The Trump administration’s hefty new visa fees for H-1B workers have prompted high-level talks inside companies in Silicon Valley and beyond on the possibility of moving more jobs overseas – precisely the outcome the policy was meant to stop.
US President Donald Trump on Friday announced the change to the visa program that has long been a recruitment pathway for tech firms and encouraged international students to pursue postgraduate courses in the U.S. While the $100,000 levy applies only to new applicants – not current holders as first announced – the confusion around its roll-out and steep cost are already leading companies to pause recruitment, budgeting and workforce plans, according to Reuters interviews of founders, venture capitalists and immigration lawyers who work with technology companies.
“I have had several conversations with corporate clients ... where they have said this new fee is simply unworkable in the U.S., and it’s time for us to start looking for other countries where we can have highly skilled talent,” said Chris Thomas, an immigration attorney at Colorado-based law firm Holland & Hart. “And these are large companies, some of them household names, Fortune 100 type companies, that are saying, we just simply cannot continue.”
About 141,000 new applications for H-1B were approved in 2024, according to Pew Research. Though Congress caps new visas at 65,000 a year, total approvals run higher because petitions from universities and some other categories are excluded from the cap. Computer-related jobs accounted for a majority of the new approvals, the Pew data showed.
Companies were already weighing an expansion in India before the new visa fee disrupted hiring. Reuters reported exclusively yesterday that Accenture has proposed a new campus in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, with plans to eventually add about 12,000 jobs in the country, where it has its largest workforce.
The Trump administration and critics of the H-1B programme have said that it has been used to suppress wages and curbing it opens more jobs for US tech workers. The H-1B visa programme has also made it more challenging for college graduates trying to find IT jobs, Trump’s announcement on Friday said.
The visa previously cost employers only a few thousand dollars. But the new $100,000 fee would flip the equation, making hiring talent in countries like India – where wages are lower and Big Tech now builds innovation hubs instead of back offices – more attractive, experts and executives told Reuters.
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