal fee and, upon approval, later fees can take several thousand dollars.
Almost all the visa fees must be absorbed by the employers. H-1B visas are approved for three to six years.
Trump also signed an executive order on Friday to establish a “gold card” for those who can pay $1 million for permanent US residency.
