The H-1B visa just got a whole helluvalot more expensive: During the pre-weekend Friday news dump, President Donald Trump made some major announcements about our system for skilled immigration.
Under his latest changes, you can essentially buy your way in. Foreigners (who are vetted) may pay $1 million for a "gold card" that will allow them U.S. residency; companies may pay $2 million for the corporate equivalent, which would allow them the ability to sponsor foreigners. "The main thing is we're going to have great people coming in and they're going to be paying," said the president. "We're going to take that money and we're going to be reducing taxes and we're going to be reducing debt."
But at the same time, a new annual fee of $100,000 will be levied on each H-1B visa applicant going forward, which will serve as a big deterrent. Some number of the roughly 500,000 people currently in the U.S. with H-1Bs—high-skill visas used by tech workers, medical workers, and other professionals working in the fields they received degrees in—would have been dissuaded from coming here had the new system been in place. For companies hiring new talent, this fee will be a huge barrier to sponsoring foreign workers—which appears to be the point.
