The Fuel Behind Trump's $100,000 Visa Fee: Lost U.S. Tech Jobs

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/business/h1b-visas-tech-jobs-layoffs.html

https://archive.ph/pxn0k

The Fuel Behind Trump’s $100,000 Visa Fee: Lost U.S. Tech Jobs
The president’s decision to charge employers $100,000 per visa for skilled workers seemed to come out of nowhere. But the grievance behind it has been simmering.
By Noam Scheiber
Oct. 3, 2025, 11:34 a.m. ET

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As long as employment in the tech industry was growing rapidly, this did not appear to be a huge source of agita. There were enough jobs for everyone, more or less. Only 85,000 of the visas are available to for-profit companies each year; they last for three years and can be renewed once. But as the industry began to shed jobs this decade, several tech workers said in interviews, foreign labor became a growing concern.

One employee who specializes in designing user interfaces, and who requested anonymity for fear of hurting his future job prospects, said his department of about five people was eliminated by his employer in 2024. That same year, the company applied for about a dozen H-1B visas, according to federal records. The employee, who filed a charge of discrimination on the basis of national origin with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said the H-1B hires appeared to work on projects he had worked on. It took him more than six months to find a new job.

A second worker, a machine learning engineer who also requested anonymity, said he had been laid off three times from positions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area from 2020 to 2024. All three layoffs, he said, followed the same pattern: He was told that a contractor, who appeared to be on an H-1B visa, would take over grunt work so he could focus on more sophisticated tasks. In each case he was laid off within about 60 days of meeting the contractor.

Mr. [Kevin] Lynn credited the softening job market with putting the H-1B issue on the political radar. “In August, when legislators went back to their districts during recess, I have been told by several people that their constituents were saying: ‘Why can’t my kid get a job? And why are there so many Indians?’” he said.

Alexander Karinsky, a longtime New York-based I.T. worker who was laid off from the marketing firm WPP in 2023 and replaced by a group of workers in Bangladesh, said the experience was “one of the most shocking events of my life.” But he said clamping down on H-1Bs wouldn’t stop multinationals like his former employer from simply hiring workers abroad.

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